The suffocating stench of urine and feces. Rotting garbage. The occasional whiffs of fentanyl, or the synthetic drug Spice clouding the air. Dead bodies. No, it’s not a Third World nation—it’s a lawless encampment of over 1,000 homeless people in downtown Phoenix, where crime is rampant, and the city does virtually nothing about it.
The city’s inaction provoked a lawsuit by business owners in the Zone who are suffering the consequences of the unchecked homelessness crisis. This week, a Maricopa County judge issued a preliminary ruling, finding that the city has “intentionally stopped—or at least materially decreased—enforcement of criminal, health, and other quality of life statutes and ordinances in [T]he Zone,” effectively making it “off-limits to [law] enforcement.” That’s good news for the business owners, but the decision is just a first step in the long process of solving the problem.
Karl Freund — who was leasing a building in The Zone and is suing the city over the homeless crisis — described to AZ Free News a state of apathy toward improvement for both the homeless and those assigned to handle it.
“You see trash everywhere. These people just don’t give a flip anymore, you know?” said Freund. “I see these people smoking meth wide out in the open. I’ll go over to them and tell them to leave. Then they’ll just go to another corner.”
The apathy has turned the once-thriving residential and business district into a depressed wasteland of death and depravity. Freund had plans to run a real estate business in the building he’d leased. Destruction to his property and the undesirability of the area caused by the homeless encampments has made that impossible; per AZ Free News’ initial report, he spent hundreds of thousands to fight for the property before having to find another to sublet it.
Human waste, garbage, and drug use overwhelm The Zone.
Sanitation is a far-off dream in The Zone — not only for the homeless, but also for those residents and business owners stuck there. These biohazardous slums are also affecting the rest of the state. Photographic evidence submitted in court filings reveals that unmanaged sewage and trash end up in storm drains. Drains which discharge into rivers, washes, and retention bases. The Zone is polluting Arizonans’ water on a daily basis, uninhibited.
AZ Free News spoke with a lawyer on the lawsuit against the city alleging a failure to take care of The Zone, Ilan Wurman, about the environmental hazards that The Zone poses (Brown v. Phoenix). Wurman confirmed that the constant deluge of waste ending up in our waterways violates state law.
“Their trash and waste goes into the storm drains and ends up in the waterways. That’s illegal discharge,” said Wurman.
The human waste and garbage that doesn’t end up in waterways creates other problems. Namely, they attract rodents and flies: a breeding ground for disease.
It was rats that resurrected a “medieval” disease in Los Angeles, California’s homeless population over the last decade: the bubonic plague. That accompanied the resurgence of other diseases rarely seen in this modern age, typhus and typhoid fever, alongside the persistent problem of hepatitis A and staph outbreaks. Around 1,000 were infected by hepatitis A from 2017 to 2019 in Southern California — even before the surge in the number of homeless that occurred during the pandemic — leaving just under two dozen dead. Typhus increased by thirteen-fold over the course of a decade in the area, from just over a dozen to just under 200 cases.
AZ Free News was unable to locate data from either Maricopa County or the state on communicable disease outbreaks other than COVID-19 in recent years.
Both court precedent and statute indicate that the city has a legal duty to not allow these hazards. Wurman referred AZ Free News to the justifications made for this argument in their recent motion for summary judgment issued in March.
“[A]ny person who knowingly maintains or commits a public nuisance or who knowingly fails or refuses to perform any legal duty relating to the removal of a public nuisance is guilty of a class 2 misdemeanor.” — A.R.S. Section 13-2917(D)
The city admits per court filings and testimony that conditions in The Zone are a “biohazard” due to the human waste, drug paraphernalia, and trash. Gina Montes, deputy city manager, said The Zone created “sanitation issues”; Scott Hall, deputy director of the Office of Homeless Solutions, admitted that the cleanups require “sanitation chemicals.”
“Their cleanup crews come in with hazmat gear. They expect us to accept those conditions in their neighborhood when they themselves have to wear those suits,” said Wurman.
The results of cleanup efforts only last a day at most, per testimony given by plaintiffs in court and by residents in interviews with AZ Free News. Cleanup crews also require police escorts due to the risk of violence they face, per city testimony. Yet residents and business owners must face The Zone on their own every day.
Up until last January, the city conducted cleanups three times a week: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Items that couldn’t be moved were trashed. That was part of what prompted the DOJ to begin investigating the Phoenix Police Department in August 2021, reflecting tensions between a community desperate for better sanitary conditions and an unwavering political belief in protecting property rights for the homeless. Office of Homeless Solutions director Scott Hall claimed to reporters last November that the city wasn’t aware of property being thrown away.
The city resumed cleanups last December. However, the effects of these cleanups were only temporary since crews conducted these cleanups on a block-by-block basis. By the time crews reached the next block, the previous block they’d just cleaned had returned to its original state. City workers also offered services to the homeless while cleanups were underway; only 33 accepted, with the rest electing to return to a life on the streets.
A fire burns in The Zone.
Cities that have dealt with a homeless crisis for far longer have experienced serious environmental dangers from mass encampments. Seattle, Washington has struggled to mitigate its homeless for decades, with reports highlighting 2005 as the first year that city officials first introduced a plan to tackle the problem. Thornton Creek Alliance (TCA), an environmental nonprofit focused on restoring Seattle’s waterways, has spoken out for years about the serious negative consequences of homeless encampments on the environment.
“The impact of homeless camps on nature is a concentrated version of the usual impacts of human settlement on nature: impervious packed soils, concentrations of human body waste, food waste, packaging waste, abandoned equipment and shelter materials, contamination by household and drug chemicals, destruction of existing wildlife and plants, pollution of watercourses and possibly water sources,” explained TCA board member Dass Adams in a statement to AZ Free News. “We have seen these effects here and we take care to discourage encampments in parks and natural areas that exist for healthful benefits for our citizens.”
In other reports, TCA warned that specific public health threats posed by homeless encampments included E. coli fecal coliform bacterial contamination of waterways. Such contaminated waterways usually indicate the presence of other waterborne pathogenic diseases such as typhoid fever, hepatitis A, and dysentery.
AZ Free News spoke with Mike Godbehere, one of the residents suing the city over alleged failure to maintain The Zone. His family’s auto supply company was located within The Zone — it had long predated it but didn’t outlast it.
Godbehere’s grandfather started the family business in 1947, after World War II ended and his service was concluded.
“My grandfather was an auto painter. When he came out of the war, WWII, he began selling services like matching color and pinstriping for body shops. One of the paint companies needed a paint distributor in our town,” said Godbehere. “Our family, four generations, have worked there including cousins and aunts and uncles. It was a business that supported our family through that length of time.”
Four generations interrupted by The Zone. Godbehere still owns the property, but leasing remains an issue. Those who most recently contracted to lease the place left before their lease was up — they opted to pay the remaining 24 months of rent rather than remain.
Godbehere said the smell of the human feces and urine saturating the ground just outside the building overwhelms him. Yet, he shared that the Maricopa County Health Department told him that since his complaint concerned property just inside the sidewalk that it was his responsibility.
Then, there’s the fires. One building on Godbehere’s property is older, with wooden double doors dating back to the business’ beginning. It comes close to going up in flames often, due to the homeless starting fires within several feet of it. Godbehere attempted to communicate with the homeless to dissuade them from starting these fires, then contacted police for assistance, but to no avail. One woman behind most of the recent fires refused city services; under current protocols, the city won’t forcibly remove the homeless from their chosen spots.
“Each day that passes I’m wondering when I’m going to get the phone call that my place will be on fire,” said Godbehere.
Joel Coplin has his art gallery in The Zone. Over the years, he observed that the sanitation issues follow the individuals under housing-first approaches — leading him to oppose it. He said he could only imagine that kind of approach working with supervision. He expressed appreciation for Gov. Katie Hobbs’ proposal to install repurposed shipping containers as supervised housing.
“I’ve taken them to their apartments, and I’m astounded at the rents these people are receiving for this. The tenant has to pay a third or a quarter for it, but the place gets immediately trashed,” said Coplin. “If you look at the tents and how there’s all this garbage, that goes in the apartment. It winds up being a junkyard with a pathway through it from the door to the bathroom and the bed. You have to have supervision otherwise it gets trashed.”
Joel Coplin has his art gallery in The Zone and has witnessed one of the many death that occur there. (Image courtesy of Blake Wilson)
Coplin compared The Zone to one of the seedier boroughs of New York.
“It’s like being in Brownsville, Brooklyn, except there’s no corner store to hang out at, so they all just hang out by their tents,” said Coplin. “I open my door and you can hear them, doing their drugs, playing their music, and having a great time. It’s a beautiful life: free rent, all the drugs you want, all the sex you want — if you have the drugs. The only problem is someone might beat you up for all the drugs.”
About a month ago, Coplin witnessed one of the many deaths that occur in The Zone. A homeless man he’d come to know on a first-name basis, Lamar, was shot and killed. Coplin explained that the homeless have tribe-like groups that fight one another.
Total deaths in The Zone have increased at an exponential rate over the last few years. The Maricopa County Medical Examiner Office reported just over 200 deaths in 2018, a year before the homeless crisis picked up. Last year, there were over 700.
Despite the squalor worsening all around him, Coplin said he’s determined to stick around, hopeful he’ll witness a revival in the area. He and other artists migrated there decades ago because it was affordable: a common backstory for those establishing a historic arts community.
“I want to see it through. I want to see our dream come true and try to put some gas on it. I want these people off the street, in some place better for them so they don’t have to crap on the sidewalk and pour my pee on the plants,” said Coplin.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
On Monday, the Maricopa County Superior Court ruled that the city of Phoenix is at fault for the homeless crisis, most evident in the massive encampment downtown known as “The Zone.”
Judge Scott Blaney ruled that city officials had done nothing to improve The Zone, declaring it a public nuisance. Rather, Blaney declared that the city had created and maintained The Zone. Blaney added that the actions undertaken by the city, allegedly to address the homeless crisis, had served only to grow its bureaucracy and throw money into government and nonprofit programs that haven’t yielded any discernible results.
“With few exceptions, the action items about which city representatives testified centered around the creation of more bureaucracy, additional staff positions, and obtaining additional funding for programs to vaguely address homelessness in general,” stated Blaney. “The Court received very little evidence — if any — that the City intends to take immediate, meaningful action to protect its constituent business owners, their employees, and residents from the lawlessness and chaos in the Zone.”
Blaney ordered the city to abate The Zone by permanently removing the encampments in public rights of way; cleaning up the biohazardous materials including human feces and urine, drug paraphernalia, and other trash; and removing individuals committing offenses against the public order. Effectively, the judge ordered the city to enforce existing laws.
The city has until July 10 to achieve material results toward compliance with the court’s ruling.
In the 23-page ruling, Blaney agreed with arguments posed by the plaintiffs, made up of residents and business owners in The Zone: that the city stopped enforcing laws within The Zone, resulting in increased violent crime, property crime, prostitution, public indecency, public drug use, a blocks-long biohazard, fire hazards, and environmental destruction.
Notably, Blaney agreed that the owners of Maker Kitchens had the right to install the dinosaur statues on the right of way adjacent to its building to discourage the homeless from re-establishing their encampments after the city did a cleanup to do gas line work. Blaney ruled that the city had arbitrarily enforced its laws so as to ignore violations by the homeless on that land and yet demand removal of the statues.
Blaney ruled that the city couldn’t force the restaurant to remove the dinosaur statues until it cleaned up The Zone or the court issued a further order.
Blaney ruled that the city had “abused its discretion through the arbitrary application of the law and provision of taxpayer funded security in The Zone.” He also ruled that the residents and business owners who filed the lawsuit had a strong possibility of receiving damages on the basis of irreparable injury, should the city not provide relief by mitigating The Zone.
🦕These mysterious dinosaur statues will likely face extinction after the City of Phoenix and nearby homeless population want them removed from ‘The Zone’. They popped up earlier this week along 9th Ave in the public right of way. More tonight @FOX10Phoenixpic.twitter.com/LxfNRZzpwg
Blaney agreed that city leaders erroneously applied the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling in Martin v. City of Boise, which determined that municipalities couldn’t enforce public camping laws against the homeless when no adequate temporary shelter options existed.
The judge further noted that the city had wholly ignored the residents’ and business owners’ proposals to resolve the homeless crisis, an outdoor shelter space, presented in January 2020 — just before the crisis “really got out of hand.” However, the city ignored all proposed plans to mitigate the crisis until one month before the plaintiffs filed their lawsuit, last October. That’s when the city approved the construction of a “sprung structure” containing 200 additional shelter beds.
Yet, Blaney stated that the city’s proposed shelter options were either designed as temporary, being seasonal, or as speciality situations, being intended for domestic violence survivors or COVID-19 response.
At one point in his ruling, Blaney surmised that violent, organized crime had taken root in The Zone. AZ Free News reported that gangs run The Zone, assaulting and charging encampment space rent to the homeless.
“The evidence also strongly suggests that the City created and maintained the dire situation that currently exists in The Zone through its failure, and in some cases refusal, to enforce criminal and quality of life laws in The Zone,” said Blaney. “The City’s refusal to meaningfully enforce statutes and ordinances in The Zone has created a classic ‘siren song’ to certain individuals that are enticed at their peril by The Zone’s drugs, sex, and lack of societal rules.”
The court’s ruling comes days after the city promised it would arrange some kind of meeting on the issue at some point following back-to-back murders in The Zone.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
Intense poverty, frequent crime, social instability, high mortality, poor living standards: these qualities describe third-world countries. They also describe “The Zone”: the sprawling encampment of over 1,000 homeless in downtown Phoenix just blocks from the state capitol and amidst what was once a thriving business district. It’s an area where law and order don’t seem to exist; so much so that locals have given the area another, much darker nickname: “The Thunderdome.”
The crisis reached a new high after the discovery of a premature baby’s remains several weeks before Thanksgiving last year, burned in the middle of the street. A month later, a similar grisly fate befell a homeless man.
“That child burned… that was the beginning of the end for me. I don’t know why that hit us so hard,” said Karl Freund, who was leasing a building in The Zone and is suing the city of Phoenix over their handling of the homeless crisis. “Someone set a child on fire, and then two weeks later somebody burned a body just a block away. Then you see the people that are so mentally ill that you can’t place them in society. We walked out a year ago to see a girl masturbating 20 feet away from my car in the parking lot.”
Death and depravity are a common occurrence in The Zone.
Last month, Phoenix police shot and killed a Spanish-speaking homeless man who lunged at them with scissors. Attempts to incapacitate the man with stun guns were unsuccessful. Police had responded to a 911 call from a woman reporting the man approaching her aggressively while attempting to trespass her property.
Drug deals, addicts using, defecation and urination, assaults, sexual acts, and rapes are also done out in the open with increasing impunity. Gangs run the streets of The Zone, making the homeless pay for their tent space and beating them up at will. Registered sex offenders roam the streets, having been dropped off in The Zone. Businesses close but must continue paying rent.
Homeless sit outside of Angie Ojile’s business and other businesses in The Zone.
The Zone sprung up outside Central Arizona Shelter Services (CASS) Human Services Campus, an organization that provides food, shelter, and more to the homeless. It’s located in a dense and diverse business district that includes a near-historic sub shop, appliance manufacturer, cabinet manufacturer, steel manufacturer, millworker, textile company, metal supplier, door supplier, ironwork company, glass and mirror shops, counter supply store, air conditioning supply store, funeral supply store, motorcycle shop, RV shop, auto repair store, electrical supply store, art museum, custom printer, waste services, paper company, several recycling services, several automotive stores, and several transportation companies. Business owners neighboring The Zone have seen the homeless population — and attendant crime — grow over the last two years and four months.
Angie Ojile, a commercial designer and realtor in The Zone for over 20 years, said that she sees this and more every day. She said she watched four people taken out of the area in body bags in a one-day period. The level of danger is so prevalent that Ojile says that other businesses refuse to come there: pizza shops won’t deliver, and plumbers won’t service the buildings. Limitations on those services pale in comparison to her other, more pressing problem: retaining employees. Ojile told AZ Free News that one young woman she hired was initially excited to work for her, but left out of fear for her safety after several days navigating The Zone.
Ojile says the city is to blame for these troubles.
“Everything they do defies logic. It’s hurting people — not helping people,” said Ojile.
The homeless relentlessly bombard Ojile’s property with human waste, fires, garbage, drug use, assaults, and gang activity. Ojile estimates that she spends more on cleanups around her property than some pay for mortgages.
“The ground is so saturated with feces and urine, I can’t even breathe. We’ve got walls that are so full of feces, it’s disgusting. You can’t even look in that direction,” said Ojile. “We had dreams when we bought this property, and now we’re paying for it.”
Property assessments estimate Ojile’s property to be worth well over $2 million — but only if The Zone didn’t exist. A realtor told Ojile that her property was essentially worth nothing due to The Zone, and that he couldn’t sell the property in good faith due to that. Anyone who bought Ojile’s property — if buyers could be found — would find themselves in the same predicament as Ojile: unable to run her business properly, causing her to fall behind on property taxes.
Ojile said that nobody from the city bothered to return her calls for help. The supervisor representing that district, Steve Gallardo, has never returned her calls. Even an ombudsman wasn’t able to get information for her in a timely manner, something which the ombudsman allegedly remarked was unusual.
“I went to the city immediately for help, but no one would ever get back to me,” said Ojile.
This crisis hasn’t just taken a financial toll on Ojile; it has imposed a great emotional and physical toll. Ojile’s dog has gone missing three times, at least. The homeless have cut her fence to take the dog; she’s had to track down her dog in homeless tents and even an animal shelter.
Last week, Ojile became severely ill while working inside her business — a sickness unlike she’d experienced before. The room she was working in wasn’t completely insulated from the outside: she had to board over one of the windows, since the homeless would break it every time she fixed it and the city would fine her for blight over the broken window. Ojile suspected that she’d been exposed to someone smoking fentanyl.
Homeless use drugs inside Phoenix’s sprawling encampment known as The Zone.
Help from law enforcement isn’t always an option for Ojile in situations like that. According to Ojile, officers told her that they wouldn’t enforce the law equally in The Zone for fear of losing their jobs.
Phoenix Police Department (PPD) reported 278 incidents in 2020 and 206 incidents in 2021. There were around 200 incidents last year. There have been well over 4,000 calls from 2019 through last year, with over 1,200 calls for fire department assistance alone last year.
For Freund, the growth of crime in the area has reached a tipping point. He’d hoped to open a real estate office in the building he’d leased, but the state of the area hasn’t made that possible. Freund said that the PPD has not only stopped responding but stopped answering their calls.
“The day-to-day down there is unlivable for anybody and I can’t believe we subject humans to this environment,” said Freund. “Why would you subject humans to that kind of living condition? There’s prostitution, murder, physical beatings.”
Freund fought to open his business in that building, spending hundreds of thousands on property taxes, renovations, and fixing damages caused by the homeless. According to Freund, they’ve attempted to set his building on fire multiple times and stolen all of the copper wiring and pipe. He gave up hope on the property after 20 months; he managed to find another to sublet the property. The thousands he spent in property taxes and beautification wasn’t enough to spur the city to action — just as is the case for so many others in The Zone.
Although these business owners have languished for years, several weeks’ worth of sports fans visiting the city were spared the crisis. Ahead of the lucrative NFL Super Bowl and PGA Waste Management Open that were held in the Phoenix area in February, the city committed to cleanup efforts of homeless encampments. However, these cleanup efforts aren’t permanent. The homeless are free to return to the areas after cleanup ends; they already have. Only 33 of the homeless accepted services during Phase One of the city’s December cleanup, according to the deputy director for the Office of Homeless Solutions, Scott Hall.
Apart from cleanups, the city has directed their millions in funding on a “housing first” or “permanent supportive housing” model, sometimes called “affordable housing.” The theory behind this model is that the homeless will choose to seek employment, become financially responsible, and receive mental health care and/or substance abuse treatment if food and housing are provided. The theory also posits that enabling the homeless to choose their housing and support services will make them more likely to remain in that housing and stick with self-improvement initiatives.
The city has poured millions of funding to create housing; yet available housing hasn’t kept pace with the number of homeless, the retention rates of the homeless in their housing and program participation remains poor, and the crisis is progressively spreading to surrounding areas. Even so, the city allocated another $12 million last October, another $8 million last November, and another $25 million in January to prove the housing first theory correct.
The city recently unveiled their latest attempt at free housing for the homeless on Feb. 8: five shipping containers repurposed for “sustainable” housing. These living structures’ purported sustainability comes at the cost of $200,000 for one-bedroom, one-bathroom’s worth of solar panels providing power, an incinerator toilet, LED lighting, and economical heating and cooling. The Arizona Department of Housing issued a $1.2 million grant for the five units.
Then there was the 24/7, single-stall, $200,000 toilet for the homeless launched in January.
Other city initiatives providing the homeless with more resources also appear to have failed to make a noticeable impact on the crisis.
In December, the city launched an employment program that pays the homeless $65 to work five-hour shifts. However, those directly impacted by or handling the crisis say that these kinds of approaches haven’t led to lasting change.
Ojile said that the homeless she’s known for many years don’t feel like they’re getting help. Some of the homeless she knows in the area have been there for decades. They’re trapped alongside Ojile.
“We can’t get out. They’re crashing our property values,” said Ojile. “There’s people that are homeless that don’t want to be near this.”
A broker estimated the value of Ojile’s property at around $2.4 million. However, the broker informed Ojile that her property is unmarketable due to the state of The Zone.
“[The] values are based ‘as if’ the property was not associated or in proximity to the situation currently occurring adjacent to the Property (i.e. homeless, mental health, drugs, gangs, etc.). Unfortunately, the property is deemed unmarketable at any realistic value at this date due to these issues along with safety concerns that would be perceived by any prospective buyer, tenant or investor that would normally have invested in the property. Further, at this date, the city of Phoenix who is trying to manage a difficult problem, has ‘kicked the can down the road’ and now that ‘can’ is on and surrounding your property. Additionally, since you have disclosed various items to me (break-ins, been threatened, witnessed drug purchases, individuals urinating/defecating on the property, etc.) as a licensed real estate agent held to ADRE Rules and Statutes, I am required to notify all potential buyers, tenants, investors of such. Therefore, as referenced above, post touring the property, which they will see the issues firsthand and my disclosure of all facts I am aware of associated with this property, I again state that the property is unfortunately ‘unmarketable’ at this time.’” (emphasis added)
Angie’s property and others are regularly bombarded with human waste, fires, garbage, and drug use,
Judge Glock, a senior fellow with a Texas-based nonpartisan policy group called the Cicero Institute, said that leaders are gravely mistaken to believe that a housing-first approach works.
“They’re convinced by a very small group that nothing can be done, that anything that moves people off the sidewalk is cruel, and the only option is a house for every single person that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per person,” said Glock. “It’s an unfortunate mindset, but that’s what a small group of activists have convinced them.”
Jeff Taylor, chairman of the board for the Salvation Army’s western territory, said that residential behavioral health treatment needs to occur before any kind of housing efforts. Taylor shared with AZ Free News just one of many initiatives to house the homeless that failed.
“They took 20 of their star people from the shelter, they got them apartments and they went to Target and got furniture, went to Walmart, got their closets filled with clothes, moved all 20 into apartments and they had employment. Within a week they’d sold everything, and they were running drug dens out of the housing,” recounted Taylor. “The problem isn’t getting someone clean; it’s keeping someone clean. Recovery is measured in years.”
Taylor said that the homeless with mental health or drug addictions were only as good as their treatment programs. What’s more, Taylor expressed concern that the crisis would only worsen due to the newest drug to hit the streets: fentanyl. The potency equivalent of other, more costly hard drugs, such as crack cocaine and heroin, only costs $1 for fentanyl.
“This is a humanitarian crisis that will only get worse,” said Taylor. “Fentanyl is a whole other ballgame.”
Sam Stone, a Phoenix City Council candidate, said that permanent supportive housing wouldn’t incentivize the homeless to get their lives on track. Stone doesn’t live in The Zone, but he’s spent much time there over the years attempting to solve the crisis.
“We have to start from the perspective that chronic street homelessness is not an acceptable lifestyle choice,” said Stone. “What they’re talking about is just warehousing addicts and mentally ill people until they die. Without treatment for their issues, they’re never going to get better. All they ever do is demand we spend more and more money. None of that does anything to change what’s going on. You have to lead with services. You have to switch things around. You have to make it tough to live on the street and easy to get into treatment.”
Stone and others we spoke to referenced Austin, Texas, as a poster child for mitigating homelessness. Austin voters reinstated a public camping ban in May 2021, after the city council ended a similar ban that had been in place for 23 years. Encampments quickly flooded the city, and the homeless were underfoot everywhere. That reality no longer exists: the homeless are few and far between throughout the city, and shelters are operated on a closed-campus basis, meaning that the homeless have to be referred in order to receive services.
Viewing The Zone and Phoenix’s homeless crisis isn’t a partisan issue. Catherine Miranda, a newly elected Democratic state senator representing the district containing The Zone, published a lengthy article last December criticizing the city’s approach to addressing their homeless.
Miranda declared that Phoenix’s housing first dreams had failed her homeless constituents. The freshman lawmaker urged the enforcement of existing street camping bans, prioritization of short-term rather than permanent housing, and treatment of mental health and addiction problems first.
“Phoenix wants to give the homeless permanent homes without addressing the root causes of their homelessness. No wonder it’s been a disaster,” wrote Miranda. “The state and city should refocus on a ‘Treatment First’ philosophy. While the failed ‘Housing First’ model does not require treatment for drug addiction or mental health problems, programs like recovery housing tie to sobriety or mental health checkups.”
Miranda also noted that building houses takes years, resulting in the homeless continuing to live a dangerous, unhealthy lifestyle on the streets.
“While we wait years or decades for these thousands of homes to be built, they want to keep allowing our most vulnerable neighbors, who are struggling with drug addiction and severe mental illness, to live and die on our streets,” stated Miranda.
The Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG) annual point-in-time (PIT) homeless counts over the past few years reflect a historic high in the homeless population, the likes of which haven’t been experienced in well over a decade. Last year’s MAG counted nearly 3,100 unsheltered homeless. That’s a 131 percent increase from 2013, when there were just over 1,300 unsheltered homeless.
The 2022 PIT also reported that 44 percent of homeless were in emergency shelters, transitional housing, or safe haven programs, while 56 percent weren’t. 2020 was the first time in recent years that there were more unsheltered homeless individuals: 49 percent were sheltered homeless individuals, while 51 percent weren’t. However, this decline preceded efforts to mitigate COVID-19 spread, such as reducing shelter capacity.
In 2019, 52 percent were sheltered, while 48 percent weren’t. Even those 2019 numbers reflected a significant decline in the number of homeless seeking sheltered services: the number of unsheltered homeless increased by 22 percent from 2018 to 2019, while the number of sheltered declined by seven percent.
According to the latest Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Housing Inventory Count, Maricopa County and Phoenix had over 12,300 beds available for homeless housing last year. Nearly 8,100 of these were permanent housing, while just over 4,200 were emergency, safe haven, and transitional housing.
A fire burns inside The Zone.
Homeless deaths have also been increasing at a significant rate. The Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office reported that homeless deaths more than doubled from over 250 in 2019 to nearly 600 in 2020, with a slight decline to just over 500 in 2021 before skyrocketing to over 700 last year.
Though crimes and deaths have increased in the area, emergency services haven’t been able to keep up. Emails obtained by AZ Free News revealed that the Phoenix Fire Department won’t respond to calls without PPD assistance and assurance that the scene of the incident is secure, due to how dangerous The Zone has become.
Even then, police claims of an incident scene being secure aren’t always accepted by first responders. Emails revealed that the scene could span multiple city blocks and contain crowds likely to assault the emergency responders.
The emails also revealed that first responders considered the Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots of 2020 to pale in comparison to the everyday dangers of The Zone. The first responders noted that they lacked adequate protection and resources to respond in that area.
“At no point during the protests did I feel like our folks were in the potential danger that they face every day responding to the area surrounding CASS,” stated the email.
Freund says he noticed a shift in the city’s handling of the homeless around November 2020. He said that the numbers of homeless in The Zone began to increase greatly around that time, and that the homeless became more resistant to residents’ requests to move. Freund said that law enforcement activity began to slow down around that time as well.
Now, Freund and leaders like Stone are warning that this problem is spreading.
“You walk into The Zone, it’s like you’re walking out of America. It’s a nightmare hellscape that shouldn’t exist anywhere in this country, but it’s also what a lot of our major cities are coming to look like,” said Stone. “Unless we start looking to get our homeless population into treatment or off the streets, The Zone isn’t going to stay in The Zone.”
Click an image in the gallery below for more images:
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
On Monday, the Maricopa County Superior Court agreed that the city of Phoenix has failed to mitigate its burgeoning homeless crisis. In fact, the court declared that the city ending enforcement of criminal, health, and other statutes and ordinances concerning homelessness in 2019 worsened the crisis.
The court rejected Phoenix’s motion to dismiss in Brown v. Phoenix, citing 11 findings of fact proving that homelessness has only worsened under the city’s watch over the past four years. The court specifically cited the sprawling, growing homeless encampment in central Phoenix: “The Zone.”
“The situation inside the Zone has gotten progressively worse, not better, since 2019 and has become dire since November of 2021,” stated the court.
Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego became the mayor in 2019.
The court specifically stated that The Zone has resulted in dramatic increases in violent crime, public drug use, break-ins, vandalisms, fires, trespassing, loitering, risk of violent crime, public urination and defecation, trash and human excrement in the streets and along business properties, prostitution, public nudity, lewd acts, tents and encampments blocking property and business access, and deaths of homeless.
Rather than attempting to work out a solution for the increasing homeless, the court said the city ignored plans to ease the burden of The Zone. Residents proposed outdoor camping shelter spaces on city lots to prevent public nuisance. However, the court stated that the city failed to act. The city confirmed during oral argument that it wasn’t considering that proposed solution because the lots wouldn’t come with air conditioning and heat for the homeless. The court rejected that rationale, noting that homeless residents of The Zone live without air conditioning and start bonfires to keep warm.
The lawsuit was brought forth by 19 plaintiffs last August: Phoenix business owners and property owners. Judge Alison Bachus is hearing the case.
One of those businesses is the Arizona Rock Products Association (ARPA), located near The Zone. According to ARPA, the homeless have wreaked havoc on their business: started fires, left used needles and condoms, defecated and urinated, broken into cars, trespassed, and stolen food from a refrigerator on ARPA property.
The lawsuit accuses the city of purposefully concentrating the homeless population into The Zone. The plaintiffs claimed that a “substantial portion” of these homeless were mentally ill, addicted to drugs, and constantly violating the city’s quality-of-life ordinances on loitering, disturbing the peace, drunk and disorderly conduct, drug use, domestic violence, and obstruction of public right-of-ways.
“In short, instead of seeking to solve the homelessness crisis, the City has effectively invited this population to construct semi-permanent tent dwellings on the public sidewalks and rights of way in Plaintiffs’ neighborhood, and to make the Zone their home,” stated the lawsuit. “The City has not only permitted this illegal conduct and maintained it on public lands within its control, but it has also encouraged it through a policy of directing other homeless persons from around the city to the Zone.”
The city’s homeless crisis has only worsened despite spending hundreds of millions in local, state, and federal funds over the last three years to solve the issue.
Learn about the proposed trial budget that will be presented to Phoenix City Council in May. $3 million and 17 new positions are proposed to assist the city’s growing homeless, immigrant, and refugee populations. #PHX#homeless#immigrant#refugeepic.twitter.com/hmvADXUfTz
The city’s attempts to mitigate its growing homelessness problem preceded the pandemic. Weeks before a national emergency was declared nearly three years ago, Gallego was announcing plans on expanding the city’s shelter beds. The mayor toldKJZZ that the city’s goal was to get those camping on the streets into shelters.
“I believe strongly that the best solutions are smaller facilities that are more distributed, where people can get more individual attention. But I understand that creating that network of facilities is going to take a long time,” said Gallego.
Throughout 2019, Gallego attempted to mitigate homelessness through billboard campaigns and repurposed parking meters to accept donations, dubbed “giving meters.”
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
The city of Phoenix plans to spend over 25 percent of its $396 million in COVID-19 relief funds on homelessness and affordable housing initiatives. It is the city’s second-highest expenditure of relief funds after city operations.
According to the city’s American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) plan for this year, over $99.5 million will be spent on homelessness and affordable housing. The majority of this, around $75.5 million, is slated to address the homelessness crisis.
Even with tens of millions allocated to mitigate the homeless crisis, notorious encampments like “The Zone” continue to worsen. City spokespersons informed reporters in September that the city is working to approve contracts and allocate the funds, which expire in 2024.
THE ZONE: Over the weekend, PPD responded to discovery of a dead & burned fetus in PHX’s largest homeless camp. Last night – a tent on fire w/ a man seriously burned inside.
There are 764 unsheltered people in the zone, nearly 3X last year this time but down from end of summer. pic.twitter.com/eR4Qjsqm62
Earlier this week, the state’s largest homeless shelter told12 News that they lacked enough resources to meet community needs, though they receive city funding. The city announced on Wednesday that it allocated $8 million to expand shelters for homeless families.
Comparatively, the city’s allocation of relief funds for other initiatives amounted to far less.
Financial, utility, and rent assistance for low-income families totaled $26 million altogether — about one-fourth of what’s slated for homelessness and affordable housing. Funds to advance the city’s workforce training facility and program, as well as establish workforce tuition and apprenticeship programs, totaled $28.5 million.
Concerning COVID-19 mitigation, the city allocated $28.9 million for testing and vaccines. From last July until the end of June, the city provided nearly 120,000 tests and 15,700 vaccines.
The city also allocated $28 million for COVID-19 health care expenses for its workers, and another $22 million to give premium pay for its essential workers. The city’s revenue replacement totaled $20 million. It set aside $23 million to rehabilitate a recycling facility and manage stormwater projects with the county’s flood control district.
$6 million went to tuition assistance and college prep for high school students, with another $3 million to update the Mesquite Library. $5.9 million went toward public Wi-Fi, with a small portion of that allocated for laptops and hotspots for the community, and $22 million to improve internet connectivity in certain neighborhoods.
$8.3 million went to refugees. $10.5 million went to climate-related initiatives: $6 million to plant trees, and $4.5 million to make 200 homes energy efficient.
Child care-related initiatives received $14.8 million, with the majority slated for airport employee child care and establishing an early childhood education program for 300 children.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
