Phoenix cleared 'The Zone,' but the city's homeless population is still growing
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Over the past year, more than 13,000 people in Maricopa County became homeless.
Among them was Jay Duval, who pitched a tent downtown after his roommate moved out and he could no longer afford an apartment.
“They wanted $1,200 a month for a studio. That’s crazy,” Duval said.
There was also Kevin Kirchhoff, who ended up in a homeless shelter after coming to Phoenix to seek addiction treatment. And there was DeArrio Lowery, who came to the city looking for job opportunities, but arrived with little money and nowhere to stay. Then there was Raquel Parra, who has lived her whole life in Phoenix, but had never been without shelter until last winter.
“I had an apartment out there on 59th Avenue and Northern, and I was wrongfully evicted,” Parra said.
Metro Phoenix’s homeless population has grown by an astonishing 50% in the past five years. The dramatic spike has been in spite of major efforts from the city, county and state to address the issue.
One high-profile example was a court case in which the city of Phoenix was ordered to disperse its largest encampment of unsheltered people. Earlier this month, the city finished clearing the area, moving hundreds of people into new, temporary shelters. But while the city met its court-ordered deadline to address homelessness in one neighborhood, many indicators suggest the crisis is only getting worse across the region.
“I hope people don’t lose sight of the fact that whatever happens right here around us, that’s not the totality of homelessness in Maricopa County” said Amy Schwabenlender, CEO of Human Services Campus, a hub of homelessness organizations in downtown Phoenix.
Schwabenlender said prohibiting camping on several blocks around the campus simply had the effect of making homelessness less visible in Phoenix, not of solving the issue.
In fact, as Phoenix worked to clear the encampment known as “the Zone,” the region’s overall homeless population continued to increase. The Maricopa Association of Governments reports for every 10 homeless people in the county getting into housing, 19 people are now becoming homeless.
“The problem isn’t just persisting, it’s growing” Jackson Fonder is CEO of UMOM, the state’s largest shelter for homeless families.
Fonder points out metro Phoenix has been gaining more than 150 residents per day, putting constant pressure on the housing market. Rents have risen nearly 40% just since 2019, pushing prices even further out of reach for low-wage earners. And as many forms of pandemic-era assistance have dried up, eviction filings in Maricopa County have reached record levels.
Meanwhile, demand for shelter at UMOM has also risen to an all-time high.
“The number of families on our Priority 1 and Priority 2 lists right now is 311,” Fonder said. “I’ve been at UMOM three years, that’s the first time we’ve hit the number 300.”
Fonder said families now wait eight weeks to get into the shelter, and affordable housing is so scarce, it’s becoming harder for families in the shelter to move out. Fonder said that’s creating a bottleneck.
“The longer the length of stay, directly correlates to the waitlist on the front-end,” Fonder said.
It’s not just a trend at UMOM. Countywide, the length of time people are unhoused has grown as has the number of people considered chronically homeless, according to the Maricopa Association of Governments, which collects data on homelessness across the region.
“We have way more people coming into the homelessness system than we have coming out,” said Cleo Warner, a human services planner with MAG.
"We have way more people coming into the homelessness system than we have coming out"
—Cleo Warner, a human services planner with MAG
“The longer that we have people sort of in these more crisis states of homelessness and not being able to move on to housing, the more stress it's putting on those interventions, as well as the resources that we have available,” Warner said.
But resources have never been more abundant. State lawmakers made a record investment in the state’s Housing Trust Fund this year. The county Board of Supervisors has directed half a billion dollars toward housing solutions since 2020. The city of Phoenix added more than 1,000 shelter beds since 2022, and has plans to bring on nearly 800 more in the next two years.
Rachel Milne with Phoenix’s Office of Homeless Solutions said shelter beds won’t solve the root causes of housing instability. But she said the city made an unprecedented effort over the past six months to bring people living in “The Zone” indoors and said the work won’t stop there.
“The things that we really need to focus on as a region is preventing as many people as possible from experiencing homelessness, and once they do, helping them exit quickly to a permanent housing destination,” Milne said.
But Fonder worries the solutions from the state, county and city still just aren’t coming fast enough.
“Whatever we’re doing is not enough, we’ve got to do more,” Fonder said. “I just want more people grabbing a shovel and doing things rather than another darn task force or a meeting to talk about what the problem is.”
For now, he said, his organization and others will keep doing their best to assist unsheltered clients, even as the waitlist for services grows longer and longer.
