LAURIE ROBERTS

Roberts: Homeless camp in tents while shelter must sit half empty

Laurie Roberts
opinion columnist
Monica Martinez camps outside a homeless shelter that must remain half empty


They line Madison Street near 12th Avenue, almost in the shadow of state offices. A long, bleak eyesore of ragtag tents and tarps that are home sweet home to about 150 people.

OK, maybe not so sweet.

But it’s what passes for home to people like Dave. The 59-year-old has been living on the streets for a long time. He says he works nights when there is work to be had cleaning Talking Stick Arena and Chase Field. But he hasn’t been able to save enough to afford a place to live and the homeless shelter operated by Central Arizona Shelter Services is full by the time he gets off work.

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People like Willie Johnson. He says he was recently released from prison and dropped off at the bus station in Tucson. He came to Phoenix hoping to find work, but a felony conviction isn’t exactly a résumé booster.

People like Monica Martinez. She has two dogs and the downtown shelters won’t accept dogs unless they are service animals. So she bands with a group of five or six others and sleeps in the dirt along Madison Street.

City: Camping here is a crime

Madison Street in downtown Phoenix, where the homeless camp outside the Human Services Campus.

This urban campground popped up late last year, its numbers growing as church groups and others came to the area to hand out Christmas gifts and food to the homeless. Among those gifts: tents.

Phoenix police come around regularly and order them to take down the tents. Police tell me they’ve gotten complaints about a dramatic increase in trash and human waste and add that camping in the right-of-way is a crime. They tell people they can go to the city’s emergency overflow shelter.

But when nightfall comes, the tents go up again.

“Police tell us to move,” said Marcella Johnson, who has been on the streets for a year. “There’s nowhere else for us to go.”

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Meanwhile, the homeless shelter a few feet away on the county’s Human Services Campus sits half empty – the result of a city-imposed stipulation when the place was built just over a decade ago.

A spokesman for CASS says the 470 beds the shelter is allowed to operate are always full.

“There are no shelters with available space to take these people in,” spokesman David Smith told me.

Why it's so hard to get people help

City and county officials who work on homeless issues tell me there usually is space in the emergency overflow shelter operated by St. Vincent de Paul on the city’s Human Services Campus. Every night, the non-profit’s dining room and an adjacent meeting room are cleared and mats laid out in tight rows so that 250 people can sleep on the linoleum floor.

But some who are living along Madison tell me they either can’t get in or prefer the safety of banding together on the streets rather than sleeping on the floor next to a stranger.

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The reasons they are out here vary. Some are mentally ill. Some are felons or down on their luck. Some have addictions that launched them into a skid that landed them here, beside a collapsed tent on Madison Street.

Every one of them desperately needs help.

Human services officials tell me they try to provide it. Bruce Liggett, Maricopa County’s human service director, notes that a coalition of government agencies working with the Valley of the Sun United Way has found permanent housing for 650 people over the last two years. But it can be tough, he and others say, to get those who are chronically homeless to accept help.

“We try to get people to come in off street and engage in services,” added Moe Gallegos, Phoenix Human Services director.

Why can't the shelter use all 1,000 beds?

It seems to me the best way to get them off the street might be to open up more beds in that half-empty homeless shelter.

CASS was built to accommodate 1,000 beds but the city of Phoenix, in a zoning stipulation, capped the number of beds at less than half that.

Mike McQuaid, who chairs the Human Services Campus board, told me the board is preparing to ask the city to raise the cap to “something more reasonable, 700 or 800.”

“Let us put the people who slept on the floor last night at St. Vincent de Paul and on the street into CASS,” he said. “When you have people in our facility, we have a much, much better chance of engaging them in our services.”

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Freddy Brown Jr., whose family owns PBF Manufacturing at 12th Avenue and Jefferson Street, says the generosity of Good Samaritans who came bearing gifts at Christmas has led to a nightmare for the neighborhood.

He’s all for allowing more beds inside the shelter in the hope of getting people off the street and into services. They need help, he says, and so do the neighbors who now must contend with the litter and the filth that accompany large numbers of people living on the street with no access to bathrooms.

“The county cited me for all of that being on my property and the city did same thing but neither of them offer help in rectifying the situation,” Brown said.

'It's like we don't exist'

I’m guessing there will be opposition to expanding CASS from some who, understandably, don’t want the area to become more of a magnet for the homeless. But it seems about a decade too late for that discussion.

And it’s heartless to let people camp on the streets when there is space available to give them real shelter – not just a spot on the dining room floor, but the luxury of a shower and the dignity of a bed. A place to store their belongings and maybe even to keep their dogs with them. And most importantly, the opportunity to figure out why they are homeless and how to help them so they can find a place to live.

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“Out there, they’re getting no help at all,” Smith said.

Out there, where Monica Martinez is camped in the dirt, a dozen or so feet outside the fence of a homeless shelter that must sit half empty.

“It’s like we don’t exist,” she says.

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