Tucson to launch new way for public to report homeless encampments

Tucson will begin a new way for community members to report homeless encampments in an effort to help the city clean them up, provide services to those living there, and when it involves a serious health or safety risk, require the occupants to leave.

The new reporting tool is largely spurred by concern from businesses owners who say the homeless community is driving away customers and otherwise contributing to unsafe conditions.

The new online reporting system is set to launch by the end of the month. Residents will be able to report encampments, and city staff will determine a response based on the magnitude of health and safety risks each site poses.

The sites will be assigned a category by an encampment coordinator to determine the city’s approach:

Tier 1: A site with no occupants that requires cleanup.

Tier 2: Unsheltered occupants living at a site that does not pose a health and safety risk but requires cleanup. The city will work with occupants to help clean the area while providing outreach for housing and social services.

Tier 3: Unsheltered occupants living at a site that poses a significant health and safety risk are required to relocate with a 72-hour notice. Staff will attempt to provide shelter for occupants and a cleanup crew will follow up once occupants leave the encampment.

“We are prioritizing businesses, obviously, because we don’t want businesses to shutter, we don’t want them to feel like they’re not getting any help,” Tucson’s Housing First Director Brandi Champion said. “Part of the beautification initiative is to target these businesses and get people moved along out of these business areas and into shelter.”

The city’s housing first approach to addressing homelessness entails moving people into permanent housing without barriers to entry and providing support services as needed. The encampment response is a renewed effort to address street homelessness, an issue the city’s housing experts say has reached a magnitude that demands an immediate response.

“We’ve had lots of work around addressing encampments, but it really is on a different level that just requires a new, renewed kind of response and try to find new ways to do this,” said Liz Morales, director of the Housing and Community Development Department. “Our existing ways were not sufficient to address the concerns, and so we have to ramp it up more and figure out what else we can do.”

Businesses express concern

In February 2022, the city’s housing department determined about 2,200 people are experiencing homelessness on a nightly basis in Tucson — 1,600 of which were unsheltered. That means for every sheltered homeless individual, about three people are residing in the city alleyways, in abandoned buildings or in other places not intended for human habitation.

The city’s housing department estimates there’s been a nearly 50% reduction in the number of shelter beds occupied by homeless people from 2019 to 2022, largely due to a reduction in available beds that occurred as a pandemic precaution.

Dan Ranieri, the president and CEO La Frontera, a social services provider that partners with the city, said in his nearly 30 years of experience working on housing issues “there’s more activity related to (homelessness) now than I’ve ever seen.”

“It’s an important problem. It’s one of the biggest, quite frankly, that we’ve had to deal with in many years. It’s going to take a whole community effort,” he said. “I think we’re going to put a sizable dent in this, but It’s not going to be easy.”

City Manager Michael Ortega wrote in a memo to Tucson’s City Council that the issue of widespread encampments “is having a significant impact on local businesses and quality of life for community members.”

Josh Jacobsen, a local restaurant owner, says that impact comes in the form of retail theft, property destruction and open-air drug use, for example.

“The urban camping, that’s only a part of the issue. The bigger part of the issue is that a lot of people are having substance abuse issues, and it’s causing them to live this type of lifestyle. In addition to the urban camping, there’s a lot of destruction that’s taking place at businesses,” he said. “Staff is constantly having to clean up human feces as well as drug paraphernalia. And it’s just a dangerous situation for everybody concerned.”

According to Lt. James Brady, the Tucson Police Department’s community outreach and resource engagement commander, the adverse impact on businesses hasn’t gone unnoticed, but it can be a difficult situation for police to navigate.

“It’s a range of those general types of behavior that are occurring on business properties, it’s damaging business property,” he said. “(We need to) take care of our business community, and also help the community as a whole understand that the large umbrella of homelessness is not necessarily the problem. There is a subgroup within there that is causing those issues we’re talking about.”

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The widespread use of fentanyl, a highly addictive synthetic opioid that’s relativity cheap and easy to obtain, is a “massive issue,” Brady said. Fentanyl is the top contributor to overdose deaths, and nearly 300 people died from fentanyl overdoses in Pima County last year, according to the Pima County Health Department.

“You have people who are homeless because of bad circumstances, and they want out of it, and they just don’t know how to get out of it, and they don’t know where to go,” Ranieri said. “Then you have other people who are homeless because they’re choosing a pretty destructive, and in some cases, criminal lifestyle. They need to have an opportunity to make a choice to change that lifestyle.”

Advocacy from businesses has contributed to Tucson’s new encampment clean-up process, where the city intends to offer shelter and support services to those experiencing street homelessness. However, not all will accept the help, creating uncertainty about the fate of those the city moves from encampments.

Some encampments will be given a 72-hour notice to vacate the premises. Morales said the city doesn’t want to displace people, but the situation may arise when city officials force inhabitants to leave.

“We have the concern for displacement, that’s a valid concern, we also have concern for the criminal activity that may or may not be linked to the unsheltered,” she said. “Our concern is let’s help those who we can help, let’s address the criminal element with what resources we have. But let’s also try to provide housing.”

The city is actively working to increase the supply of shelter in conjunction with encampment clean up.

Tucson has plans in the works to set up a large, low-barrier congregate shelter. There’s room for about 220 people in its four current shelter sites, and the city plans to increase capacity by adding another 60 beds in the coming months.

But when it comes to the number of those experiencing homelessness and the availability of shelter space, a significant gap remains. Morales said the city’s “starting to see a lot of turnover” in getting those in shelters into permanent housing, however.

Besides forcing people to vacate, another encampment response will involve simply cleaning up an area without pushing out inhabitants and instead “help mitigate whatever’s causing the issue without displacing them,” Morales said.

City-county collaboration

The online portal for reporting encampments came from a collaborative task force with city and county leaders that’s been meeting for more than two months to come up with immediate solutions to address the homelessness crisis.

The city’s using about $400,000 of American Rescue Plan dollars to support cleanup efforts in addition to part of a $2 million grant from the Arizona Department of Housing to expand its homeless work program, which provides employment to those in emergency shelters through community service work.

The funds will also go toward buying a mobile shower unit to bring directly to unsheltered populations.

Nearly every city department, from Environmental and General Services to Housing and Community Development, will be involved in the response, according to City Manager Ortega. To coordinate efforts between departments, the city hired Amaris Vasquez as an interagency resource manager. Vasquez is a former manager at Tucson Fire’s Collaborative Community Care program, which tracks the root causes of calls for EMS service to reduce reliance on the 911 system.

On Sept. 27, Tucson City Council authorized the hiring of a joint city-county funded position for a regional manager to coordinate homelessness outreach efforts between both jurisdictions.

County Administrator Jan Lesher said she has approved the hiring, and the county is currently inventorying county property to identify potential affordable housing projects.

While pervasive in Tucson, the issue of homelessness doesn’t stop at city limits, Lesher acknowledges.

“In our regular meetings with the city and the county, we’re constantly looping in the other jurisdictions … because the belief being if it’s not at the forefront in Sahuarita or Oro Valley right now, it probably will be,” she said. “We’re seeing (homelessness) everywhere … we know we’re going to need a real county-wide solution.”