A homeless camp is growing once again at downtown Tucson’s Veinte de Agosto Park, and sleeping pods could soon return.
Less than three months after the city cleared out the wooden boxes from the park and the sidewalks on one of downtown’s busiest blocks, people are once again making the park their home.
Piles of bedrolls, personal belongings, cardboard and tarps line Church Avenue. On Friday morning a man slept on the wet sidewalk, one shoe on, one shoe off.
On Thursday afternoon a man slept on the corner of Church and Congress Street under a sleeping bag. The high was 95 degrees.
By one estimate, 50 people are sleeping in the one-acre park at night.
Social workers are visiting the encampment regularly to try to place the people in housing programs, said Cliff Wade, a veterans outreach specialist with Old Pueblo Community Services.
“We’re trying to do everything we can,” he said.
But there aren’t a lot of places for homeless people to go right now, he added, especially for non-veterans.
Community Partnership of Southern Arizona, the Regional Behavioral Health Authority for Pima County, has 350 beds for homeless people, and only 10 are open, said Jordan Layton, director of housing services.
Most shelters are full, and the city’s $20,000 contract to run a temporary men’s shelter — which was meant to reduce the number of people living in the park — expires in one week.
The temporary shelter at Central City Assembly, 939 S. 19th Avenue, less than a mile south of Veinte de Agosto Park, averaged 50 men a night, said lead pastor Davide Ferrari.
Up to 35 regulars sleep there every night. “They’ll go back to doing whatever it was they were doing, like sleeping in a wash,” he said.
The funding for the temporary shelter has run out, said Sally Stang, the city’s housing and community development director.
The group sleeping at the shelter and the group living at the park may be two separate populations, Ferrari said.
The people living at the downtown park are part of the longstanding Safe Park protest, said organizer John McLane.
Protesters say the city has made it a crime to be homeless. At its peak, before it was disassembled in March, the protest included more than two dozen “dream pods,” locking wooden boxes that provided safe sleeping and storage for the homeless.
McLane said the pods have been converted to bike trailers, and he intends to move his pod back to the corner of Congress and Church at the end of the month. He is currently banned from the park.
He estimated 50 people sleep at Veinte de Agosto Park each night. Coffee and doughnuts are delivered each morning, and food and other supplies are delivered regularly. There is nowhere for people to use a bathroom at night.
“A safe, legal place to sleep is something that weighs on our hearts,” he said.
Talks with the city — both about a possible legal campsite and about a possible urban camping ban — have dried up, McLane said.
City officials said they are monitoring the situation at the park.
The Safe Park group has an ongoing lawsuit against the city, accusing police of violating their free-speech rights.
“We know that it’s not ideal for a group of houseless people to be sleeping at that park,” McLane said, and organizers still are working on solutions.
A public forum on “houselessness” is planned for 2:30 p.m. June 28 at the Main Library.
Stang said she has been studying other cities’ models for helping the homeless.
She checked out Phoenix’s homeless campus, but said Tucson couldn’t afford that model.
“We do have quite an investment every year for homeless programs,” Stang said — $16 million in federal funds to various local programs, but it’s not enough to meet the demand for services.
