The tents and campfires were gone. The sidewalks where people had built makeshift shelters from wooden pallets and blue tarps were empty. On Friday, all that remained of “the Zone,” a sprawling homeless camp in downtown Phoenix, was discarded clothing, trash and questions about what comes next.
For the first time in years, residents said the Zone felt virtually empty, cleared after an Arizona judge declared the area a “public nuisance” earlier this year and ordered Phoenix to dismantle the encampment by Saturday.
Housing advocates say the operation appears to have removed — at least temporarily — a notorious symbol of the homelessness crisis in American cities.
“It’s like some kind of science fiction movie,” says Joel Coplin, whose home and art gallery are in the heart of the Zone. “They all disappeared overnight.” He said he often woke up to the flashing lights of police cars and ambulances responding to fights, shootings, fires and overdoses outside his bedroom window.
Phoenix began clearing the area in May, going block by block to convince homeless residents to move into hotel rooms, shelter beds or other short-term housing. About 600 people have left the camp for temporary housing, the city said, at a cost of about $20 million.
Phoenix is also opening a $13 million campground on an empty lot nearby, with shaded tents, food, bathrooms and showers with room for 300 people who can’t or don’t want to stay indoors.
“This was a huge effort,” said Rachel Milne, director of Phoenix’s Office of Homeless Solutions. “It’s a huge difference.”
But housing advocates say it has done little to solve the shortage of affordable housing, mental health care and addiction services, fueling Arizona’s broader homelessness problem.
Phoenix shelters are nearly full, and homeless advocacy groups say the city still needs tens of thousands of additional low-income housing units to serve a homeless population that has grown 70 percent in the past six years to more than 9,000.
“It didn’t end people’s homelessness,” said Amy Schwabenlender, CEO of Phoenix’s Human Services Campus, a group of organizations that serve the Zone. “It took them from an exposed place to a sheltered place, and that’s good. But how many more people will become homeless?”
For now, Prisella Goodwin said she was lucky enough to escape the tent where she had been sleeping along a stretch of asphalt known as the Jackson Curve, the last part of the Zone cleared this week.
Some in that last block had decided to leave before the pre-dawn cleanup crews and outreach workers showed up, wheeling overflowing shopping carts and rolling bags into parks and alleys where the judge had no cleaning order.
But Ms Goodwin, 66, who said she had been homeless on and off since she was 14, said she welcomed the city’s offer to move to a hotel 30 minutes north of the city centre.
“I hope this will open a door,” she said as she sat in the breakfast room of her hotel.
City officials say about 80 percent of people living in the Zone have accepted offers of temporary housing in the past five months. Ms Milne, from the Office of Homeless Solutions, said most of them were still sheltered, but said some had returned to the streets.
“The city is not taking any victory laps,” Ms Milne said. “Some additional real work needs to begin.”
The camp sprung up in a neighborhood where Phoenix’s largest homeless shelters and homeless services organizations are clustered, where hundreds of people continue to sleep, receive food and medical care, mail service and help applying for jobs, housing or identification cards.
On Friday afternoon, several dozen people looking for a break from the 85-degree afternoon sun squatted on sidewalks next to new signs that read: “This area is closed to camping.”
“It’s dramatically better,” said Joe Faillace, the owner of Old Station Subs Shop and one of several local business owners and residents who have sued Phoenix, arguing that the city had allowed the Zone to grow into a crime-ridden plagued nightmare by not enforcing the rules. against loitering, drug use and camping.
Still, several homeless people said the cleanup went beyond clearing out the tents and tarps. With the area cleared, they said police no longer allowed them to sit or stand on the sidewalks.
A 46-year-old man who gave his name as BJ said he moved off the street to a shelter bed, but the gated campus became claustrophobic and chaotic after a while, and he sometimes had to leave.
“They say we don’t have any rights to walk around here anymore,” he said.
As he and three friends stood on the corner, a police car rolled past them.
“You can’t hang around here anymore,” an officer said over a loudspeaker. “You have to move on.”
David Iversen reporting contributed.