Phoenix leaders are failing everyone, homeless or not, in 'The Zone'

Phoenix officials announced this month that they had started “cleanups” of the vast homeless encampment known as The Zone.

That’s welcome – but at best it’s a tiny fraction of what’s necessary. At worst, it’s a charade by politicians seeking to disguise their refusal to protect the rights of Phoenix’s law-abiding residents.

The Zone now encompasses some 1,000 people, living in tents along Ninth and 13th Avenues from Jefferson Street to the railroad tracks south of Jackson Street, and along Jefferson, Madison and Jackson streets from Eighth to 13th Avenues.

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Instead of enforcing rules against camping on public property or polluting city streets, the city has spent years encouraging people to stay, even transporting them there from other neighborhoods and effectively refusing to patrol the area.

Naturally, the crime rate, the risks posed by campfires and the pollution resulting from public urination and defecation have ruined local businesses and driven residents to such despair that they sued the city in August for maintaining a nuisance.

A single-block cleanup did nothing

In response to that, and another lawsuit that argues the city is maintaining the homeless in “inhumane” conditions, city officials said earlier this month that they had conducted what they call a “test run” of cleanups in The Zone.

But it was little more than window-dressing.

First, only a single block was cleaned; the city has no plans for follow-ups. Second, it was only temporary: residents simply moved tents aside while crews removed some junk. Third, if future cleanups occur, they will proceed block-by-block rather than wholesale, so that by the time the process reaches the end, it’ll be time to start again.

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Worse, the city lets campers immediately move back onto the street, instead of going to a public shelter. 12 News reported that on the block the city cleaned, 33 out of the 50 people approached agreed to go to a shelter. The others elected to remain.

The reason is that shelters typically forbid people from drinking or using drugs, or engaging in other conduct on the premises that many of The Zone’s population would prefer to persist in. By letting people remain on the streets instead of moving to such a “high barrier” shelter, the city is effectively operating its own “low-barrier” shelter – that is, one where people can stay and ignore the law.

Phoenix says it can't act. We say they refuse

That’s legally significant because the lawsuit filed in August was brought by business and property owners who every day experience damage to their property, threats to personal safety and the destruction of their businesses. One described having to order his windows re-sealed due to damage caused by urine.

Fires set by Zone residents to keep warm often get out of control; police last month reported to two fires, only to find burned human remains in the ashes – in one instance, those of a premature fetus. This all amounts to a nuisance maintained by the city – making it liable under existing law.

Yet city leaders claim they can’t act due to a 2019 court ruling, which declared it unconstitutional to arrest people for “involuntarily sitting, lying, and sleeping in public.” That case said that if people have “no choice in the matter,” it’s cruel and unusual to punish them for sleeping on the streets.

But many, perhaps hundreds, of Zone residents are perfectly capable of making choices. They simply choose to stay. And that 2019 case made it clear that cities can arrest people if they refuse to go to a shelter. The fact that so many people in one block insisted on staying in tents proves the city can act.

Yet it still refuses.

There's nothing compassionate about 'The Zone'

Phoenicians who demand that the city enforce the law are sometimes accused of lacking compassion. But there’s nothing compassionate about letting a thousand people live in dangerous and unsanitary conditions for years – at risk of murder, arson, theft, contagious illness and drug abuse.

And the city’s refusal to enforce the law is hardly compassionate to the hard-working residents of the neighborhood, whose livelihoods have been wrecked by official negligence. The first responsibility of public officials is to protect the rights of the law-abiding; on that, Phoenix leaders have completely, and even deliberately, failed.

Timothy Sandefur is vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute, which has filed an amicus brief in support of Phoenix residents’ lawsuit against the city for maintaining a public nuisance. Reach him at TSandefur@goldwaterinstitute.org. Austin VanDerHeyden is municipal affairs liaison at the Goldwater Institute. Reach him at AVanDerHeyden@goldwaterinstitute.org.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Phoenix is failing everyone, homeless or not, in downtown 'Zone'