PHOENIX (CN) — Residents and business owners of a multi-block area of downtown Phoenix populated by nearly 1,000 homeless people asked a county judge to set a hard limit for the city to abate the issue in the first of a three-day trial.
“That area, it's a warzone,” said Ian Francis, who operates multiple businesses out of warehouses in the downtown area known as "the zone." “It’s a nightmare.”
The zone spans from 7th to 15th Avenue and from Washington to Jackson Street, nestled between the Arizona state capitol and Phoenix City Hall. The number of people permanently living in the zone has ballooned since 2018. People who live and operate businesses in the area have reported witnessing violent crime, drug use, sex acts, urination and defecation just outside their homes and storefronts.
The conditions finally led 19 residents to sue Phoenix this past October, demanding it solve the issue by enforcing camping bans and clearing the area of tents and other semi-permanent living structures.
Maricopa County Judge Scott Blaney ordered the city to begin clearing the camp in March; it’s cleared three blocks so far, moving to a new area every three weeks to ensure time to help people staying on each block find shelter space or other services. Once a block of the zone is cleared, nobody is allowed to return to that section.
Plaintiff attorney Ilan Wurman said the city’s success in clearing the few blocks it’s done so far is evidence that it has the ability to clear the entire zone.
“It’s not that complicated,” he said. “They cleaned up a couple of half blocks, and it looks great. There’s no more nuisance on those blocks.
“Make the injunction permanent and give them a firm deadline by the end of the summer,” he demanded of Blaney.
Phoenix attorney Justin Pierce said the city is doing all it can to solve the issue, but the timeline offered by the plaintiffs isn’t realistic. He asked Blaney to dismiss the case and allow the city to move at its own pace.
“Within about nine months, that whole area’s gonna be clear,” he said.
Aside from the feasibility of the plaintiffs’ preferred timeline, Pierce said the city is “walking a legal tightrope.”
The tent city began growing exponentially following the 2018 Ninth Circuit ruling in Martin v Boise, which held that cities can’t enforce anti-camping ordinances if there aren’t enough shelter beds available for those they remove from the street.
A federal judge in Arizona echoed that decision in December when he told the city it can’t clear the zone without ensuring shelter availability or other forms of aid. Because of these decisions, Pierce said, Phoenix must take its time to ensure compliance with the law.
“We can’t simply wave a magic wand and it’ll be gone,” he said. “We’re doing it within the confines of the law, and it's been working.”
But plaintiffs argued the city can’t be trusted to complete the cleanups without a permanent injunction and a hard deadline.
“The only time they cleaned up was after the court order,” said Freddy Brown, who owns a business on Jefferson Street
While it was only after the March injunction that the city began closing cleaned areas to camping, Phoenix Office of Homeless Solutions executives testified the city conducted five other “enhanced cleanings” between December and March and only allowed people to return to the street after cleanup if they didn’t accept a shelter bed.
Midway through the proceedings, Pierce asked Blaney to issue judgment as a matter of law, saying that the plaintiffs didn’t provide sufficient evidence that the city created the nuisance or is actively contributing to it. Both plaintiffs Brown and Ian Francis testified to seeing police and certain outreach groups associated with the city dropping people off at the Human Services Campus near the center of the zone, supporting their stance that the city is responsible for maintaining the public nuisance by bringing more homeless people in.
Pierce told Judge Blaney that a few observations over the course of three years, without ever confirming who was dropped off or why, aren’t enough to establish solid evidence that the city has contributed. He said the city would have to have taken “an affirmative act in maintaining the nuisance” to be found responsible. Otherwise, he said, if the city didn’t create the problem, it isn’t mandated to eliminate it.
Wurman countered that while he believes the city created and is contributing to the nuisance, it wouldn’t matter either way. Because the zone is on city land, it's the city’s responsibility to take care of it.
The second day of trial begins Tuesday at 9 a.m. While it's scheduled to last three days, Wurman said he’s confident it will be over on Tuesday.
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