The City Council continued to discuss its “Strategies to Address Homelessness” plan to address community involvement and the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
City employees shared feedback from the public and gathered response from committee members during the Land Use and Livability Subcommittee meeting Wednesday. The plan will be finalized after revisions and presented to the council on Oct. 27.
Although the city reached out to over 60,000 people and received over 3,700 comments through an online survey and various public meetings, many people who spoke at the meeting, including Vice Mayor Betty Guardado, felt there still wasn’t enough community input in the plan.
Guardado suggested getting more community members together to be sure they are included in the final plan presented to the council in three weeks.
Multiple representatives of community groups spoke on how the plan could be edited throughout the meeting.
Elizabeth Venable, treasurer for The Fund for Empowerment, said the technology divide between people experiencing homelessness and other stakeholders, like businesses or neighborhood groups, prevents the city from making plans that include all communities in Phoenix.
“The main thing that is really missing from these meetings, and possibly from the comments, is the voices of people experiencing homelessness and coming out of homelessness,” Venable said.
Venable also said the city would come up with “more balanced solutions” if they focused on comments from people experiencing homelessness. To support this, she said Fund for Empowerment collected public comments from people experiencing homelessness and submitted them to the city before the meeting.
Jeff Spellman, a Phoenix resident and advocate, said he thought city employees had done a good job identifying important themes in the community.
Deputy City Manager Inger Erickson said, however, that both ideas will continue to help edit the “Strategies to Address Homelessness” plan.
“It is important to note that the feedback we heard were from diverse perspectives,” she said. “They were also sometimes counter to each other.”
Over 800 of the comments were on the housing section of the plan, in addition to the survey answers. Phoenix Director of Housing Cindy Stotler said many comments highlighted a need for more shelters and specifically low barrier shelters — which allow people to bring their pets, partners and belongings in even if they refuse services or are misusing substances.
Pamela Morrison, the community relationship officer at Phoenix Rescue Mission, said the biggest problem facing the homeless population in Phoenix is the lack of low barrier housing. Phoenix Rescue Mission has a men’s shelter and a women’s shelter, but those shelters are places for people to come for an extended time.
“There’s nowhere to take a family that is homeless today,” Morrison said. “Everybody goes on a waitlist.”
Bill Morlan, a member of the Madison Pioneers Coalition, a new neighborhood group in Phoenix, also added that the city should create smaller, more specialized facilities for groups like veterans, the LGBTQ+ community, and seniors because they would provide better support and lessen the impact on neighborhoods.
Revising and editing the plan has become crucial, according to Lisa Glow, the CEO of Central Arizona Shelter Services (CASS) largest emergency shelter in Arizona. Located on the Human Services campus in downtown Phoenix, CASS is working to continue combating homelessness as well as the pandemic.
“We’ve been in a homeless and housing crisis for a decade,” Glow said. “That was before the pandemic and now we’re seeing projections that homelessness could rise by up to 30% in Arizona.”
Councilmember Carlos Garcia, District 8, said he likes the idea of smaller shelters because “having different plans for people experiencing homelessness in different ways” is important.
“We shouldn’t try to react to this or even pretend that we’re going to fix it with one plan,” Garcia said. “It’s something that we need to be committed to figure out new ways of funding, and properly funding, the issue and continue to incorporate all these voices to come together and help out.”
Contact the reporter at mcheshi3@asu.edu.
