A judge ruled last month that the city must clear ‘The Zone,’ which has become a public nuisance where prostitution and drug use run rampant.
The city of Phoenix is slated to begin work this week clearing out and cleaning up “the Zone,” a massive downtown homeless camp that a state judge recently deemed a public nuisance.
City workers on Wednesday are slated to begin removing tents, block by block, from a portion of the unstructured homeless camp, one of the nation’s largest, according to media reports.
Hundreds, and sometimes more than 1,000 people, live in the camp, where hard drug use and prostitution occur openly. The camp – which is not far from the state Capitol and the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball stadium – is littered with trash, used needles, and human waste.
There have been multiple burned bodies discovered in the Zone, including the burned body of a newborn found dead in the street, according to court records.
Neighbors and business owners sued the city last year. In late March, Arizona Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney released a preliminary ruling in their favor, finding that the city has been illegally “maintaining a public nuisance in the Zone” – a biohazard where laws are enforced arbitrarily. The city has until July 10, the next court date, to clean up the mess.
Lawyers who spoke with National Review last month said Blaney’s ruling is significant because it presents a legal pathway for addressing the massive homeless camps sprouting in parks and on sidewalks across the country, and particularly on the West Coast.
Blaney’s ruling made clear that not only can the city take action to “abate the nuisance” it helped to create, but that it must. The ruling took aim at one of the city’s primary excuses for not clearing the camp – Martin v. City of Boise, a 2018 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that concluded that people cannot be prosecuted for sleeping outside on public property when they have no other home or shelter to go to.
In his ruling, Blaney wrote that the city “erroneously applied the Martin case,” which does not prohibit enforcement of laws against things like outdoor fires, drug dealing, violence, biohazards, and pollution. “But the most glaring misinterpretation” of the Martin ruling “is the inference that anyone who has erected a tent or other structure in the public right of way is intrinsically unable to otherwise obtain shelter,” the judge wrote.
Ilan Wurman, an Arizona State University constitutional law professor and one of the lawyers representing the neighbors and business owners near the Zone, told National Review that they’re eager to see what the city does to clear and clean the camp. City leaders have said that once a portion of the camp is cleared out, people are not supposed to be allowed to return.
“How they’re enforcing that is unclear to us,” he said. “Where everyone is going to go is unclear, because they haven’t opened up a structured campground yet.”
Wurman said his team will be keeping an eye on the city’s efforts to ensure they don’t clean out just a portion of the camp, leaving the rest of the public nuisance in place, and hoping to get a pass from the judge. “The last thing we want is for them to view this as an excuse; like, ‘look, we’re doing what we can,’” Wurman said. “That was their excuse before the lawsuit.”
In late April, the city announced that it would be taking “decisive action” to address homelessness in the Zone, and would be using a “multi-pronged strategy” that includes “enhanced cleaning, connecting unsheltered residents with needed resources and services, and increasing resources to meet the demand.”
Rachel Milne, the director of the city’s Office of Homeless Solutions, said in a prepared statement that improving conditions in the Zone is “one of our top priorities.” She said the city would be “accelerating existing plans” to meet the needs of “those experiencing homelessness, but also the business owners impacted by the large increase in people camping in the area.”
According to the city, there are at least seven projects in the works that will add 800 new shelter beds over the next two years. The city says it added 592 shelter beds last year.
There were more than 3,000 unsheltered residents in Phoenix, according to 2022 estimates, about four times the number from 2014, according to the city.