Last week, the city of Phoenix made a startling announcement. The Arizona capital had previously identified 222 chronically homeless veterans living in the city, more than half of them veterans of the Vietnam War. [...]
Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton said last week that every last one of them now had a roof overhead. The city has effectively ended chronic veteran homelessness, according to the mayor [...].
Phoenix did this – prioritizing housing first, then wrapping other services around it.
— theatlanticcities.com
4 Comments
No, a city cannot. And it shouldn't either. Some people (admittedly few) do choose to live on the margins. Forcing those few independents into housing would effectively be jailing them.
Agree^ Phoenix is an absolutely horrible place to be homeless. It's climate is deadly in the summer and much colder than most think in the winter. Besides that, the overall urban form of Phoenix makes homelessness even more miserable than most cities. The homeless typically panhandle along busy highway on ramps. I would argue that rather than provide formal housing in an effort to sterilize the city the city should provide more informal integrated spaces with resources like drinking water, benches, temporary shelters, etc...
When you remove a problem from public sight it usually just becomes worse.
According to the article, "veterans as a group make up about 10 percent of the total homeless population in the U.S." - means that Phoenix has another 1,998 non-veterans to go to have effectively ended homelessness.
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