PHOENIX — While facing an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, a lawsuit from a collective of neighbors and a separate action by the ACLU, the City of Phoenix resumed its cleaning of the state's largest homeless encampment in downtown Phoenix on Friday.
Scott Hall with the city's Department of Homeless Solutions said January was the last time such a cleanup was completed in the area.
They were paused months after the U.S. Department of Justice began its investigation into whether the city was violating unsheltered people's civil rights when throwing away unattended belongings.
Now the city says it's trying a different approach.
"People have plenty of opportunity to keep their belongings," said Scott Hall with the Phoenix Department of Homeless Solutions.
On Thursday, a judge ruled on how the cleanups were to proceed after a lawsuit from the ACLU.
Friday's cleanup had some new protocols for how people's stuff would be handled.
If unattended people have seven days to pick it up according to Hall.
"After that seven-day process where we try to identify who it belongs to then we will take that property and consolidate into a storage unit that we have here at the Human Services Campus," he said.
From there the things are stored for 30 days, then discarded.
Hall said the idea is to go block by block to help people clear their area and offer service.
"It's pretty encouraging to have the additional shelter capacity to offer people," he said.
A spokesperson said 33 people accepted services in total during Friday's event.
But because it's a trial program it only covered one of the ten blocks where some 1,000 unsheltered people are camping.
"You can obviously see that nothing's been done," property owner Karl Freund told ABC15.
Upon arriving at his building near 10th Avenue and Madison Street on Friday, he found a piece of clothing on fire just a couple of feet away from his front door.
"I've literally hit the breaking point," he said.
"We have to take action at a massive scale. Not just like, 'hey, we're gonna just come through and clean it a little bit and pressure wash the street,'" he said.
Earlier this year Freund and other property owners in the area sued the city demanding that the unsheltered in the area be relocated to an area specifically set aside for urban camping.
"We need to move these people housing, getting proper treatment, and do long term and short-term solutions for this. This is unacceptable in Arizona, especially in the greatest country in the world," he said.
