PHOENIX — In November, the City of Phoenix completed its court-ordered cleanup of the massive homeless encampment known as 'The Zone.'
Right in the middle of 'The Zone,' at the center of the homeless crisis is the Key Campus, formerly known as the Human Services Campus.
The latest numbers from their weekly neighborhood street count show there are still more than 100 people living unsheltered in the area around the campus. The Key Campus is a collaboration of organizations working together to provide people with a variety of services including legal, housing, food, mental health, dental and employment help.
It's a drastic change for CEO Amy Schwabenlender.
"It's a bit surreal for me. When I started working here five years ago, it was like this. Basically, there weren't people living here and camping and creating structures and attaching things to the fence, and then we had our slow growth and we had, you know, quite a while with 500 up to 1,000 people living right here," said Schwabenlender.
Despite the chaos created by 'The Zone,' she tells us Phoenix found a humane way to handle the cleanup.
"I didn't know how we would get from that to this, and grateful that the city of Phoenix didn't do what other communities have done, which is just go through on one day and say you can't be here, and really being thoughtful and intentional and planning and doing it in the most dignified way it probably can be done and saying 'We're going to do a street at a time. We're going to make sure we have indoor places to offer all of you,'" Schwabenlender replied.
Now, with the city fulfilling its order to clear the area, she fears the actual problem of homelessness is being forgotten.
"Telling a jurisdiction, 'eliminate the public nuisance,' isn't a solution to how do people become homeless. It's a wiping away. It's an erasing of a circumstance that's happened to people and it's not identifying a solution. It really just said, 'Go through this area. Tell people they can't be here,'" said Schwabenlender.
According to ABC15's reporting on homelessness, it's a multi-tiered problem that will require a multi-tiered solution.
"Is that the biggest program — affordable housing and having roofs in general?" asked ABC15's Javier Soto.
"So, for us, it's really a three-pronged approach: How do we help more people stay housed, how do we have enough services for people who lose their housing, and how do we have enough housing? And we really need to, as a community, need to be looking at all of it instead of picking one segment only," said Schwabenlender.
Those solutions require everyone to come together to resolve this compounding problem because it's not going away.
"Everybody wanted to talk about homelessness, and so there is this feeling inside like, 'Okay, are we back, are we back to where we were five years ago that people don't see homelessness, so they're not going to want to talk about it.' And I don't want 1,000 people living outside to have to get people to talk about it," said Schwabenlender.
