Tucson withdraws ordinance to ban camping in washes amid community concerns

Ana Armijo used to camp at Santa Rita Park, but she expected to spend Wednesday night “in an alley somewhere.” Alejandro Martinez’s friend, who also used to camp at Santa Rita with his two dogs, would be spending Wednesday night in an empty house that Martinez’s building manager temporarily opened up.

Armijo and Martinez’s friend were among 40-some people cleared from Santa Rita Park on Wednesday morning near 22nd Street and Fourth Avenue as part of a broader city effort to break-up large encampments of people living outside.

Together, they show the patchwork realities for unhoused people after a sweep: uncertainty about what comes next.

“It’s really sad,” said Armijo, a tear rolling slowly down her cheek. “Where are we supposed to go?”

As Tucson wrestles with its enforcement approach to unhoused communities, the question of where people go after enforcement actions is one being asked at all levels, from the person tugging all of their belongings along the street to the mayor of Tucson herself.

Both raised the same point.

“My question has always been where do we take these individuals that obviously need help?” Mayor Regina Romero asked at a Tucson City Council study session Wednesday.

Wednesday’s session focused in large part on how the city engages with people who need housing support services, but may also be using drugs or struggling with their mental health.

That discussion, including police and Pima County officials as well as city staff, ranged from best practices in harm reduction for people addicted to opioids to whether the city could mandate people enter detox programs.

What wasn’t on the study session agenda, or the evening city council meeting, was also notable.

The week before, the planned city council agenda had included an ordinance that would have banned camping in washes.

By Tuesday, the agenda item was gone, in large part, Romero said, because of concerns she heard about whether there was a place for people to go if they were removed from washes.

“If we displace somebody from washes, do they go to the neighborhood, do they go to the park?” she asked. “If we’re going to move people from washes or from parks, where are we going to take individuals that need assistance or help?”

The clearing of Santa Rita Wednesday morning raised those concerns for some.

City officials said they had spent two weeks offering relocation to a shelter for residents of the park, but none had taken them up on the support.

Others, however, felt that the way the clearing was done was unfair, and unlikely to find a long-term solution.

Council member Lane Santa Cruz, whose ward borders the park, said she was “frustrated and disappointed” to only learn of the sweep last minute.

She also felt the city had not done enough to keep encampments from growing in the park, and questioned how many “low-barrier” beds, which don’t require sobriety or other specific demands of residents, were really available.

“We have been allowing for these park spaces to get out of control, [we] turn a blind eye until it gets out of control, then we come and do enforcement with an iron fist,” she said. “We need to know what kind of path we are forging.”

During public comment at the city council meeting, one speaker named Bryce said he had been happy to call Tucson home for the past ten years, but what he saw at Santa Rita had shocked him. “I began feeling an emotion I’ve never felt for our beautiful city before: shame,” Bryce said. “This was just an effort to displace these people from our camps.”

In response, the mayor sharply defended the city’s efforts. “Our teams… have been offering resources to individuals at Santa Rita Park,” she said. “Please inform yourself.”

Living in the washes

Eric Sutton often thinks of the five years he spent as a wildland firefighter when he’s camping in Tucson’s washes. He’s careful to look out for dry grass before he so much as lights a cigarette, and makes sure he shares that information with anyone nearby.

The washes are the closest place Sutton has had to a steady home since he was young. Without them, he’s not sure where he will go.

“All they’re doing is shuffling homeless people around,” said Sutton, who says he wears through two pairs of shoes a month walking around the city to avoid being stopped by police. “You can’t go anywhere else.”

The proposed city ordinance would have made it illegal for Sutton and other unhoused people to live in the city’s washes.

In a memo outlining the proposed ordinance , City Manager Timothy Thomure said camping in public washes obstructs streams and drains, compromises natural habitats and often includes the use of fire for cooking and heating. It is also harder for rescue officials to locate people in washes, the memo says.

The memo noted that the city already addresses camping in washes by using laws against trespassing, or restrictions on blocking drainage, the ordinance would be a blanket ban on all camping in washes. “which will make enforcement more straightforward.”

In response to a question from Arizona Luminaria, Thomure said it was fair to ask for what options were available to people currently camping in washes, but that didn’t change that it was inherently unsafe for someone to reside in a wash. “We do have shelter capacity (including low-barrier options) and other resources available as well as navigators that do frequent outreach to connect people to resources,” he said.

The ordinance was removed from the city council’s consent agenda for Wednesday .

Still, understanding it gives insight into what measures the city has considered around removing unhoused people who are camping in Tucson, and how city council members and community groups would respond.

City council member Paul Cunningham said he was struggling with the reasoning for the ordinance.

“We already have laws that govern camping on public property. Putting a special emphasis on moving people out of the washes would just have moved them into other areas in our community,” he said in an email statement to Arizona Luminaria. “It would be shifting a problem instead of working to solve a problem. The ordinance isn’t quite ready for prime time.”

Homeless people themselves say they understand that camping in washes can be dangerous, but with limited access to sleeping in public parks, they say there are not enough places to be.

Priscilla Martinez doesn’t have a home of her own, but she often stays with friends. And while she doesn’t camp in the wash, on her days off from work she may meet friends at a local nature area, sit against a rock and have a drink in the sun.

Martinez worries about where people will go if they’re moved out of washes.

“It might not be much to you or me, but to them, that’s all they have,” she said. “It’s going to make people hostile.”

Supreme Court decision changed enforcement nation-wide

When the wash encampment ordinance was initially discussed at a Feb. 21 city council study session, council members said they were waiting on the Supreme Court to rule in a case called City of Grants Pass v. Johnson.

The case weighed whether a city could restrict the rights of homeless people to sleep outside if there were not enough shelter beds to house them all. In Pima County, the most recent point-in-time count — which is run around the nation to count how many people are without shelter at a specific point — counted 2,102 people living  in shelter, transitional housing, or living without shelter on Jan. 23, 2024. A housing inventory report from the Tucson Pima Collaboration to End Homelessness found that there were at least 1,800 full-year available beds for adults.

On June 28, the Supreme Court ruled that cities could in fact arrest and criminally charge unhoused people for sleeping in public, regardless of whether they had anywhere else to go.

The Pima County Attorney Laura Conover and Pima County Supervisors Chair Adelita Grijalva both came out against the decision when it was announced, with a press release saying the ruling “falsely suggests that we can arrest our way out of chronic homelessness, substance use disorders, or mental illness.”

In June, city attorney Mike Rankin told KOLD that he didn’t expect the ruling to have a significant impact on enforcement.

“Tucson has been careful to shape its local laws and enforcement strategies in a way that protects the constitutional rights of its residents while still regulating the use of public property to allow enforcement efforts to preserve and promote public health and safety,” he said in a statement.

In the most recent memo on the proposed ordinance , Thomure said, however, that Grant’s pass gave the city leeway on the wash ordinance. “Ultimately, the Court held that local jurisdictions can lawfully adopt and enforce such ordinances,” he said.

Tucson previously banned camping on public sidewalks , as a way to clear a large downtown homeless encampment and protest, in 2015. A lawsuit by two homeless activists went to the Ninth Circuit, which sided with the city in 2017.

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