Phoenix Key Campus will lose shelter capacity for about 100 people during hottest part of the year

Phoenix’s largest hub for homeless services will lose beds for more than 100 people during the hottest part of the year. Funding is running out to keep an overflow space open on the Keys to Change campus.

Keys to Change is the lead organization on a 13-acre campus in downtown Phoenix where multiple shelters and other homeless service organizations operate. At the start of the pandemic, Keys to Change got funding to open the St. Vincent De Paul dining hall and the Lodestar Day Resource Center as overflow spaces. The two buildings are not meant as shelters, but they have enough room to put about 280 mats on the floor every night to get people inside.

“It’s not ideal,” said Keys to Change CEO Amy Schwabenlender. “This overflow – putting mats on floors of buildings that are used for other purposes during the day – has really been a long-term Band-aid.”

But, with shelters across the Valley at full capacity, the temporary spaces have become especially critical when human services organizations are trying to get people out of extreme summer heat, said St. Vincent De Paul chief program officer Jessica Berg.

“Really, in the summer, it's like number one is keeping people alive,” Berg said.

The number of heat-related deaths in Maricopa County has skyrocketed in the last decade. The steep increase has correlated with warming temperatures and rapid growth of the region’s homeless population. In recent years, people experiencing homelessness have made up the largest share of the county’s heat deaths.

Operating two extra buildings on the Key Campus as overflow shelters costs tens of thousands of dollars per month. Berg said expenses include salaries for case managers and security guards, janitorial costs and utility bills for round-the-clock air conditioning.

Funding to operate the overflow spaces has mostly come from federal pandemic aid, which is beginning to run out. Berg said Phoenix has promised to provide funds from its heat relief budget to pay to keep the St. Vincent De Paul dining hall space open overnight through the summer. The dining hall will stop operating as an overflow space at the beginning of October. But the Lodestar Day Resource Center will stop operating as overflow shelter space on June 1.

Berg said she worries that means more people will have to endure extreme temperatures outside this summer.

“That’s 100 [more] people on the street and we might not be able to save their lives. ‘We’ meaning the whole community,” Berg said. “I think the municipalities are doing a lot. They all have heat-related offices and folks in charge now working together, but it’s just a bigger problem than we all have capacity for right now.”