Michael Travis was living in a Phoenix apartment with his sister when their rent increased almost 30%. His sister moved out, he couldn’t afford the place on his own, and pretty soon, he faced the extremely stressful experience of living on the street.
“It’s a different day every day, there’s a lot of things going on, you got drugs going on, you got people dying outside,” Travis said.
He tried going to a homeless shelter, but he didn’t feel much safer inside the crowded, chaotic facility.
Then he got a referral to Phoenix’s Safe Outdoor Space — a big lot downtown with a huge shade structure covering about 200 tents pitched on top of artificial turf.
Travis has been there for about seven months now. He likes the privacy of his own tent. He’s allowed to have his dog with him. And he says he likes the arrangement better than living on the street or in a traditional shelter.
“The security [at the Safe Outdoor Space] are more thorough in what they do, and the staff as well,” Travis said.
His case managers are working with him to help him find new housing and a job. He is also working toward a nursing degree — Safe Outdoor Space staff have even helped him find quiet places onsite to do his homework.
“I just did a lab project for my microbiology,” Travis said.
The Safe Outdoor Space has now been open in downtown Phoenix for two years. The Phoenix Office of Homeless Solutions and guests like Travis say the site has been working well. But the future of the site, which was originally planned to be temporary, remains unclear.
The Safe Outdoor Space has all the services that brick-and-mortar shelters have, including 24-hour security and case managers, said Phoenix Office of Homeless Solutions director Rachel Milne.
“Back here, we’ve got all of our restrooms, handwashing stations, showers, laundry,” Milne said, walking through the facility on a recent afternoon. “All of the tents are uniform, we do issue everyone a tent, so everyone’s got the same size tent, they are in designated spaces, so it is very structured.”
And even though guests sleep in tents outside, there is a 12,000 square-foot air conditioned warehouse building in the middle of the lot where they can eat meals or just take a break to escape the elements.
“This is what made this site so attractive to us — in addition to all of the shade out there — having a place where people could come inside in the summer, or the winter, or a monsoon,” Milne said.
Phoenix opened the Safe Outdoor Space in November 2023. In the years preceding its launch, a homeless encampment around downtown’s homeless services hub, Key Campus, had grown so large that nearby businesses and neighbors sued the city. The court ordered the city to disperse the encampment, known as the Zone.
City officials wanted to find shelter for all of the nearly 1,000 people who had camped in the Zone. About 80% of people who outreach workers approached accepted referrals to shelter or treatment.
But Milne said, “we knew pretty quickly that not everyone was going to accept our offer of indoor sites.”
So her office got City Council approval to purchase the 4.2 acre industrial lot on Jackson Street, not far from the Zone, for $5.4 million. The City Council also rezoned the site, which had been a state-owned storage facility, to allow it to be used as an outdoor shelter. The goal was to create another option to offer unsheltered people a safer alternative than staying on the street.
Phoenix’s Safe Outdoor Space is not the first of its kind. A trend toward sanctioned encampments took off during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic as homelessness increased, but tight quarters inside congregate shelters posed a health risk.
“In response, a lot of cities started experimenting with sanctioned encampments,” said Jade Orr, an assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington.
In a 2023 article in the journal Urban Geography, Orr and coauthors compared about 50 similar outdoor sites across the U.S.
Maricopa County was among the places that tried out a sanctioned encampment during the pandemic. That temporary site lasted less than a year and lacked shade and other amenities.
Orr said many sanctioned encampments around the country don’t offer ideal conditions for people living in them.
“They’re situating people kind of on the margins or the outskirts of cities where we shouldn’t be locating people,” Orr said.
Or, if the sites are in more central locations, she said, they can be controversial for other reasons.
“There’s typically a lot of pushback from neighbors having them sited in their neighborhoods or in residential areas,” Orr said.
That was the case when the Safe Outdoor Space was first proposed for downtown Phoenix.
When Phoenix City Council was considering the plan in 2023, community members expressed concern that the city’s downtown neighborhood was shouldering a disproportionate burden in terms of providing homeless services, when the issue of homelessness affects the whole region.
And some community members questioned why the City Council would spend money to house people in tents rather than just investing more in affordable housing. Many raised concerns about Phoenix’s potentially deadly extreme heat.
City Council members acknowledged that tents were not a preferred type of shelter, but characterized the Safe Outdoor Space as a stopgap solution that could be set up quickly as the city worked to follow through on the court order to disperse the Zone.
“One of the most important parts of this plan is that we really do not go into it with the intention of making this something that's long-term; it really does need to be temporary,” then-Vice Mayor Yassamin Ansari said during a September 2023 City Council meeting.
The City Council approved the rezoning plan for the site with the caveat that the Safe Outdoor Space would only operate for three years.
Bill Morlan, who owns an electric supply business in the neighborhood, was one of the community members who asked for the three-year limit. If the experimental site didn’t run smoothly in his neighborhood, he said he wanted assurance from the city that there would be an end date for it. And he hoped after a few years it would no longer be necessary.
“The hope that it would be temporary would be that there would be more shelter beds being built, there would be more indoor shelter beds, there would be more affordable housing,” Morlan said.
Morlan now calls that notion “naive.”
Two years later, homelessness continues to increase in Phoenix. The Maricopa Association of Governments reports for every 10 homeless people finding housing in the county, 19 people are becoming homeless. Shelters across the metro area are full.
Morlan said he still wishes more homeless services would open beyond downtown in other parts of Phoenix, or in neighboring cities. But he said he understands there’s still a need for the Safe Outdoor Space. And he said the site has not been disruptive in his neighborhood. He no longer feels it should be limited to three years.
“It is just so much better than so many other options,” Morlan said. “I would hope to see them continue to fund it at the levels it’s being funded and continue it.”
Funding could be a challenge. Federal pandemic relief dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act that have allowed Phoenix and Maricopa County to make historic investments in homeless services over the past few years will expire in 2026. The Maricopa Association of Governments reports about 1,000 shelter beds were already lost in metro Phoenix in 2024 as a result of expiring federal funds.
The Safe Outdoor Space also doesn’t fit into the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s definitions of “shelter.” In the 2024 Point-in-Time count, an annual survey of homelessness that the federal government uses as a metric in determining some types of grant funding, HUD did not count the site as progress toward reducing the number of people on the street in Phoenix. Rather, it classified more than 200 people in tents at the Safe Outdoor Space as “unsheltered.”
Milne doesn’t see it that way.
“It’s so much better than what people could experience in an outdoor experience that wasn’t this,” Milne said. “This is absolutely going really well, and having this alternative option has been very beneficial.”
More than 2,000 people have come through the Safe Outdoor Space in its first two years. About 30% have gone on to treatment, indoor shelter or housing, Milne said.
“We do have other shelters in our community that have nowhere near as high a rate of success,” Milne said.
Milne said other cities have even visited Phoenix’s Safe Outdoor Space to take inspiration from the site. Tucson last month launched a similar gated camping area.
The question of what will happen to the Safe Outdoor Space after this third year of operation remains — that will be for Phoenix City Council to decide, Milne said.
“It might not look exactly like this a year from now or two years from now,” Milne said. “But we’ve proven that this is a well run program.”
Alex Fuentes, who has been staying at the Safe Outdoor Space for about a month. agrees.
“I’ve been through a lot of shelters, but this is one of the best ones yet,” Fuentes said.
He appreciates the privacy and independence he has in his tent and the case management he has been able to access through the site. He said he not only wants to see the Safe Outdoor Space continue, but also hopes more sites like it will open in the future.
“All shelters should operate like this,” Fuentes said.
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