By now. You may be familiar with the name Jordan Neely. Protesters in New York City have been chanting his name ever since the young Black man was put in a chokehold and died on a subway train earlier this month. They demanded the man who put Neeley in that chokehold be held accountable. And on Friday, after days of waiting, there was movement.
Manhattan District attorney’s office says they will charge 24 year old Daniel Penny with manslaughter.
Marine veteran Daniel Penny turned himself in to authorities and was arraigned on a charge of second degree manslaughter. Now, his attorneys say Penny risked his own life and safety for the good of his fellow passengers and could not have foreseen Neely’s death. However, a witness said Neeley didn’t hurt anyone and wasn’t armed. And we’ve since learned nearly was experiencing homelessness and mental health issues, shouting at passengers that he was hungry, thirsty and out of money.
If you didn’t have the intention of killing Jordan Neely, I believe that the least he did not have consideration for his life because he was poor, homeless and Black.
And Neely’s death has reignited a conversation about the overall crisis of homelessness in this country. Public intolerance for panhandling and tent cities is helping fuel a debate over safety and poverty in America’s largest cities. And that has advocates for the unhoused asking: does pushing the problem out of view actually solve the problem?
My guest this week is CNN’s Gabe Cohen. He’s going to take us to Phoenix, where a judge’s ruling to clear a huge homeless camp could provide a template for other cities, while leaving hundreds of vulnerable people in limbo. From CNN, this is One Thing. I’m David Rind.
Gabe, you’ve been reporting on the homelessness crisis in America, and I know we hear about it a lot. But can you just put it into perspective? How big of a problem is this?
So, David, it varies city to city, but there’s no doubt that homelessness, the crisis in this country has really exploded in recent years, especially coming out of the pandemic. So many cities right now are facing a housing crisis and more and more people are ending up on the street. Of course, so many of the images we’ve seen with regard to homeless encampments are in cities along the West Coast, cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, which is home to Skid Row, the largest homeless encampment in the country.
And we’ve also seen homelessness become more polarized and politicized. More states are passing laws to ban public camping, really trying to clear it from public view. And so with all of that, in this context, that’s what brought us to Phoenix, a city that is really struggling to deal with the homelessness crisis there. It has now one of the largest homeless encampments in the United States in downtown Phoenix. But it’s about to be cleared out. And so we wanted to get on the ground in Phoenix to see what that looked like.
And so what did you find?
Good morning. How you doin?
So what we found is a massive, sprawling encampment about a mile long. Tents on just about every inch of sidewalk. Nearly a thousand people, right around 900, live in this encampment, which has been called “The Zone” by locals.
Why do you think most people end up here?
It’s different challenges, honestly. You’ll get so many different stories. Nobody’s story is the same.
And it popped up several years ago. But it has grown rapidly in recent years, along with the homeless population in the Phoenix area, Maricopa County. Homelessness there has grown 46% since 2019.
As they are struggling to create enough affordable housing for everyone. And housing prices have just skyrocketed across the Phoenix area, really across Arizona. And so we met so many people on the street and it gave us a much better sense of just how nuanced this issue is.
How long have you been here for?
About a year and just about a year.
And what happened? How’d you end up here?
I lost my husband. My husband passed away. So he was a head of household.
One of them was a woman named Rayann Denny, a 37 year old widow. She lost her husband last year. She said she ended up on the street in a tent because she couldn’t pay the bills by herself. Now she is dealing with addiction.
What would it take to get you out of this place? What do you need?
Really, just a stable, you know. I wouldn’t mind, you know, getting a job. But there’s very little, you know, resources to help me.
She does not want to be in a shelter, but she does want housing. She wants somewhere safe to be. And she acknowledged just how unsafe she feels inside this sprawling encampment. How are you feeling down here?
I don’t want to be here. I came down here to give me an apartment.
We also met a 73-year-old woman named Beatrice. She said her kids left her at The Zone, unable to afford to take care of her. And she is now in a shelter bed right next to this encampment, right inside the Human Services campus. That’s right next door.
You have social Security?
That’s all I got. I only get $800 a month. You can’t afford; you can’t live off of it. What can you do with $800 a month. Some people live off of $800 a week. I’m trying to go back to school, to get my GED, so I can get a job.
She told me that she gets about $800 every month in Social Security, and yet it is not enough to afford rent. And so she feels like her safest option is a shelter bed.
What you won’t hear from a lot of people. There is a feeling that this is a safe space. People acknowledge that there is human waste all over the ground. There is garbage everywhere. There are a lot of police calls to this area. There are fires frequently in this encampment. We watched a tent go up in flames while we were there on the ground. And so there is a lot of concern about safety in this area. And that gets to how local businesses and residents are feeling about this.
Right. What do residents say it’s been like living next to this encampment?
They’re struggling with it. And what we have seen is a massive pushback from business owners and residents who feel like this is a public nuisance and the city is not doing enough to deal with it. And so what we saw in Phoenix is a lawsuit filed by these neighbors of the camp that said that the city has not done enough, has not done its duty to abate the nuisance that is The Zone.
So what are you experiencing day to day? Talk me through. What, what’s happening here?
Oh gosh. Sure, sure. You know, and you never know what you’re going to experience. You know, we start on a monday morning with a knot in our stomach because we don’t know what we’re going to come up to at our business.
So two of the plaintiffs in this lawsuit against the city of Phoenix were Debbie and Joe Faillaci.
So it’s, it’s disgusting. That’s pretty much it. And it’s never ending.
It’s been they run a sandwich shop right near The Zone. They have tents right outside their property. They say they have been dealing with property damage, human waste on their property, people in crisis scaring their customers and their employees now, for years. The way they described it was a sense of lawlessness in this area. And they said they filed this lawsuit because they want to get their neighborhood back.
But then what’s the goal? You want it swept. You want it cleared. Like, what’s the.
Personally, I want it out of here.
We want our neighborhood back. We want to feel safe when we come to work. And we want our employees to feel safe when they come to work. We want our customers to feel safe when they come into our business.
And they won. The judge sided with them in this lawsuit and ordered the city of Phoenix to clear this camp in the next couple of months. It is a very unique situation. As I mentioned, we’ve talked about states that are passing laws to clear encampments. This was different. This was a lawsuit brought by residents and business owners who said enough is enough.
So people just not even waiting for laws. They’re saying this is a nuisance. I feel unsafe, my businesses being harmed. So get this out of here, basically.
Exactly. And so the question is, will more people in other cities say, let me file a very similar lawsuit and see if I can get a judge here to agree and force the city to clear the camp.
So now that a judge has ordered this camp to be cleared, what does that look like? Because you said that the shelter system was under strain in Phoenix. There’s just not really enough beds for these people. So where are these people supposed to go?
Yes. So that’s the question. There is a major shortage. And so the question is, where will these 900 or so people go when they’re cleared out at the peak of Arizona’s brutal summer heat?
We know that the city is saying they are going to go block by block and they’re going to try to offer services and a space for any person that they’re clearing out. But as of now, there just isn’t enough space. So the city says to try to meet that demand. They’re going to lease vacant buildings and hotel rooms as temporary shelters, and they’re going to try to build some sort of sanctioned campground with sanitation, with security, where people can go when they get cleared off the streets.
So it’ll still be outside, but it’ll be under the city’s purview.
Exactly. Exactly. And they’re not the first city to do this, but it is a controversial approach for several reasons. People are concerned with the idea of forcing people experiencing homelessness into a space like that. There are also concerns about who will turn down those services.
Roger Manzanilla
00:10:52
I don’t know if I would or not because I don’t know anybody that’s staying in a shelter right now.
Having spent time in The Zone, there are a lot of people who say they don’t want to go into a shelter.
So I don’t like that type of environment. I’d rather be, you know, how here where I could do, you know, what I do without being told what to do.
They want housing, but they’re not comfortable with the rules and the curfews that go along with a large shelter. And so there is major concern that people aren’t going to all accept these services. And what you’re going to have is a lot of people who are currently living on the street just moving down the road into other neighborhoods where we’re going to see more camps popping up, where they’re going to be more isolated from services, and they’re going to potentially be in more dangerous situations.
Like it’s out of view of the public eye. But the homelessness continues.
Exactly. It’s this concern about invisible homelessness. Advocates are saying this is just going to increase the amount of invisible homelessness in a city like Phoenix, where people are struggling in the shadows, where they can’t be seen. And what that could mean is more people get sick and end up in the emergency room, or perhaps more people even die. More than 700 people experiencing homelessness died in Maricopa County last year. That is a massively troubling number, especially as Phoenix tries to grapple with this problem that’s only growing. Last year, more people became homeless in the city of Phoenix, not less.
Wow. And broadening it out to other cities around the country that are dealing with similar problems. Is there any kind of long term fix here? Because when I listen to what you’re saying and to the conversations you’ve had with people in the zone, the thing that kind of runs through all of this to me is the idea of affordable housing and just the physical spaces that are not affordable to a big chunk of people in these vulnerable situations. So like, how are people grappling with this?
Well, you hit on it there. In short, most advocates will tell you a housing-first approach is the only proven approach to start making a dent in homelessness across this country, that we need to start building more housing now. And unfortunately, it’s been met with a lot of pushback in cities across this country. A lot of people who don’t want affordable housing in their area. And we know that most cities are just not building enough affordable housing right now. But you can’t build your way out of this with shelter beds. If the city does come in and sweep this place in the next couple of months, what does that means for you.
It’ll mean I have nowhere to live.
We spoke with a young woman named Stefanie Powell. She says she hasn’t been able to work in a while because of medical issues dealing with fibromyalgia, dealing with neuropathy, and she’s ended up in a tent inside The Zone.
I can see the emotion in your eyes talking about it. What is that?
Fear, anxiety, worry. I don’t want to wind up having to walk the streets again.
She fears as the city comes to clear the camp that she’s going to end up roaming the streets again as she did when she first ended up homeless. She fears that that’s going to leave her in a far less safe situation.
Just because you clean out an area doesn’t mean that you wipe the problem away. It’s still there.
She feels that this initiative to clear away the camp is not to fix homelessness, not to help people like her, but simply to make them less visible, simply to push them to areas where the problem won’t be seen.
We’re not all strung out on drugs. I know several people who live out in these tents who have jobs, legitimate jobs, but the cost of living is just too high for us.
She told me. Help us find housing. Help us find somewhere where we can stay permanently. We don’t want to live in this situation, but at this point it feels to her like it’s falling on deaf ears.
One thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paolo Ortiz, Eryn Mathewson, and me David Rind. Matt Dempsey is our Production Manager, Faiz Jamil is our Senior Producer. Greg Peppers is our Supervising Producer. And Steve Lickteig is the Executive Producer of CNN Audio. Thanks for listening. And if you’d like what you hear, you can leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts. And we’ll be back next Sunday. Talk to you then.
