Justin Hamilton spends his days as the City of Tucson’s homeless protocol outreach coordinator driving to encampments around town checking in with people experiencing homelessness.
He asks them how they are doing, if they need to make a connection with the Multidisciplinary Outreach Team and offers them a bottle of water.
“When you’re making contact with the encampment, the very first thing you want to ask them is: ‘What can I do for you?’ I mean, you’ve got to meet these people right where they’re at,” he said.
Hamilton, who is a recovering addict and was once homeless himself, lets people know he’s been where they’re at as a way to connect to those who are living unsheltered.
He is now one of several city workers in the Housing & Community Development Department along with community researchers leading Tucson’s Housing First approach, which prioritizes housing before addressing other personal barriers.
Brandi Champion, who is the city’s Housing First program director, said that a community effort is necessary for a Housing First approach to succeed, rather than leaving the issue up to a single agency or governmental body.
She also said that people are quick to blame the City of Tucson for increases in homelessness, but the city and county are not resource-heavy.
“I think with the money that this division gets, we’re being pretty effective compared to the expense of emergency room visits, incarceration and what have you,” Champion said.
Data from Common Sense Institute Arizona shows that Pima County receives $112-139 million of the state's homelessness related spending. The total state spending amounts to about $1 billion.
Arizona has a budget for homelessness-related spending of about $1 billion, said Katie Ratlief, executive director of Common Sense Institute Arizona. While Maricopa County gets $678-807 million from that pool, only about $100 million is allocated for Pima County which continues to suffer the highest rates of unsheltered homelessness, she said.
Common Sense Institute Arizona is a non-partisan group that researches the fiscal effects of state and national policies on the greater economy and individuals.
“We really want to challenge policymakers to think about — you know — Are our policies the most compassionate that they could be?” Ratlief said.
Data from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development shows that 68% of homeless individuals in Pima County are unsheltered. In Maricopa County, 50.9% are unsheltered and in the entire state 53.5% are unsheltered.
Their data shows that nearly 70% of Pima County’s homeless population is unsheltered while that rate remains about 50% across the rest of the state, Ratlief said.
Keith Bentele is a professor and sociologist with the University of Arizona Southwest Institute for Research on Women and has been involved with evaluations on local homelessness services.
He points to the pandemic as one of the reasons why homelessness has spiked in Pima County over the last few years. Within that time, he said, accessible and affordable housing units became crowded while rents increased by about 30-40% and incomes stayed put from 2020-2023.
Data from the Southwest Institute for Research on Women shows that rent prices in Tucson have increased above $1,500 in recent years. In 2014, the average and median costs were under $1,000.
“The volume of resources that our homeless service providers have — all of that funding is very small relative to the volume of people flowing into and remaining homeless,” Bentele said.
Ratlief said the issue began closer to 2017 when the homeless population started to increase and the number of shelter beds continued to decrease over time.
Data from the United State Department of Housing and Urban Development shows a state-wide housing inventory from 2007-2023. In 2023, permanent housing units approached 15,000 while shelter beds fell between 6,000-10,000.
While experts suggest Housing First as the best policy approach for mitigating homelessness, it is not always the end-all-be-all. According to Ratlief, it works if the root cause of a homelessness trend is housing and if the culture of the community allows for an assessment of those root causes if they are not housing issues.
Champion also said that Housing First does not work for everyone, and that “Everybody has a different journey.” Sometimes that means they are working through substance abuse, mental health conditions or barriers with the justice system, she said.
However, Champion said she has seen cases where there are prerequisites to achieve housing.
“This [Housing First] flips it on its head because how can you do any of those things when you don’t have a starting place?” she said.
“People think homelessness is just the guy at the bus stop smoking fentanyl and it is not. Those people up in encampments and experiencing homelessness and in their addiction are my peers … No one is disposable. Every human being brings something to the table,” Champion said.
She added that the city has plans to open affordable housing units soon. In the past, No-Tel Motel was used as a temporary shelter and the Wildcat Inn — which opened in 2022 — helped house people from an encampment on Golf Links Road. Milagro on Oracle is one of the newest complexes opening in Tucson and will serve as a 63-unit senior living apartment building, Champion said.
“It feels like sometimes we’re just going through the motions … Now with Housing First, we’re done with that,” Hamilton said.
He and Champion at the City of Tucson have an end goal in mind that the peers they help will one day become mentors for others who are still experiencing homelessness.
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