^ I Support Local Community Journalism Support the independent voice of Phoenix and help keep the future of the New Times clear. The city of Phoenix spent $ 309,000 on federal COVID-19 relief funds to install hundreds of metal posts and thousands of foot chains, and more installments will follow to push homeless people onto fenced property this past spring. The chains are lined up between the hips – tall posts that encircle the unpaved areas between the sidewalk and the street in the blocks around the Human Services Campus. The residents of the area call them “the easements”. Previously lined with tents, the easements in the area bounded from 8th and 15th Avenues and Jackson to Jefferson Streets were now empty after city officials and police evicted the people who lived there and erected the chain posts and 13,600 feet of chain. Despite complaints from tent residents, service providers and neighbors, the city is lining more blocks in the area with the glowing barriers this week. The issues were discovered by an Arizona State University landscape architecture class who had a plan to increase the greenery and trees in the area. Faculty member Lora Martens said there are a lot of rumors going around the chains, so one of her graduate students, Kevin Scholfield, decided to file a public record application. Martens said she was surprised by the records they received – not how much it cost to install this volume of structures, but that the city would undertake such a large and expensive undertaking without doing anything. These chains installed in parking strips around the Human Services Campus are an example that proponents have pointed out as hostile treatment of homelessness in Phoenix. Erasmus Baxter “When you go down there it’s shocking,” she said. “It’s blocks and blocks and blocks.” While Maricopa County has claimed that the parking lots are optional for the campers, Phoenix Police initially told some that they would need to move to the parking lots. The city now admits that part of the chain plan was to get people onto the lots. Two spokesmen for the city administration’s office defended the move as a way to prevent COVID-19 from spreading among groups of vulnerable people, “said Shelly Jamison, communications director for the office of the company She went on to say that moving people to the properties was a way to ensure they were all in one place to access services, and that campsites were unsafe because they were next to the road, but many people left Ash Uss, advocacy and partnerships coordinator at André House, an off-campus homeless service provider, spent some time trying to figure out where people camping on the easements ended up after they were evicted, but gave up when she realized the task required more resources than she had, “I’ve got it he just hasn’t seen it since this happened, “she said. Before the eviction, about 400 people camped on the easements, and the county lots only had room for about 200 people when it opened, she said. Some people didn’t leave because they didn’t want to be trapped in a fenced lot and many didn’t want to cope with the extreme heat on the unprotected lots.The heat relief was great, it was a 15 minute shuttle ride from the service providers and many did not use it. Before the chains went off, field workers could easily find people camped near the André house by simply stepping outside, but you’ve now lost track of the people they worked with as many have disappeared from the radar or scattered across the city, said Uss. Someone she knows has moved from the area near the Human Services campus to a warehouse in the middle of the Garfield neighborhood, where there is shade. “The CDC was as clear as possible that we shouldn’t break the camps now,” she said. A newscaster walks past the tents of the people who lived on the easements before the city evicted them. Courtesy of Joel Coplin Since March, well before the city dispersed the people who lived on the easements, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had declared that unapproved camps should not be dispersed, unless appropriately, physically remote shelter is available. The CDC fears the exact situation that Uss is describing: people are spreading among the population and potentially carrying COVID-19 while being separated from field workers who can provide toiletries and instructions. While the city’s vision of centralizing people on the lots to provide them with services fits, city spokesmen didn’t have good responses to the resulting distraction with CDC goals. Nor were they sure where the idea for the chains and guards actually came from. Angela Ojile, leader of the Madison Pioneers Coalition, a group of neighbors and business owners in the area, said the posts came as surprising to her as to anyone else. “We would never have been okay [with the posts] because they look so horrible, “she said. Ojile said she thought the posts” saved lives “by moving people out of easements where their group says dangerous activities were going on, but their group wanted to find something nicer and She said it was a classic example of the city not communicating, with Jamison, the city spokesman, speculating the idea may have sprung from one of the many meetings between department heads trying to figure out how to get on Best of all is the $ 293 million CARES Act funding the city received. Back then there was great uncertainty about how COVID-19 worked, so they tried a lot of different things. The contributions were “things we do.” to the best of our knowledge, “they at the same time the first round of posts was being installed, the city installed gates in two alleys in the Ge and tried to pay them with CARES Act money, the Phoenix New Times previously reported Gates for an Alley in Phoenix May Be Refunded by federal coronavirus aid money. Erasmus Baxter The chains were fired by Phoenix Councilor Carlos Garcia, who asked the city attorney back in June to look into the legality of the project. Councilor Michael Nowakowski (who represents District 7, where the Human Services Campus is located) has endorsed the project, but three of the four candidates to replace him after he left office in April have expressed skepticism about the project informed the second phase of the project, which was discussed about a month ago. Martens, the landscape architect, said there were better ways to design the use of the site. Her students were looking for plantings and drainage that would increase the quality of life in the area while preventing long-term camping. What this does not address is the need for more homeless shelters. Keep Phoenix New Times Free … Since we started Phoenix New Times, it has been defined as the free, independent voice of Phoenix, and we want it to stay that way. We offer our readers free access to concise coverage of local news, food and culture. We produce stories on everything from political scandals to the hottest new bands, with bold reporting, stylish writing, and staff who have won everything from the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Feature Writing Award to the Casey Medal for meritorious journalism. But with the existence of local journalism under siege and the setbacks in advertising revenues having a bigger impact, it is now more important than ever for us to raise funds to fund our local journalism. You can help by joining our “I Support” membership program which allows us to continue to cover Phoenix without paywalls. Erasmus Baxter is a writer for Phoenix New Times.
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