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I spent the summer at a shelter for the unhoused. The Supreme Court has it all wrong.
About five days into my summer internship, a woman came in and asked for a blanket. I’ll call her Diane. That’s not the name I knew her by — I’m not sure if the name I knew her by was her real name either. She was a Black woman about my grandmother’s age, tiny and fragile-boned with an entirely toothless smile. By then I knew the answer I was supposed to give: “I’m sorry, Ma’am, we only give blankets out at 6:30 p.m. when we close the front gate after dinner, I’ll get you one then.” I tried to give it, too, but she just nodded and laughed her delicate laugh.
“Honey, I have an apartment 45 minutes away and I have to be back there by six, but I don’t have anything to put on the bed. It can really be any blanket. You can get it whenever you can, I know you’re working hard. I’m sorry to be a bother. Take care, baby.”
I contemplated. It wasn’t busy. She was so kind, so small, so patient. Although I liked the majority of our clientele well enough, my first week on the job had been ragged and bloody. The rougher edges of life on the streets were unfamiliar to me — the rhythm of overdoses, meltdowns and harassment that I would soon become accustomed to were still cutting deep. It had been a challenging morning, but Diane wasn’t screaming at me or asking me out or smoking fentanyl in the parking lot. She was acknowledging that I was working hard, even when she had every reason to be angry at the cruelty of her situation. And she called me baby. I got deodorant for a man who had asked earlier and got a blanket for Diane, sneaking it into a plastic bag to keep it hidden from inspecting eyes. She thanked me over and over.
I found out at dinner that night that Diane did indeed have an apartment and probably did not need that blanket. I had not been the first one to fall for her whims — she was well known for coaxing attention and spare items out of workers with her elderly charm. Although she was reportedly staying away more often now, she had hung around the encampment areas for months after becoming housed, coming up with new needs just to have an excuse to return. Everyone loved her. Everyone told me to be careful about giving her anything else. Why would someone who was no longer homeless voluntarily spend time in a place as dangerous, congested and traumatizing as the Zone, and why did she stop hanging out once it disappeared?
The Zone had been the nexus of Phoenix’s homelessness crisis. Home to nearly 1,000 people at its peak, it had consumed entire blocks with tents and trash. Three other Notre Dame students and I had been told about it as soon as we were assigned to work at Andre House through the NDBridge program. We were told that the institution had been placed squarely in the area so that it could provide necessities to people when they needed them most. I say that Andre House was not moved to the Zone, the Zone moved to Andre House. In 2023, the city had ordered a complete clearance of the tents and banned people from sleeping there ever again.
We understood instantly upon arrival that that narrow week of street cleaning in November had divided these blocks into a before and an after, and we were living in the after. The loss was palpable. I felt it when the police cruised down the block once every few weeks, lights flashing and radios blaring, and suddenly enforced the new rule — as far as any of us could tell, the new rule was just that it was illegal to sit by the street if you looked like you might be homeless. I felt it when the guests collected on the avenue would respond to the officers’ microphoned demands by standing up and wearily rising, off to go wander the city in the dark while trying not to die of heat stroke or dehydration, and I felt it again the next morning when we found out who we had lost. I felt it most profoundly when I was driving. We would be 20, 30, 45 minutes away from the Zone and see someone we knew trudging in the heat, their belongings on their back and their head often too in the clouds to check before crossing the street. When I got off the highway in outer Scottsdale, one of our guests was standing in front of our car.
The pools and palm trees try to make you forget it, but the greater Phoenix area — the Valley of the Sun — is uninhabitable in its natural state. In early July, it’s outright deadly. The result of this is that no one walks around the city at all unless it is their only option. And with the new Zone regulations in place, the homeless were forced to be on constant move. It’s an eerie energy for such a populated city to have — new homes, new apartment buildings, new restaurants and bars, and streets wandered only by stragglers in torn clothing and ratty shoes.
“It looks post-apocalyptic. Like the world already ended, you know?” one of my podmates mused once. For the people left out there, maybe it had.
The claim behind the dissolution of the Zone was that it was a public nuisance, harmful to businesses and residents. After working at Andre House, those words seemed like a cruel generalization. Were the people on the street in the Zone not residents too? Yet even if one does accept the official narrative — and I will concede that I would not want every person that I met at Andre House to be living outside my house — it was obvious by July that getting rid of the Zone had only expanded the nuisance to the entire city. They had provided hotel rooms for the unhoused, but the rooms were temporary, bare and scattered throughout the entire metro area. People found themselves alone in Mesa motels and then found themselves alone on Mesa sidewalks when their four months of allotted time were over. What had once been a few crammed blocks of destitution and tragedy had transformed into something that defined the city. I went to a concert on one of my nights off and saw one of my most regular guests begging for change by the gate after it was over.
On June 28, four weeks into our time at Andre House, the Supreme Court ruled on a small Oregon town’s anti-camping policy. They confirmed that the law was constitutional and enforceable, setting formal legal precedent that it was permissible to ban people from sleeping in public and tear down encampment zones. The case ratified Phoenix’s decision. Maricopa County had paved the way towards mass criminalization of homelessness. The Zone was gone forever — and now the other zones of America would go with it.
When I first heard about the Supreme Court ruling, I didn’t think about the consequences that would be felt in other cities and other states. I didn’t think about how it would disperse even more people, how it would cause our guests fear, how it would assure that the police kept cruising down our block with the lights on. I didn’t think about how it would feed the cycle of incarceration and trauma or about how sending people to prison would only make it less likely that they would escape homelessness. I didn’t even think about how it would kill people, about how they would die of heatstroke or dehydration or opiods or suicide, about how the desert cemetery out by the highway where they buried the unclaimed bodies was now only guaranteed to grow in size.
Instead, I thought about Diane. I remembered something a worker had said about her once, that her apartment was way out of the city in Gilbert and that she didn’t know anyone there. She must have been lonely. A roof over her head couldn’t bring her connection or belonging; the Zone, with its hustle and bustle and humanity, could. The guests there cared about each other. They offered each other food, water, fentanyl fixes. It was bad for Phoenix and bad for women. It was dirty. It was a hotspot for rape and murder and overdoses, a place that should not exist in a country so wealthy, an emblem of America’s greatest sins and shames. Yet even with its worst horrors, it was a place where people lived in community. Diane had come back there time and time again because it was, in some sense, her true home.
Now her home is gone. It’s been reduced to a few old-timers hanging on the side of the street, cigarette butts, a pink sky, 500 meal tickets. I don’t want to romanticize something as ugly as life in the Zone, but every unhoused person I met spoke about the street clearing as a tremendous tragedy. The dirt and danger of the tent city are still ever-present — it’s the solidarity that’s gone.
Diane got lucky. She has four walls around her at night. For the rest, there’s nowhere left to go.