Andrew Court and Reuters – December 23, 2020
Tent cities are expanding across the United States as experts warn that the ongoing pandemic could lead to a ‘catastrophic’ homeless crisis where hundreds of thousands more Americans are living on the streets.
Officials in Phoenix, Arizona have cleared two large parking lots in the Bender neighborhood to accommodate for the city’s exploding number of homeless people.
More than 7,500 people are without permanent shelter in Phoenix, according to Reuters, who visited the tent city, which is dubbed ‘The Zone’ by some of its inhabitants.
There, hundreds of homeless people are packed together. Many people do not wear masks, and some count a sleeping bag or a tarp as their only worldly possession.
Although the city has posted portable toilets and washing stations along the perimeter of the encampment, health protocols like handwashing are difficult and the risks of contracting COVID-19 is exponentially increased.
Feces and garbage are also littered among the tent city, which is located just a short distance from Phoenix’s ritzy restaurants and luxury apartment buildings.
Phoenix is just one example of a slow-motion disaster unfolding in many large US cities as homeless numbers, already growing in recent years, spike during the global coronavirus pandemic.
In 2019, before the pandemic hit, there were close to 600,000 Americans who were homeless. That number has surely surged in the past twelve months, although experts have been unable to pinpoint the exact number.
Since COVID-19 reached the US in January, however, more than 162,000 evictions have been filed in 27 cities tracked by the Princeton University Eviction Lab.