A Wide-Open Alternative for Homeless

J.R. Murphy was once a Delaware legislator. Hard times left him homeless. But when he drifted into Phoenix, he found a new start--in the country’s only officially sanctioned outdoor camp for the homeless. Rehabilitated in this desert setting, Murphy is now a champion of the project, which has gained nationwide attention.

One night last fall, a man bearing the identification of a former Delaware state legislator drifted into a camp for the homeless here. Depressed and nearly broke, he told a hard-luck story of divorce, bankruptcy, a daughter’s death and a fruitless search for a new life out West.

Today, J. R. Murphy, who served three terms in the Delaware House of Representatives from 1966 to 1972, is back on his feet with a new mission. Murphy, 52, has become a part-time political advocate for homeless people. He testified on their behalf last week before the Arizona Legislature.

Murphy also has become a champion of a novel place, the camp that rehabilitated his spirits and now employs him. It is the only officially sanctioned outdoor homeless camp in the country, according to experts in the field. As such, the camp has become a haven for the most unwanted segment of the homeless population--those who shun more institutional settings and are often blamed for much of the crime that has made homeless people unwelcome in many quarters.

Pitched near the desert on the ragged edge of the city’s south side, the fenced, 3-year-old camp abuts a railroad switching yard, a lumber yard and a cemetery. Despite the utter bleakness of the place, it has become the object of study by city officials from around the country, including Los Angeles, who are trying to figure out what to do with a growing element of homeless people who seem to prefer to live out of doors.

These people are mostly young, seemingly self-sufficient men and women who have taken up residence along city streets, beaches, river banks and vacant lots. In Los Angeles, their Skid Row shantytowns recently have been the target of a series of much publicized sweeps by police and public works crews.

“They are the hardest group for the general public to care about because they appear to be able-bodied, and they do not seem maimed in the sense that they are not visibly mentally ill or hopelessly alcoholic,” said Jill Halverson, director of the Downtown Women’s Center, a Los Angeles residence for homeless women.

“But they are maimed,” Halverson said, “in that they are the laborers, farmhands and factory workers trained for a world that no longer exists, and they lack the know-how or the motivation for retraining.”

They are the homeless who James Wood, chairman of the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, has described in recent speeches as “urban nomads” and who City Councilman Gilbert Lindsay, whose district takes in Skid Row, has referred to as “out and out bums.”

Wood and Lindsay both have talked about setting up a camp for Skid Row’s street people, and Wood, who has visited the outdoor compound in Phoenix, says he thinks the same thing would work in Los Angeles.

“I think it’s a good idea. I think it offers the missing ingredient in the city’s strategy for dealing with the homeless,” Wood said last week. His agency, which is in charge of rehabilitating the city’s downtown, has the delicate task of balancing the needs of local businesses with those of local residents--about 11,000 poor people who live in flophouses, missions and sidewalk encampments.

The Phoenix camp, actually, is just one part of an extensive complex that includes two indoor shelters, a health clinic, counseling and job referral services. The entire operation is run on a yearly budget of about $1 million by Central Arizona Shelter Services Inc., a nonprofit organization that receives most of its money from local government.

The shelter complex, indoors and outdoors, houses about 1,000 people, with close to 600 now camped outside. The outdoor area, which is equipped with bathrooms, was designed for 325 people.

The 3 1/2-acre camp has a Bedouin flavor with its desert horizon and assortment of tents and lean-tos draped with brightly colored blankets and tarpaulins. The air is filled with the acrid smoke of bonfires stoked with broken bits of furniture, plastic food containers and worn out clothes. Around many campsites, household debris runs together with found objects that people have been known to fight each other for.

The camp tends to segregate itself into ethnic groups and cliques, according to the people who run it.

Children are not admitted, but there are more than a few women in the camp, wives and girlfriends living with their men and unattached women who can stay where they like. The sexes are not segregated.

Camp security remains elusive as officials strive for a set of rules that will ensure safety without sacrificing basic liberties. Police patrol the grounds at regular intervals, and there is a small camp security force. Newcomers must register and provide Social Security numbers, which are checked by the police against lists of fugitives.

Arrests are made almost every day, police say. Despite a ban on firearms--there is also one on drugs and alcohol--shootings have occurred. Stories of violence, drunken brawls, drug deals, clubbings and knifings are common.

“There are two ramadas (lean-tos) along the east side where you can buy marijuana most any time,” said Donald Wheeler, manager of the complex.

Last November, a camp resident was charged with the molestation and murder of a 6-year-old neighborhood boy whose body had been found in a nearby abandoned house.

Conditions in the compound have caused many residents to move to desert squatter camps, illegal settlements that local officials had hoped would disappear once Central Arizona Shelter Services set up its own outdoor operation. Instead, the squatter camps have grown larger, with one, near Mesa, now said to contain 300 families.

But the rough side of life at the Phoenix camp has failed to dull J.R. Murphy’s enthusiasm for the place. Murphy said his life has not had such a sense of purpose since he retired from political life 15 years ago. Murphy said his legislative career ended in 1972 when he lost a race for the Delaware Senate.

“I was joyful I could find a place like this,” said Murphy, who added that he came to the camp at the suggestion of a hitchhiker after he had driven west from Denver to Albuquerque to Phoenix in search of a new life.

“There is crime here,” Murphy said. “I’ve seen it. I had my stuff stolen. But this is not a middle-class suburb, and it should not be expected to act like one. It is full of people who have fallen on very bad times who need some kind of haven. And this is a very good one.

“Some of the best counseling in the state of Arizona is here,” he said. “If you need marriage counseling, drug counseling, job counseling, it’s all here.”

Murphy, who still carries a laminated ID card from the Delaware Statehouse, conceded that the first few days in the camp were not easy for someone once used to living in a $100,000 house.

“It took a tremendous adjustment. But people were friendly. An old Spanish guy took me under his wing. He was sort of the majordomo of our ramada, and he wouldn’t tolerate any trouble.”

Murphy said he fully expects to resume a career in business and regain the standard of living he once enjoyed. But for the time being, he said, he is content to live and work at the camp and lobby, as he did recently with Arizona lawmakers, on behalf of the homeless.

Murphy may have his work cut out for him. There is a good chance that his new home will have to move, as the camp’s current location is the city’s first choice for a proposed sports complex. Moreover, a number of homeless advocates are not in favor of reopening the camp, at least not in its present form.

“I don’t think it has been very successful, not in the way it has been put together. It has been so overpopulated and there has been so much violence,” said Louisa R. Stark, the president of the Washington-based National Coalition for the Homeless. Stark lives in Phoenix.

“I wouldn’t recommend setting another one up elsewhere unless you can figure out a better way to screen the inhabitants, to separate the strong from the weak,” Stark said.

With the aid of city officials, a committee has begun looking for a new home for the shelter complex, and for now, at least, plans call for relocating the outdoor camp with the rest of the facilities.

“The total system ought to include an outdoor area, otherwise you are not going to reach an awful lot of people who cannot tolerate the idea of living in an indoor shelter or a flophouse,” said Robert Fenley, the city’s homeless-project coordinator.

In his mid-60s, Fenley speaks from long experience. He has been a social worker most of his working life and, as a boy during the 1930s, lived outdoors in California.

“My family survived the Depression by camping along the Feather River, panning for gold and stealing poultry from the farmers. There is no way you would have gotten us inside somewhere, and I’m sure we were no different than a lot of people out there today.”