Some Reject Confinement, Crime of Open-Air Shelter

Brad is a little fellow with alert eyes and a shock of red hair. A boyish 19, he lives with a friend and a four-foot boa constrictor in a hovel in an illegal squatters’ camp along the Salt River just south of town. Brad says he is into drugs and witchcraft. But he looks to a fundamentalist preacher for guidance, and he heads off each day in search of a job.

Just five miles away, the nation’s only officially sanctioned outdoor homeless camp was built to accommodate people like Brad who don’t want to live in shelters or single-room-occupancy hotels, the traditional places of refuge for the down and out. But Brad, who says he grew up in orphanages and detention halls, wants no part of an institutional setting, indoors or out. He is not alone.

Many of the estimated 200 people who live in cars, vans, tents and cardboard shacks in the camp along the Salt have tried and rejected the city’s open-air shelter operated by Central Arizona Shelter Services Inc. Some say they left it because of crime there. Others complain that the fenced, overcrowded facility was too confining.

“I’ve got no money, and damn few prospects, but at least I’ve got my freedom out here,” said Jesse Pitts, a 56-year-old stroke victim who prefers living by the river. He writes poetry and soaks daily in the brackish waters of the Salt, insisting that it is good therapy for body and mind.

Squeezed between the river and a pig farm, the squatter settlement in some ways is testimony to the humor and resourcefulness of people making do at the dead end. One couple has jury-rigged a lighted path and hot and cold water lines to a plywood shower stall. Nearby, neighbors have unloaded their furniture into a sort of open-air living room, where wine “cocktails” are downed in lighthearted defiance of the Phoenix Lighthouse Ministries meeting house right next door.

Painted chartreuse, the meeting house itself is an act of defiance, erected by the Revs. Harold Kueneman and Bob Briceland after the owners of the property ordered it to disband three months ago.

“We came out here at Christmastime to witness for Jesus and to make a stand with our homeless brothers and sisters,” Kueneman said.

The illegal camp, and others like it, are a source of consternation to local social workers who don’t know what to do when their own offers of legal shelter are rejected.

“These people are like the Navajo Indians. You could give them the best parks in the world, and they wouldn’t stay there long,” said the proprietor of a Phoenix soup kitchen.

Louisa R. Stark, president of the National Coalition for the Homeless and an anthropology professor at Arizona State University, takes a slightly different view. While she worries about the fate of the river camp, she is impressed by its spirit.

“I go to the shelters and, so often, I see failure in the eyes of the people there,” Stark said. “I go out to that camp by the river, and I see more hope. People there have not given up.”