Phoenix prioritizes housing in 2026 homelessness plan

PHOENIX (CN) — The Phoenix City Council unanimously passed a new plan to address homelessness, focused on new housing and neighborhood safety, as the number of people living unsheltered rises. 

“Housing is going to end homelessness,” Office of Homeless Solutions Director Rachel Milne repeated throughout Tuesday’s council meeting. “Concentrating our efforts on those housing initiatives will help us truly move the needle forward.”

The plan doesn’t offer numbers or set hard deadlines, but in it, the city commits to developing new housing models like master leasing and shared housing for people exiting homelessness and investing in new permanent housing with rental assistance and other support services. 

The plan also includes stabilizing funding for support services for people no longer homeless and advocating for more federal housing vouchers. 

Council member Anna Hernandez, formerly a Democratic state senator, said she would like the council to focus on revising zoning laws that inhibit the construction of affordable housing in some areas.

“I’m a very broken record at this point,” Hernandez said. “Housing is the biggest path to resolving homelessness.”

On the preventative side, the city plans to offer services to people exiting the criminal justice or behavioral health systems and “use predictive analytics and administrative data to identify the most vulnerable households.”

Milne said the city is collaborating with the state’s public universities to identify what data may best predict when families or individuals may need homeless services. 

Since the city launched the Office of Homeless Solutions in 2022, it has created 1,200 new shelter beds and 300 outdoor shelter spaces. Both sheltered and unsheltered homelessness have risen since 2022, though. In January 2025, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development counted 3,514 sheltered and 3,761 unsheltered homeless people living in Phoenix, marking a total 1,237-person increase in three years. 

“We have to sustain the investment we’ve made over the last three, four years,” Milne said. “We have put so much money into this shelter system. We have more than 890 people sheltered because of those investments.”

Unsheltered living dipped slightly in 2023 after a state judge ordered the city to clear a downtown encampment that at times held more than 1,000 people in tents. The city had already begun clearing “the zone,” going block by block, offering services to each of its residents. But it rapidly increased its pace when a lawsuit filed by residents and business owners whose property became part of the encampment resulted in a November 2023 deadline. 

Council members applauded that the plan balances compassion with community safety. The plan aims to streamline enforcement of camping ordinances and establish a dashboard of shelter bed availability to reduce intake and referral time. The city says it will also maintain a low barrier of entry into shelters to reduce the unsheltered population. 

Hernandez urged that the city exhaust all other options before taking enforcement steps. 

“Criminalization keeps our residents in an ugly cycle,” she said. “They end up back on the street, now they could have a mental health issue, a record and no housing. Criminalization does not work as a solution to homelessness.”

Other priorities of the 2026 plan include forging stronger partnerships and coordination with substance use and mental health treatment programs and improving neighborhood outreach and data collection. 

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