A judge in Tucson, Arizona ruled in favor of the City of Tucson on May 2nd, in a public and private nuisance case related to unhoused people camping on city-owned land. The Navajo Wash is a small strip of land owned by the city, but the area is surrounded by the Hedrick Acres neighborhood. Three residents of that neighborhood, including the secretary of the homeowner’s association, brought the suit to court and sought a preliminary injunction to force the city to “abate the nuisance” by clearing the area of unhoused people.
Local civil rights lawyer Paul Gattone, the National Homelessness Law Center, and the Public Justice Debtor’s Prison Project, serving as counsel for two local organizations, Community Care Tucson and Community on Wheels, filed a motion to intervene in December of 2023. Their motion argued that the unhoused people in the Navajo Wash’s interests were not being represented in the suit because of the City of Tucson’s history of dispersing encampments of unhoused people.
The judge, Greg Sakall, denied the plaintiff’s injunction since the campers were not city employees and the city’s actions did not cause or encourage camping in the area. Furthermore, he determined that only two of the three plaintiffs had standing to raise a public nuisance claim. Judge Sakall’s decision referenced the 2022 case, Brown v. City of Phoenix, where the City of Phoenix’s reduction of enforcement, transportation of unhoused people from other areas, and introduction of social services in a downtown area known as “the Zone,” was considered the cause of the public nuisance experienced by residents and businesses in the area.
Public Justice called the decision in Tucson, “an important victory,” saying: “We hope our intervention prevents this emerging legal strategy from spreading. People are not a nuisance, and the solution to crowded encampments is safe housing and hygiene facilities, not unconstitutional sweeps.”
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