Tempe residents angry about planned Victory Acres unhoused shelter

Firas Joudeh owns a lot on East Apache Boulevard in Tempe’s working-class Victory Acres neighborhood. He planned to develop the land with a shop and three stories of stacked residential units.

Across the street is a planned development that Joudeh thought would be affordable housing. Instead he was surprised to learn that Tempe has approved the development of a headquarters for the nonprofit Tempe Community Action Agency, which will include a homeless shelter.

Now Joudeh said he’s putting his plans for a shop and apartments on hold.

“We don’t have enough understanding about what the shelter’s going to be,” Joudeh said. “We have to study it and see what we can develop. We might not develop anything.”

Joudeh is one of many Tempe residents upset about the TCAA development, which is called the East Valley Health, Housing and Human Services Center planned for 2425 E. Apache Blvd. The controversy around the project encapsulates a number of issues related Tempe’s efforts to address homelessness.

Residents’ opposition is tinged with NIMBYism — which stands for “not in my backyard." Several say they want to help the unhoused but prefer that a shelter go up somewhere else. They also point out that Tempe doesn’t place these projects in higher-income neighborhoods.

And while residents gripe, advocates for the unhoused stress the importance of the project — especially in Tempe, which has an infamous reputation of criminalizing homelessness.

“If the city of Tempe is taking a proactive step in building a health and human services shelter to address this crisis,” said unhoused advocate Ben Jeffrey, “then the greatest failure would be for the community to reject it, to look down their noses at those in need, and to resist a solution that could change lives.”

Residents upset

TCAA has had a presence in Tempe since 1966. The organization launched its first emergency shelter in 2006. CEO Deborah Arteaga has said the organization serves 35,000 children and adults in Tempe each year.

The new facility will serve as the organization’s new home. In addition to shelter beds, it will include a kitchen, a market-style food pantry, a multipurpose room and a welcome center. In a Jan. 14 press release, TCAA said it has raised the majority of funding needed for the project but that it still needed $6 million. TCAA did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Nonetheless, TCAA will hold a groundbreaking ceremony for the facility in mid-March and expects to complete the new headquarters by May 2026. Other than costs, the development faces no government impediments — Tempe approved a permit to build the shelter on Nov. 12 and denied an appeal over that approval in January.

The green light has rankled residents in Victory Acres. Some say the city didn’t properly seek resident input, holding a little-publicized community meeting three days before the city’s Development Review Commission was set to vote on it. (In a public presentation about the project, Arteaga countered that a community meeting was not required.) One resident — Irene Larios, who owns companies that do construction, landscaping, pool decking and painting — suggested that Tempe Mayor Corey Woods has a conflict of interest. Woods served on TCAA’s board of directors from 2006-12.

Albert Avelar, a local landlord who filed the appeal against the zoning change, said at a city hearing that his tenants were concerned about the unhoused trespassing and stashing belongings on his property. Both in a letter to the city council and in an interview with Phoenix New Times, Larios said unhoused people moved through the area like “zombies.”

Larios said some positives could come from the shelter, and she says she wants the homeless to get help, but she worries it will bring more unhoused to the area. She objects to the idea, raised by TCAA board member Lou Silverman during a Jan. 9 city council meeting, that resident concerns are “fear-based.”

“There’s fear because we’ve seen it. We live it in this neighborhood, you don’t,” Larios said. “It’s not a fear out of nowhere.”

Much of that sounds like the stereotypical resistance to any development meant to aid the unhoused. But one argument residents make has some teeth. They say such a project would never have been approved — or even considered, for that matter — in more affluent parts of the city.

“They wouldn't do this if it were the Lakes, they wouldn’t do this if it were Warner Ranch, they wouldn’t do this to certain areas of Tempe,” said Garnet Markis-Rocos, an artist and Victory Acres resident.

Larios agreed.

“These type of developments take advantage of areas and neighborhoods like this,” she said, “because they don’t have the power to voice, or the money to get lawyers or protest against it.”

Tempe and homelessness

The claim that Tempe saddles lower-income areas with affordable housing and homeless shelters while leaving tonier areas alone does hold merit, said Elizabeth Venable, the cofounder of the homeless advocacy organization Fund for Empowerment. Neighborhoods like Victory Acres do feel a “disproportionate burden,” she said.

But Venable and Jeffrey don’t think that’s a reason to reject the TCAA project. Tempe has a terrible reputation for addressing homelessness, they note, adding that any forward momentum should be welcomed.

Jeffrey provides input on homelessness to the Maricopa Association of Governments through the Lived Experience Collaborative. From 2018-20, he was unhoused, living in the large encampment that sprung up in the Salt River Bottom and struggling with substance abuse. As a military veteran, he eventually got help through the Veteran’s Court and the Veterans Administration.

Tempe “is notorious for criminalizing homelessness,” Jeffrey said. The homelessness crisis has myriad, entangled roots, but Jeffrey said Tempe has often made the problem worse. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that cities could enforce bans against public camping — and after Arizona voters approved Proposition 312, which allows property owners to sue for property tax refunds if cities don’t enforce public nuisance laws — Tempe announced it would more strictly enforce its own campaign bans.

“It is a systemic issue rooted in long-term policy failures, economic trends, and legal shifts that have made homelessness more pervasive and difficult to address,” Jeffrey said. “Rather than implementing proactive solutions, the response has been a stick-without-a-carrot approach — one that punishes poverty without providing meaningful pathways out of it.”

The kind of community pushback the TCAA development now faces isn't new to advocates such as Jeffrey. He would tell concerned residents to consider the greater good. Solutions to homelessness have to come from everywhere, and for once, Tempe is doing something positive to address the situation.

Residents can be a part of the problem or a part of the solution.

“The citizens of Tempe have a choice,” Jeffrey said. “They can embrace real solutions and help end homelessness, or they can reject progress, allowing suffering to persist while their city remains complicit in the very crisis it claims to solve.”