Day in and day out, social workers and case managers working to find people housing in Pima County hit an overwhelming reality: homelessness in the region is increasing, funding cliffs mean fewer beds, and the majority of unhoused individuals who request help from service providers are unlikely to see any result.
It’s an unflinching picture of a critical challenge in Pima County and Tucson, laid out in a thorough and data-rich report for the Tucson Pima Collaboration to End Homelessness, a coalition of community and faith-based organizations, homeless service providers and government bodies.
The report, published Jan. 22, also suggests a remedy: concentrating on prevention.
The report says that will require:
- Increased coordination among agencies
- Additional funding for social services like shelter beds and transitional housing, as well as rent and mortgage support
- Non-housing financial assistance
- Tracking new metrics for how people exit and enter homelessness
It was written by two researchers at the University of Arizona’s Southwest Institute for Research on Women, Keith Gunnar Bentele, a sociologist, and Sara Shuman, a public health researcher, who work to understand where homelessness, poverty and public health issues intersect.
“Building, and sufficiently resourcing, a community approach to homelessness prevention has the potential to reduce ongoing overwhelm of our homelessness response system, reduce harm among households who avoid an experience of homelessness, and better position our community to weather future challenges,” the report says.
The report used an approach called systems flow, which emphasizes the flow of people in and out of the homeless services system — which encompasses local governments, nonprofits and other groups that work on the issue.
The report builds on a 2023 gap analysis published by the Tucson Pima collaboration that called for significantly more resources to be put toward homelessness, and estimated the city and county would need thousands more shelter beds and supportive housing units to address the growing need.
In that time, Tucson has debuted new affordable housing developments and is in the midst of establishing a low-barrier emergency shelter that could open this spring.
Still, 2025 dawns on a “bleak picture,” the report says, striking a new tone of urgency.
“We [have] not yet observed any slowing of inflow into homelessness and there is increasing visibility of unsheltered homelessness in our community,” the report says.
Shuman says unhoused people, and service providers, all have a common goal: stable and secure housing.
But amid high housing costs and a range of other structural barriers, including record rental rates, a growing need remains.
“People are doing tons of work to treat, prevent, reduce homelessness, but despite all the resources that are going into it we are not doing enough, we see homelessness increasing,” Shuman said. “There’s just these barriers: there aren’t enough resources to get people housed. The solution to homelessness is getting people housed.”
Here are some key findings:
1️⃣ Homelessness in Pima County and Tucson was dropping before the pandemic, but now it’s going up and shows no signs of slowing.
From 2010 to 2019, the number of people experiencing homelessness in Tucson and Pima County was trending downward, the report said. Then, amid the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number began to substantially increase, mirroring a nationwide trend.
The report paints a stark picture of the jump in homelessness after 2020.
Between 2020 and 2023, the number of single adults experiencing chronic homelessness jumped by 86%, according to Tucson Pima collaboration data.
Between 2021 and 2023, there was a 59% increase in unique households seeking homelessness-related services through an assessment created to establish the needs of clients.
And in reality, the report recognizes, these numbers likely only capture a portion of the homeless population.
“Even our best-available metrics of the prevalence of homelessness do not capture a sizable number of people who are experiencing homelessness (e.g. individuals experiencing unsheltered homelessness who are not seeking services) and do not include people in a wide range of situations that a common-sense understanding of homelessness would likely include (e.g. individuals “couch-surfing”, those staying in hotels or other temporary arrangements),” the report said.
The report quotes a 2023 City of Tucson needs assessment that found only 40% of people experiencing homelessness interviewed could remember ever having completed a housing assessment.
The reasons for the rise in unsheltered communities are multiple, the report says.
The housing landscape is one part of the puzzle. In a less disruptive economic period, some people would leave the rental market to buy housing, but that process slowed during the pandemic, while people lost their jobs or suffered through illness and the death of family members.
“The structural drivers of housing insecurity, including home values, rent prices, and poverty, all remain elevated in Pima County,” the report said.
Broader social struggles seen by many communities in the region also play a part: insufficient access to healthcare, challenges to reentering society after incarceration and the opioid epidemic.
2️⃣ “System overburden:” 72% of people seeking homeless services were not served in any type of housing
The report lays out a painful reality often expressed by unhoused people interviewed by Arizona Luminaria: engagement with homeless services rarely results in access to housing.
“Nothing happened as a result of their engagement with the system,” the report said. “This is a portrait of an overburdened system increasingly struggling to keep pace with rising need.”
That isn’t unique to the Pima County and Tucson region: “a defining feature of homelessness service systems in most communities is a striking mismatch between the volume of need for services and the capacity of systems to meet those needs.”
“Pima County, like much of United States, does not have enough affordable accessible housing,” said Shuman.
In fiscal year 2023, 72% of households that completed an assessment seeking some form of housing assistance were not serviced in any type of housing.
Many of the people seeking services who are homeless are sleeping rough, said Shuman, so they’re not in an emergency shelter. “They’re sleeping outside, they’re sleeping in tunnels,” she said. “This is a really tough time of year to be sleeping rough.”
In total, 7,689 unique adults or heads of households completed a coordinated entry assessment, which localities use to assess the need for housing services, in Fiscal Year 2023.
Of these assessments,
- 28% were served in some type of shelter or housing program
- 7%, or 535, unique households seeking services in Fiscal Year 2023 were successfully enrolled in a rapid rehousing or permanent supportive housing program
The gap between the number of households seeking services and the number served “is critical to understanding systems outcomes and the hard-earned lack of faith that many people experiencing homelessness have in their likelihood of receiving assistance,” the report said. The coalition partners don’t currently track or report that metric.
One reason for that, the report found, is the number of housing units available decreased across all types between 2023 and 2024, due in part to grant funds or other funding programs ending.
Bentele and Shuman also say that, at times, giving residents an honest assessment of the little support homeless services in the region can provide may be the most honest way to move ahead.
“While it is not reassuring to hear that you are very unlikely to receive assistance from the continuum when you are seeking help, and are perhaps in crisis, it is the truth.” the report said.
“Adjusting the information provided when a household is going through coordinated entry to provide a more realistic understanding of their likelihood of being served could reduce some of the widespread feelings of frustration and cynicism about the provision of supports that currently exists among people experiencing homelessness.”
3️⃣ Roughly 16,000 households (or 11% of renters) in Pima County struggled to make rent in 2023.
Of the 16,000 renter households who were not current on their rent in Fiscal Year 2023, a monthly average of 2,580 saw an eviction as “very likely” to occur in the next two months, the report found.
In the same time period, the monthly average of eviction filings was 1,073 while the Tucson and Pima County homeless services received an average of 747 new coordinated entry assessments.
Households who were rent burdened, meaning they pay more than 30% of their household income to housing costs, rose to 55% in Pima County.
“Elevated risk of homelessness is expected to continue to drive elevated rates of inflow into homelessness. Consistent with this expectation, all indicators of housing insecurity in Pima County remain elevated as we enter 2025,” the report said.
Two factors were consistently associated with homelessness: rent prices and the availability of rental units.
Between 2020 and 2023, average rents went up 36% and the proportion of severely housing cost burdened households went up 11% in Tucson.
Since 2022, however, rent prices have largely stabilized, the report said. The local vacancy rate, which measures the general availability of rental housing, has increased steadily since 2021.
The pressure on the rental market is traditionally eased by people buying houses, but that has shifted, the report found. As recently as 2020, 75% of sold Tucson homes were affordable for a family with a median income; by 2023, that was only 38% of homes.
“A major driver of rent increases in recent years has been the demand for a limited supply of rental units by an increasing share of households who in previous years would have exited the rental market as they purchased homes,” the report found.
4️⃣ What can be done?
The funding landscape for state and federal dollars has become more challenging in recent years between a state flat tax that has already caused a city budget hole, and the election of Donald Trump, who campaigned on cutting federal and government funding.
While efforts are being made to increase affordable housing stock, it is a slow-moving process.
The researchers said local authorities should increase resources on homeless prevention, for which the report suggests several approaches, including assistance to pay rent or mortgages so people don’t lose their home, or to pay for car payments so a traffic issue doesn’t keep them from losing their job. “It doesn’t have to just be housing focused,” said Shuman.
Increasing the job quality and training of frontline homeless services staff could minimize turnover, which could give people using services a more positive interaction with the homelessness support system and decrease cynicism.
“High caseworker turnover can create disconnections to services and deeply negative perceived experiences of being abandoned or forgotten for clients,” it said. “In a scenario where provider staff are managing reasonable workloads with appropriate compensation, asks for engagement with continuing education and training opportunities would be more reasonable and possible.”
The report also speaks starkly of the limited resources that the Tucson Pima Collaboration to End Homelessness has access to and must work to maintain, but did say that they could encourage providers to increase their focus on homelessness prevention.
The system could also more intentionally track the revealing but “admittedly less flattering” metrics used in the report, like the proportion of new inflow households seeking services who were served and returns to the system among those who did not exit to a permanent housing destination.
A spokesperson with the city of Tucson did not respond to a request for comment.
While putting forward a critical view, the report said it believed the goals of reducing homelessness are achievable, if prevention initiatives see more investment.
“It’s not like a very hard to manage, rare disease that we don’t have a treatment for,” said Shuman. “Getting people into housing and then providing them the services they need works. There is just very little money in prevention, but there’s lots of evidence that prevention works.”
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