Tucson needs more housing. There are upward of 2,000 people living on the streets and in emergency shelters. At the same time, the city is expected to see nearly 50,000 new residents over the next decade, and will need to produce more than 62,000 housing units to meet housing needs.
Amid those complicated needs, the department of Housing and Community Development is at the forefront of creating a housing safety net for Tucsonans — doing everything from dispersing federal dollars for public housing to buying properties to eventually increase the stock of affordable housing.
For nearly a year and a half, Ann Chanecka has been the director of that department with a wide-reaching goal of finding more housing for residents most likely to fall through the cracks of the housing system.
As homelessness continues to rise and federal cuts loom, Arizona Luminaria spoke to Chanecka about the work the housing department is doing. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What should Tucsonans know about the work done by the housing department?
A: We are the public housing authority for the region, which means we own and operate both public housing and we have other affordable housing units. We own and operate approximately 2,000 units of housing, and administer the Housing Choice Voucher program for the region with about 5,500 vouchers. In total, we serve over 6,600 households that tend not to have other housing options. We have over 40,000 households on our [vouchers] wait list currently.
The city has the Housing First program, and a lot of the staff that work on specific homelessness issues are embedded with housing and community development. We’ve done street outreach for quite a while. We’ve expanded into having emergency shelters. We have housing navigation, we operate permanent supportive housing. It is housing plus services and that’s really important. An important part of our homeless work is helping provide case management and coming up with individualized care plans to really help stabilize people and get them into housing.
Our department also works in what we call thrive zones, which is reinvestment efforts geared around how we support families in the areas that have high rates of poverty.
I might be slightly biased, but I do think the work that we do is really important.
Q: How do you anticipate the Trump administration, as well as the recently passed budget bill, will impact the department?
A: We administer Community Development Block Grant funding, HOME funding, Emergency Solutions Grants funding, and Housing Opportunities for Persons With AIDS, HAP funding. Those funding sources come from HUD [United States Department of Housing and Urban Development] and they are really critical.
We get between $5 and $6 million a year in community development block grant funding. That funding supports shelters, it supports different agencies, food security and different types of homeless services.
We also have HOME funding that helps support the construction of new affordable housing development.
The HUD funding is really critical for a lot of what we do. [Over 90% of funding for the department comes from federal funds.] We know what was in the president’s initial proposed budget, but we don’t have clarity yet on what the HUD funding is going to look like.
Q: Housing is one of the key struggles I hear from communities in Tucson. How did we get here?
A: Tucson is unique. We’ve always traditionally had high rates of poverty, and our housing had been more naturally affordable for quite a long time.
Naturally occurring affordable housing is housing that low-to-moderate income families can afford that doesn’t have subsidies. While public housing is subsidized, naturally occurring affordable housing might be a rental unit the landlord keeps relatively affordable. Today, much of the naturally occurring affordable housing tends to be manufactured housing which is an important part of our housing spectrum.
During the pandemic, what we’ve seen is really a very increased housing market in terms of rental prices skyrocketing, we saw the average home price skyrocket. I think a lot of that is coming off of not enough production from the recession. Simply, we don’t have enough housing to address the need.
We also have too many families paying more than is sustainable for their housing. And then we have too many families that can’t get into affordable housing and some of that results in the homeless numbers we see now. [The total number of people without permanent housing in Tucson increased in 2025, according to the Point in Time count.]
The reality is, we need more units to be able to move folks into to have permanent housing. We know that shelter isn’t permanent housing. It is a good stop in coming in from [the] streets and trying to stabilize people, but at the end of the day, we need more housing.
Q: Can you talk about the city’s non-profit housing arm and the gap that is working to fill?
A: We know one of the most important things we can do to address both the homelessness crisis and the affordable housing crisis is create more units. We need more housing.
I always look at two important documents when I’m thinking about what the solutions are: One is the Tucson Pima Collaboration to End Homelessness gaps analysis, which really lays out what types of facilities are needed to end homelessness in this region. I also look a lot at our housing needs assessment, and how many units of housing are needed to fill the housing affordability challenge that many families are experiencing.
Part of where our department has expanded over the past five years is the El Pueblo Housing Development [a city-run nonprofit]. Mayor and council recognized early in the pandemic how expensive housing was getting. You start looking at the numbers and since the recession, there was not housing production at the rate there needed to be to fill the need.
The city used to do affordable housing development. We had done several projects. And the last project that we had done was the MLK Apartments downtown and that opened up in 2013. So there had really been this gap where the city wasn’t also doing affordable housing development.
We created El Pueblo in part from the housing affordability strategy that the mayor and council asked our department to create. One of the items in that plan was having the city also be part of the solution.
We have opened up our first project this past year: Milagro on Oracle. And we have 1,200 units of housing currently in either construction or pre-development. Amazon Flats is the first phase of a project which will be permanent supportive housing for persons experiencing homelessness. Then we also have Sugar Hill on Stone, another affordable housing complex, which will be for families, that is under construction at this time. And we have a lot more in planning.
We can thank mayor and council over the past few years for the number of properties we’ve purchased for either shelter and or to create affordable housing. It’s pretty spectacular in terms of what goes into the purchase of a property.
Q: If someone in Tucson has a need for housing, either because they’re homeless or they can no longer afford the home they live in, how can they access city services?
A: I would say 311 is the easiest, best source to remember to tell people to go to. There they can really triage and figure out what is the best avenue to direct people.
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