Pima County and Tucson Leaders Agree to Joint Workgroups to Tackle Homelessness, Fentanyl Crisis

Pima County supervisors and Tucson city council members met jointly on Tuesday, Nov. 18, to lay out coordinated steps addressing unsheltered homelessness, gaps in affordable housing and a sharp rise in opioid and fentanyl harms across the region.

Deputy County Administrator Steve Holmes told the gathering the county has emphasized prevention in housing policy and has prioritized a set of programs to keep people housed and out of jail. "We started...gap funding about three to four years ago where the board wanted us to prioritize $5,000,000 a year" to help close financing gaps for affordable developers, Holmes said. He also described a supervisor proposal to phase in a tax intended to create a fund of about $250,000,000 over 10 years to support housing investments.

Holmes outlined other county investments, including roughly $10,000,000 in a program to help people facing eviction, a Craycroft transitional property the county manages that staff said has about a 91% transition rate into more permanent housing, and pretrial and transition-center reforms. "By standing up the transition center, we've seen [recidivism] reduced to under 10 percent," Holmes said, citing the county's internal outcome data for misdemeanor offenders who…