One of the toughest hurdles that has faced downtown Phoenix for decades is the fact that the city and county governments have consistently used it as the storage center for the metro area's downtrodden. Jails, homeless shelters, and mental health facilities are all clustered downtown. Yes, they've got to be somewhere, but downtown bears a vastly disproportionate burden in housing these uses.
One telling statistic along these lines is that downtown's main zip code is home to the largest number of registered Level 2 and 3 sex offenders in Maricopa County. The 85003 zip code is home to 40 such sex offenders, all of whom live right downtown at Fifth Avenue and Adams next to a police station, but mere blocks from the Orpheum Lofts and 44 Monroe. Compare this to zip codes 85017 (west Phoenix/40 sex offenders), 85040 (south Phoenix/36 sex offenders), 85014 (east Phoenix/15 sex offenders), or of course 85281 (downtown Tempe/14 sex offenders), 85251 (Old Town Scottsdale/6 sex offenders). These are all in raw numbers-- if there were some way to measure these in per-capita terms I'd bet the proportion of sex offenders to total residents in downtown Phoenix would be staggering.
Downtown Phoenix should be a place where all types of people can freely mix. But it can't be overwhelmed by any one type of person-- so if Phoenix is serious about turning its downtown into a world-class (or even "national-class") destination, it needs to stop viewing downtown as the dumping ground for society's troubled.
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As weak as downtown Phoenix is, you think someone (say the local newspaper) might actually question the wisdom of using the city's faded but still grand hotel as a virtual homeless shelter. That would presume, of course, that people actually cared about urbanism as opposed to the various vanities with which movers and shakers enthrall themselves. So we get a Marty Schultz of APS spearheading the placement of a mega-shelter at 12th Avenue and Madison in order that Scottsdale police cruisers know exactly where to dump their surplus human cargo.
Even today, it's virtually impossible to have a sane conversation about the wisdom of placing all of the metropolitan area's troubled souls in the key but equally troubled core. You'll be demonized as a basher or bigot. But the problem here is simply one of telling the truth. A Seattle or Portland will have many more homeless on its streets and not suffer terribly because their downtowns are actually functional. The difference between them and Phoenix needs no elaboration. You understand it the moment you walk their crowded sidewalks.
Phoenix tells itself lots and lots of stories (Marty Schultz thinks downtown Phoenix is "world-class") and the result is a neighborhood so obviously not "world-class" that you'd have to be nearly comatose to overlook the ugly truth. Moreover, The dynamic is still frustrating. For downtown Phoenix to blossom, we'll need to make its mostly deserted streets more begnign than they appear. Once downtown becomes self-sustaining, the homeless and troubled will be much less of an issue. Indeed, they'll be emblematic of a DIVERSE, and hence successful, human community. But at present, they overwhelm the core's still-fragile ecology.
Oh, that's a bit unfair. Lots of cities have homeless downtown, lots of cities have paroled sex offenders. It's not Phoenix's fault any more than any other city. Look at San Francisco - homeless people EVERYWHERE on Market Street, yet that city functions fine. It's just a matter of bringing in more people downtown, that's all, and Phoenix is trying to do that.
These stats are a bit misleading. Most of the offenders in 85003 are at the same address: the old Windsor hotel which serves as a cheap transition hotel for people who've just gotten out of the near-by jail. If you look at the stats for neighboring and fellow-downtown zip code 85004, you see that the number of resident offenders drops dramatically.
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