Tucson’s homelessness outreach workers spent a decade using a national questionnaire to decide who gets housing resources. This summer they’re using a homegrown one instead that is centered around a new question: who is most likely to die outside?.
That shift to identifying people most at risk of losing their lives while living outside, and prioritizing them for scarce housing resources, is the latest example of the ways that local providers are shifting a broad range of services to address the stakes of extreme heat.
“One of the main issues that we saw in the community is that people were literally dying on the streets while experiencing homelessness and that’s something we really, really wanted to address,” Zach Simmons, a resource navigator at the University of Arizona’s Southwest Institute for Research on Women, told Arizona Luminaria when interviewed for the project in 2025…