The following is an AZPM original production.

From the radio studios of AZPM, welcome to the latest edition of The Press Room.

I'm Steve Goldstein.

Coming up, election day is less than a week away.

What are the key issues dividing Tucson City Council candidates?

Plus, Southern Arizona's mobile home residents are facing dramatic challenges, including a rapid eviction process.

We'll preview a new investigative series to learn more.

A group of journalists joins me to discuss those stories and more next on The Press Room.

(upbeat music) Welcome to The Press Room.

I'm Steve Goldstein.

Joining me on this edition of the program are Caitlin Schmidt of the Tucson Spotlight and Jim Nintzel of the Tucson Sentinel.

Welcome guys, thank you for being here.

And stay tuned because later we'll dig into an investigative series on mobile homes in Southern Arizona.

So Caitlin, Kris Mayes likes to sue the Trump administration.

I mean, she probably doesn't like to, but it's part of her job and she does it.

And we found out this week that because SNAP benefits are likely going to go away, unless this government shutdown is magically solved or something else happens, so Kris Mayes joined 22 other attorneys general in taking action.

What's she trying to do here, basically?

I mean, she's trying to get them to free up money that has been allocated for SNAP benefits in a situation like this.

Basically asking them to do their jobs.

It remains to be seen if this will work, but if it doesn't work, I think the impact on the community or the state is gonna be dire.

I mean, these are resources that are already being stretched really, really thin.

Then they became thinner with the federal shutdown and people not getting paid.

And now we're about to take SNAP benefits away from hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children in the States.

So this is maybe the last course of action.

Kris Mayes had said also that she was afraid that many people in the community just didn't know how many people get SNAP benefits.

It's about 900,000 people in the state, which is a really striking number.

It is, and a huge percentage of them are children.

And some of our most vulnerable citizens, obviously.

So I mean, I think if nothing else, it was a good point of education to let people know how widespread the impact of this is gonna be, but as this federal government has shown, she sued them a handful of times now and haven't seen a whole lot of actions.

So I don't know if this will work.

When we think about 900,000 people, Jim, this is just the smallest drop in the bucket, but Governor Hobbs found a little bit of money, apparently a little over a million dollars.

How do you see this whole situation playing out for Southern Arizona specifically?

Well, that's not very much to go around.

You speak to folks at the food bank, they've seen a tremendous amount of demand, of folks who are turning to them.

That's only going to increase if the SNAP benefits go away.

And I think this is just another example of how dysfunctional the government has become and how challenging it is to get by when you're living at the poverty level or just above the poverty level and struggling to put food on the table.

Caitlin, this is a very unfair question, but we've all covered news and politicians and elected officials for a really long time.

In a partisan world that we're in, even more so than probably we've ever seen, I would think, and members of Congress not coming back, we've seen what Speaker Mike Johnson has not acted on Adelita Grijalva yet, the representative elect, what are possibilities of actually making them act?

Is it all political or is it going to be people are suffering?

Yeah, I mean, this is scary stuff quite honestly.

I feel like it's gonna take something quite catastrophic to get them to act.

And I don't know what that's gonna look like, right?

We already have situations with mass shootings, with people dying on the streets, with people starving, and that's not spurred action in certain areas.

So I don't know what that's gonna look like, but I think this situation and this extreme level of dysfunction, I mean, we should all be talking with everyone we know about how important it is to vote in every single election, because even the small ones factor up to this.

The judges that we elect at our county levels are now the federal judges that are ruling on some of these critical issues.

So you've gotta start small.

And if we elect the right people, if we elect people who care for our best interests, we might not find ourselves in a situation like this, again, in two more years, four more years, six more years.

Yeah, and Jim, as we're taping right now, this is about a month since shutdown's been going on.

What do you think moves people to action?

Is there anything that comes to mind?

Well, you know, it's gonna be very interesting to see what next year's election looks like, because I think there's some concern that we may not have an election next year or that if the results are not what certain people like, they may get thrown out.

But I would imagine what we're seeing now in terms of some of the activities of the ICE folks in certain communities is going to lead to some people thinking through how they are voting and thinking that it is more important to get out and vote.

But we have an election next week in Tucson, and those turnouts have traditionally been very low, and we'll see, I guess that'll be something of a bellwether.

We'll dig in more on that in a second.

Adelita Grijalva, any anticipation?

There's gonna be any movement on this until the shutdown was over?

I mean, they've given us no reason to believe that, right?

And now she set a record, which is great for the longest representative-elect to not be sworn in.

So, no, I mean, they've dug their feet in really deep, both sides here.

And I feel like we're critical of speaker Mike Johnson to some extent just every week on this program, not intentionally, I mean, he's the one who's not taking action.

He had some quote and it's not verbatim, but something along the lines of, well, Adelita Grijalva doesn't really know how things work in Congress, so she, I mean, wasn't her dad in Congress for a while?

She made some trips back there, right?

I think she is not as unfamiliar with the workings.

It's a pretty dismissive comment for the speaker to make, especially since one of the things that's not working is a staff in Congressional District Seven that could respond to congressional, or respond to constituent complaints because she has not been sworn in.

So she cannot start hiring people to take care of things.

Yeah, all right, let's move to that aforementioned election.

Tucson City Council races a couple that we're gonna focus on in this conversation.

Jim, you wrote about some of this.

One of the issues I wanna get to is specifically transit, then we'll move to public safety a little bit.

But transit is a massive issue and there's that Venn diagram where it crosses over with public safety.

What are you hearing from the candidates as far as their emphasis on transit as far as whether free fares will continue or should continue?

You have two races up for grabs in Ward Six and Ward Three.

The Democrats in both those races wanna keep the fares free on the buses and potentially invest more money into the buses.

Miranda Schubert in particular is a huge champion of public transit.

The costs of transit in this city have really climbed significantly and the portion of it that's coming out of the general fund in particular has gone from about 45 million before the pandemic to about 70 million this year.

So the cost of that, they say that fares could bring in about $9 million, which would offset that.

But then there's the cost of collecting the fares and whether that would depress ridership and all the rest of that to be considered in all of that.

But I think the fundamentals in this town because Democrats outnumber Republicans on a two-to-one basis and because I think Democrats at this point would crawl across broken glass to vote for a candidate because they're so angry with the Trump administration, the Republicans are really moving against a serious headwind.

They're underfunded.

They are having trouble, I think, getting a message out and I don't think it's gonna be a good night for them come Tuesday.

Caitlin, just for the sake of argument, there is the Trump administration, there is the MAGA group, which I would think most people, majority, certainly a great majority of people in this area in Tucson and Southern Arizona are thinking, okay, I don't wanna support folks like that.

But because there's also some frustration with how the council is acting and what the council is accomplishing, at least among some, is there any chance of moving the needle not to elect a MAGA Republican?

But is there any chance for a surprise, at least not as someone winning, but making some more inroads that might give some of the Democratic candidates pause and think, oh, well, maybe I should be taking a slightly more centrist view on this particular issue, whatever it may be.

I mean, anything can happen and if it was going to happen, the Ward Six race is probably where we would see it happen because the Republican that we have on the ballot has been very upfront about he only ran as a Republican because he knew that the Democratic primary would be packed and he wouldn't make it that way.

So his slogan is politics over party or politics not party or something.

So he's been really open that he has not aligned himself with a Republican.

He did this as a strategic move.

He seems pretty middle of the line but he does still share some Republican beliefs and tendencies.

And honestly, I mean, I think at this point, Miranda Schubert is almost running as the incumbent because she has name recognition from when she ran four years ago.

So voters in Ward Six remember her, but I will be surprised if we see a Republican elected that just isn't how we do things in the Tucson City Council.

But I mean, shouldn't we have both parties represented in our organization so that at least the voices of community members are heard?

I mean, it's tough to say.

Yeah, I wanna stay with Miranda Schubert, just for a sec because there was a piece in the Spotlight profiling her.

I'm sort of having fun with this, but in the story said that she wants staffing levels as far as police are concerned that are appropriate in response, that's fine.

I wanna get into that a little bit.

But she also said that the reason she ran for office in the first place is, quote, "I started watching City Council meetings "and I was hooked," end quote.

So do we have to wonder about her mindset on that?

Like she was watching Council meetings and then she wanted to actually get involved?

Being a little sarcastic.

Right, I mean, in a perfect world isn't that what we want to happen here, right?

Yeah, I mean, and she started watching Council meetings during a critical time during the pandemic, which for journalists here, I think is when Council and Supervisors meetings became much more interesting back then when I was covering them and it was potholes and property taxes and sewer rates, which it still is, but it's also literal life and death issues every week.

So it got exciting.

And I think it's definitely, we've seen some new blood because of these.

So Jim, Mayor Romero came up, put out the concept of Safe City recently.

Is that something that is gonna be more of a discussion, at least in people's heads as far as maybe not how they vote coming up for the Council races, but their approach to it with public safety, is that more in the mindset of most, I don't wanna use the term zeitgeist, but I will, is it in the zeitgeist more here in Tucson, people are thinking about that, even if they still wanna vote Democratic?

I think so.

And we should say, like Adelita Grijalva outperformed her father in this last congressional race.

So I think Democrats, as an example, are outperforming what you would expect from them.

So I do think they're gonna do well, but Regina Romero definitely is talking about how there is a frustration out there in the community regarding crime, regarding homelessness, and regarding opioid addiction, particularly fentanyl.

And these things all interconnect.

Not everybody who's homeless is on drugs, not everybody on drugs is homeless.

Not everybody who is causing crimes are homeless or on drugs, but there is a lot of crossover in this area.

And it's a problem that is happening not only in Tucson, but across the country, but Tucson is where they can act.

But some of what they're doing is saying, well, it's not our job to deal with the mental health issues, that's the county's job, and the state needs to do more.

And that's not something that's gonna help in the short term in terms of this, but they were out with the police yesterday, Wednesday, doing kind of a roundup and helping people get their warrants quashed, offering people services, busting up some homeless camps, rolling up on bus stops, things like that, to show that they are trying to do something about this problem, but it's so difficult to handle because the cost of housing is crazy in this community compared to where it was 10, 20 years ago.

And it's just very, very difficult to solve these problems.

I need a very brief answer on this, Caitlin.

Do you think that even if the Democrats win by 30, 40 points, those on the council will still be committed to looking into public safety issues?

Oh, absolutely, yeah.

I mean, I think that that killing on The Loop that we've discussed several times really shook the community.

That was brazen, absolutely, and a crowd of hundred people.

So yeah, I think people are scared.

They have to take some action.

I got about 10 seconds for you, Jim.

Dylan Smith who's been on this program was honored this week.

He was, he earned a Civic Champion Award from a group called the Arizona Democracy Resilience Network for his work with the Sentinel.

He's been doing this for 16 years.

I think it's so important.

Organizations like Caitlin's, like the Sentinel, like the Arizona Luminaria that's on this program regularly are doing a whole lot to fill in the spaces that our mainstream media is failing us on.

Jim Nintzel, Tucson Sentinel.

Caitlin Smith, Tucson Spotlight.

Thank you guys as always for being here.

Stay tuned for more of the press room coming up.

We'll dig into mobile homes and how they're affecting people in Southern Arizona.

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Welcome back to The Press Room.

I'm Steve Goldstein.

Affordable housing is a challenge the entire country is dealing with.

New homes and apartments are rarely, if ever, built with lower income residents in mind.

People in Pima County mobile home communities may technically be living in much less expensive accommodations, but those residents are also forced to deal with other challenges, including price gouging on utilities and an extremely rapid eviction process.

AZPM has teamed up with AZ Luminaria for a four-part series called Mobile Homes: The Last Affordable Housing?

(dramatic music) Over-billing of electricity and master meter parks is appalling.

Total opportunity for landlords to take advantage of tenants, and they're doing that.

Each time we'd get A new manager, the rent would go up.

In 15 days, we're gonna evict you, and in 30 days, you'll be outta here.

We're burning up over here.

It's hot.

The most vulnerable residents in Tucson are those people that live in manufactured homes.

There were no requirements for them to have any insulation.

The walls were very thin, they were made of aluminum.

The people that are getting evicted have no choice but to go back home to their children or they're homeless.

This is the last affordable housing.

There is no place that's cheaper than this.

And it clearly is something that is an existential threat and problem for Pima County.

With me to talk about the series are Yana Kunichoff of AZ Luminaria, John DeSoto of AZPM's Arizona Illustrated, and Raye Winch of Poder Casas Móviles.

Thank you all for being here tod Yana, this is a really ambitious project.

So talk with me a little bit about how this partnership got started.

Had you been working on a piece and then you and John partnered on it, give us some background.

Yeah, I started getting interested in manufactured housing in Pima County and the experience of residents about a year ago, last summer when I started reporting about extreme heat and just trying to understand like, how are people living in the summer in Tucson and what kind of what levers could make their lives better.

And I stumbled upon a situation in a manufactured home community where someone died following an 11 day electricity outage.

And through that reporting kind of saw these systemic questions about upkeep of this park.

And also saw a lot of organizing happening around this issue.

And it became an area that I was really interested in covering to try to understand this bigger question of like, what makes our region livable and for who.

And there was so much organizing happening around it that I was like, wait, this would be great to be doing a film or a document series about.

And that's when I brought John and folks in.

Okay, so John, before we get into more details about what the project is about, I'm curious when you're talking with someone who's, you've done this before, you've worked with AZ Luminaria before, how does that process itself when you're talking about a written product, a long series, and we know that if there's a big writing project, you have a little bit more wiggle room, even in public broadcasting, you're still talking about a seven or eight minute segment as opposed to what may be five, 10,000 word piece.

How do you work that together to figure out with Yana what actually works for these different segments?

That's a good question.

There's definitely a lot of elements to this whole story.

And through Yana's reporting, really being able to say, okay, let's cast a wide net in terms of scheduling interviews and finding people and those threads and sort of just determining what comes to the surface from there, just as an addition to the reporting that she had already done.

And so then being able to just find those themes that would come up, find those characters that would sort of make the storylines.

And I think the example that she gave of the gentleman who had passed away from not having electricity in his mobile home was sort of that inciting incident for me.

So being able to find those threads that we could pull on and sort of make this come together.

Raye, let me bring you into the conversation.

When Yana mentioned organizing, I would put you into that general category.

I hope that's okay to say as far as organizing goes.

So what Yana was witnessing there, what is the organizing like?

How many obstacles are you up against?

How many people are you helping?

A lot of questions there, but can you?

Yeah, so in the park where Yana mentioned, we had been organizing already in that park.

And this was around a year ago, and in that park of having seen the issues with the utilities not being on, the power went out for 30 seconds, but in that park it went out for 11 days.

And that's one of the major issues that we're seeing.

We're organizing in another park now where the electricity went out around 20 times over the summer.

And people have their infants, their newborn babies in the bathtub or going to their car and turning the air conditioning on.

So the organizing has looked like a lot of door-to-door outreach.

And of residents standing up, because there are times when others will support that too, but places like the attorney general only steps in when residents are the ones speaking out.

Yana, does it feel like this is an underreported story?

Because I had a chance to watch one part.

And it's easy to say, but it's heartbreaking.

And you watch these things and what Raye just cited there.

Is that part of the motivation, not to necessarily tell people what to do, but to let people know that this is happening under your noses, that maybe you have challenges in your life, but these may be that much more dramatic.

I think what is interesting and important to me about this topic is that, so manufactured housing is 10% of the housing stock in Pima County.

So that's a lot of people that live in manufactured housing.

And it's also the housing stock that is most affordable, that is not like non-subsidized by like the city or the federal government.

And so I think it is interesting to me that there's actually like a lot of people who live in mobile home communities, but they are dealing with issues that are very specific, because in a lot of cases, a landlord or a park owner will own the park, have authority over the state of the electricity in the park, but because people own their own homes, it just like creates this very specific dynamic that you don't see in like a regular home ownership situation or in apartments.

So I think for me, it felt like there's this group of people that is actually like a really important part of like having housing that a lot of people can afford in the community we live in, and they're dealing with unique challenges and sort of falling through the cracks in the support that they're getting for those challenges.

So like when I started this reporting a year ago, there wasn't action from the attorney general, or there wasn't conversation about state law that would change some of this, and through like some of the door knocking that I've like followed, and just like all these meetings that I've been at, and a lot of what you're gonna see in this documentary, you're seeing what it takes to change a situation like that.

Yeah.

Yeah, and John, there's a piece in the part about evictions where kris Mayes is at a public event and hearing from concerned residents.

And the feeling is that maybe she is someone who can move forward.

How important is it to have scenes like that in a documentary like that?

Because yes, you're hearing from people who are being affected by it, but also the possibility that there is action that could be taken.

Yeah, I think it definitely felt like being in that first town hall meeting felt like a lot of expression of people feeling like we're just little people trying to enact change, whereas people were sort of describing this need for someone with her power and authority to really make a difference.

And I think it was key to be present at that to hear from the community things that they were dealing with and facing, and then see some accountability and follow up from that meeting by the fact that she issued cease and desist orders.

She came back to the community to continue the conversation.

And so feeling like they had an advocate that they could sort of link arms with to see things change.

Raye, one person who stood out to me in that town hall that Kris Mayes held was someone prominently featured in the episode that I saw.

And Kimberly, is that who I'm thinking of?

Who's now living in a shed?

Roseanne.

Oh, Roseanne, okay.

Who was living in a shed.

And I don't have the quote exactly, but justice is for the rich and not the poor.

And she mentions that in the town hall and also later.

I'm just really, how important is it to hear from someone like this who has these real experiences?

And do you have hope that people who will watch Arizona Illustrated and learn more about this will want to take action in the community?

I think one of the really powerful things about that meeting in April with the attorney general of having residents speak up and share their stories.

You know what, it wasn't hundreds of residents having to be there, but those five or 10 people are gonna, I'm gonna have the courage to go out on this evening and speak up.

There's a later on when the attorney general met with residents, she said, "That was when I learned about it.

I learned about it because I heard it from you.

And then our staff followed up and we made formal complaints and were able to follow through."

And really just seeing that power of, there is power.

Sometimes I think the law is stacked against people.

But when residents are united, when they connect with organizations like Poder Casas Móviles that know the law and can help people advocate for the law.

And when people like attorney general Kris Mayes says, "I have the power and I'm gonna use it."

And to use that in partnership with the residents because yes, and in a lot of ways things are stacked for the rich.

People are getting evicted over a fraudulent utility bill and that judge is not taking the time to say, "Hey, that bill doesn't look right."

But there are other people who are, who are using their power to protect.

Yana, as we wrap up the conversation, I'm gonna sort of ask for the inevitable takeaway.

30 seconds or so, I know this is a massive series of working on for a year, but what do you want just from this conversation, people to think about as they watch Arizona Illustrated?

Yeah, I mean, I want people to think about like, what kind of protections and supports do you need to make the community we live in livable and safe for like a broad group of people?

And what are the ways that it takes to make change in these systems that seem like really impossible where someone like, you know, is going through eviction court in a matter of days or has an issue with their park manager who, you know, might have them leave and then their home gets left in the park that they can't access anymore.

Like what kind of organizing and effort does it take to make change in that system?

And I hope this teaches people about that.

John, 30 seconds or so.

Yeah, I think this is a large community that we don't often think of.

And so when we're talking about it being the last form of affordable housing, that if these people are being priced out and pushed out due to these tactics, where do these people go and how does that affect our community and just the housing crisis in general?

Yeah, Raye, let me give you the last word.

Yeah, so we want transparency for the ways that utilities are billed and charged.

We want the Arizona Department of Housing to have authority over this.

We worked with residents who had a court case with the Department of Housing.

The Department of Housing and the Administrative Law Judge said, "Yes, your meter reads are inaccurate "and we will do nothing about it.

"We don't have the authority to give money back to residents."

That is ridiculous.

We need to have these processes have real accountability.

We need people to be able to keep their homes Oftentimes people are being evicted and the parks are stealing their houses.

There are not laws in place to protect that.

We need those laws in place.

And at the end of the day, we need rent control that no matter how many other protections we have, if the landlords are allowed to raise the rent as much as they want, our residents in these homes that they own are never gonna be safe.

So wanting rent control and also for resident ownership that in places where residents own the community themselves or it's owned by a nonprofit or community land trust, and you take that extractive landlord model out of it, people are so much safer and so much able to afford to live in this beautiful housing type.

Okay, Raye Winch, John DeSoto, Yana Kunicha.

Thank you all for being here in the Press Room.

Again, you can watch the series on Arizona Illustrated coming up a four-part series.

And that's all for this edition of the Press Room back next week with a new episode.

I'm Steve Goldstein.