'Staggering': Homeless deaths rose 42% in Maricopa County in 2022

The number of people who died while homeless in Maricopa County surged in 2022, newly released data shows, revealing yet another grim consequence of the region’s growing homelessness crisis.

The Maricopa County Office of the Medical Examiner investigated 732 deaths of people experiencing homelessness in 2022, representing a 42% jump in deaths from 2021, according to the office’s annual report released Friday.

That amounts to two deaths per day when averaged out, though some days — particularly during the summer — were far deadlier than others.

While the overall homeless population has grown in recent years, the increase in deaths has outpaced it. There were just over 9,000 people experiencing homelessness in the county on a single night in January 2022, according to the annual Point-in-Time count , representing an increase of 22% over the 2020 count. (Because of COVID-19, no count was conducted in 2021.)

Drug overdoses, traffic accidents, heat deaths and other types of accidents accounted for a large majority of the deaths of people experiencing homelessness in 2022 that were investigated by the Medical Examiner’s Office (78%). Those were followed by natural deaths (12%), homicides (5%), suicides (3%) and undetermined deaths (2%).

Not every death is captured in the data. The Medical Examiner’s Office investigates accidents, homicides and other types of unnatural or unexpected deaths, but it doesn’t look into deaths that occurred naturally in a health care facility, such as a hospital. The homeless death tally also doesn’t include people whose housing status couldn’t be determined, which accounts for hundreds more people.

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Central Arizona Shelter Services began working with the Medical Examiner’s Office in April to help identify deceased people who may have been homeless, to better understand the factors behind the deaths and to reconnect family members who contact the Medical Examiner’s Office searching for people who are still alive, said Phillip Scharf, CASS’s new chief operating officer.

“Our main goal is to help them close cases and to get more families into a state of knowledge of where their loved ones are,” Scharf said.

Jamie Chang, an assistant professor at Santa Clara University who researches deaths of unhoused people, called Maricopa County’s numbers “staggering” and said a majority of the deaths are preventable.

While local policy changes can help address the issue, Chang believes a more sweeping approach is needed to solve the housing and homelessness crises at large.

“We just need stronger state and federal policy around this,” Chang said. “I don’t see a solution out of the current crisis situation that a lot of our cities are facing without that.”

Juliette Rihl covers housing insecurity and homelessness for The Arizona Republic. She can be reached at jrihl@arizonarepublic.com or on Twitter @julietterihl .

Coverage of housing insecurity on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Arizona Community Foundation.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: 'Staggering': Homeless deaths rose 42% in Maricopa County in 2022