Tom: This weekon Arizona Illustrated.

50 years of orchids in the desert.

Mark: Lifelong Horticulturist.

I have about 5000 square feet of greenhouses and other shade structures.

Tom: Field notes on a desert icon.

David: Gila monsters bites are venomous Tom: A Nogales organization saves food from the landfill and feeds the community.

Yolanda: Not all produce sells.

And so what doesn't sell, we've been educating the produce industry to donate to us.

Tom: And a look at the housing crisis through the lens of one local apartment complex.

Bob: The truth is, we're going to wind up living out of my car for a while.

I will.

I have to be out same time as her end of the month.

I haven't even started looking yet.

Tom: Hello and welcome to an all new episode of Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

And thanks for joining us from here in downtown Tucson.

You know, the days are getting shorter and fall will officially be here September 22nd.

Though here in southern Arizona, we likely won't feel the effects of fall until about late October.

Our desert climate can make it very challenging to try to grow things here, but with the right care, many things can flourish, including, oddly enough, the orchid.

In Southern Arizona The Tucson Orchid Society has been teaching its members about these colorful plants since 1972.

[SINK TURNS ON] [POURING] GINA: Three years ago, we were visiting family in Chicago and it was around Father's Day.

So my dad had gotten orchids over the last previous couple of years, and I went to a orchid nursery and bought him an orchid for Father's Day, and I was blown away by the thousands of orchids.

And it was just beautiful, I have pictures of all of them.

[WHIMSICAL MUSIC] These are my three favorites.

One, two, three.

This one was my very first one, so it was near and dear to my heart.

This one I got two years ago, and it's doing really well.

It's a good bloomer.

It makes me happy.

And it's called The Clown.

It's kind of looks clownish, so it's very happy.

And then this one I really like because I was able to rehab it and get it healthy again when I bought it, it was sickly.

Now.

I can't go to a store without buying one, unfortunately.

And now I have 70 of them.

But it's, the more you get exposed to them, the more addicting they are.

They're just a lot of fun.

[CHIMES] KELLEY: I've always been a nature person.

I grew up in a small town and in that town we made our own fun.

And most of that fun was outdoors.

[BIRDS] The orchids are part of that.

The orchids kind of really fired up big time during the pandemic because I was staying home all the time, caring for them and watching them flower.

The springtime is fabulous because they are really mostly all in flower at that time.

And it's just breathtaking to see the colors.

Some of the colors are retina-searing!

They're so bright and so beautiful.

Until I started going to the Orchid Society meetings.

I just thought there was one kind of orchid.

But there are many kinds of orchids.

PRESENTER: Wrap this around the bottom and then clip off , everything on the basket.

And now this section over here, the roots are actually covering it up.

But I have a pretty good idea.

KELLEY: Once I started to meet and learn about the people here in Southern Arizona that are really wonderful growers.

I wanted to be like that.

MARK: My name is Mark Dimmit I am a lifelong horticulturist.

I have about 5000 square feet of greenhouses and other shade structures.

Where I grow several thousand plants in pots, including about a thousand orchids.

[JAZZ MUSIC] I got hooked on orchids when I was about ten years old.

I had a great aunt who was wealthy and had an orchid collection.

You had to be pretty wealthy to have orchid collections then.

On a dining room table.

She had this species of orchid, which is called a spider orchid, and I had never seen anything like it.

It was the most exotic, most beautiful plant I'd ever seen.

And I was just instantly addicted to orchids.

And within a few years, I had found a few that I could afford to buy.

And I had orchids by the time I was in high school.

[JAZZ MUSIC] What changed the system was in the 1970s, the science of tissue culture was developed better called micro propagation, as is practiced today.

But now you can take a tiny piece of an orchid and put it in a flask with culture, media, and grow thousands of them at a at a low price.

So now you can go to a market or a big box store and find orchids.

today, that would have cost you hundreds of dollars in the 1960s and 70s.

I probably have the biggest collection in Tucson, so I'm not a typical orchid collector.

In my mind, this is not a hobby.

For me, it's an obsession.

And orchids can be addictive.

[UPBEAT MUSIC] GINA: They're kind of my babies.

My husband calls them my or-kids.

We don't have children.

So they're my little babies.

MARK:Oh, I've never heard that before, but that.

That's a good one.

That's a good one.

Or-kids?

Yeah.

I have a few thousand or-kids.

KELLEY: Of course, they become like family.

Well, this is my first orchid, and I just.

She lived in spite of the odds.

She shouldn't have lived because I took so long to repot her.

And she's just a vigorous plant that keeps growing and blooming.

Every spring she puts out great big white blooms.

And I just love her.

[WHIMSICAL MUSIC] GINA: It's fun to watch them grow new leaves or new roots and then bloom.

It's been very rewarding and I never thought I'd be able to grow anything.

So it's pretty neat to realize that once you kind of learn a little bit, you can do more.

Tom: Like many desert creatures, Gila monsters can be elusive, though occasionally they turn up in the strangest of places.

Producer David Fenster recalls two memorable encounters with these Sonoran Desert icons.

It's part of a series Field Notes, in which David Fenster brings us his observations from the Sonoran Desert and beyond.

David: This is a video I took with my phone in Saguaro National Park in May of 2019, when I first moved to Tucson.

It's embarrassing to admit, but I had to Google "lizards of Arizona" to find out that this was a Gila Monster.

As I was standing there, I learned that Gila Monster's bites are venomous, that they often don't let go of their victims and have to be pried off.

I learned that a component of their venom is FDA approved to treat type 2 diabetes.

They can store fat in their tails.

Mating can last from 15 minutes to two and a half hours.

And human beings are their only known predators.

This spring was my most recent sighting.

I was on Tumamoc Hill filming something at the Desert Laboratory, and I walked into one of the buildings and saw this.

At first we thought it was someone's pet that had somehow gotten loose, but that didn't really make any sense.

So then we figured it must have just wandered in from outside.

We had to go back next door to finish our shoot.

But when I came back a couple of hours later, the Gila Monster was still there.

Some people have lived here for years and have never seen a Gila Monster.

But if you spend a lot of time outdoors in May and June or indoors at the right place, you might just see one.

Tom: Billions of pounds of produce cross the US-Mexico border every year, destined for grocery stores in the United States and Canada.

But some of that produce never leaves the Nogales port of entry, either because it's close to perishing or consumer demand has softened.

Enter the organization Borderlands Produce Rescue, which is working to save that food from the landfill.

One warehouse at a time.

[Truck Engine] Ramon: We just received a call from one of the donors.

We have a load of grapes, which is delicious.

[Truck Engine and Brakes] Yolanda: Borderlands Produce Rescue, formerly known as Borderlands Food Bank.

What we do and have been doing for 28 years is basically rescuing fresh produce.

There are billions of pounds of fresh produce that come across at our port of entry from Mexico.

And of course, it's a consumer driven market and not all produce sells.

And so what doesn't sell, we've been educating the produce industry to donate to us instead of dumping it or disking it in the landfill.

[Sounds of Heavy Machinery] You're going to spend a lot of money to go dump it at the landfill, besides the fact that you're going to hurt the environment.

Plus, the donor can get back some of his crossing fees that he pays to cross this product from Mexico to the United States because he's donating some poundage to a nonprofit organization.

Ramon: This is the one I want.

I am the warehouse manager.

So I'm also a truck driver.

A CDL truck driver.

So I'm the one who's in charge of the whole whole warehouse of keeping the produce, organize, whatever-- what comes in and out.

Yolanda: He started as a contract driver, volunteering and contract driving for me while he still had his other job.

And then we needed the position opened up for a full time CDL driver and we kind of coaxed him.

The best thing about him is that he works really, really hard and he wants to do his best and that's really important.

He takes a lot of pride in what he does.

Ramon: It is nice because you help a lot of people thanks to the donors that they are giving us a lot of produce.

That's the reason we're keep this program going.

Yolanda: I've been in the produce industry with produce family members all my life and I could see what was happening and the throwing away and the bad gas emissions.

And I've always been one of those people and I've surrounded myself around people also that don't like waste.

And we want to rescue as much as we can and help as many people as we can.

[Hopeful Music] What we've been doing is basically knocking on doors of the produce industry one at a time and educating them that it is not a good thing to dump this product, that there are a lot of people, families that really need to eat nutritiously, and if they call us, we will pick up that produce 75% or better within a 24 hour limit.

Ramon: Right now everything's real expensive, everything.

So that's what the idea is to help the people.

We give them the full cart of veggies, vegetables, all kinds of vegetables, which is about six or seven items, different items .

You bring good, healthy food to your house.

That's what makes me feel happy.

Yolanda: Monday through Friday, people can come and pick up product that we've set outside for them, take it home to their families.

And what we really try to ask them to do and convince them to do an obligate them to do is pay it forward , not only take it for their own needs, but also for their families, their their neighbors, their clubs or churches.

And so that we can reach as many people as possible.

Mark: I have been coming here maybe once, once a month for at least ten years.

It is a lot cheaper.

You know, one sack of grapes could cost you $3 or $4.

And I have eight sacks here, plus a whole bunch of other stuff here for $5.

So it's a great deal.

Yolanda: It is about 790 million pounds that we've rescued throughout the 28 years.

It's a lot a lot of meals that we're supplementing and that we have supplemented.

I think it's imperative that we all leave our footprint on this earth.

And I think this is a good way for all of us to do it, to be able to do our part to help our environment.

[Hopeful Music] Tom: Construction seems to be a constant in Arizona, but the resulting new supply of housing is not meeting demand, according to the state's housing department.

Arizona needs an additional 270,000 homes to address our current housing crisis.

In the following in-depth report, we look at the human cost of this issue by focusing on an apartment complex in midtown Tucson after its sale to a real estate investment company in December 2021.

The leases on all 52 units were terminated.

As we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic we still face multiple crises.

One of the most glaring is the housing crisis.

It doesn't just stop at our national borders.

It's global.

And as we see the rates of evictions and homelessness increase, those numbers can overshadow the real human cost.

We're in clearly a housing explosion right now in terms of rent increases.

And the sad reality is, is that because the state legislature has a preemption in place, there's virtually nothing we can do at a local level to cap rents.

Our challenge right now is a supply and demand issue.

It's also the fact that we have virtually no local investors who are putting money into our housing stock and upgrading them.

These are all out of state people.

They're real estate investment trusts.

They're people who are just simply pooling money together without any attachment to the local people.

They're putting a little bit of money into them, jacking the rents up, refinancing based on the new rents, and taking that money that they get in the refi and putting it into another another project.

And they're turning people out on the street at the same time.

Developing housing in Tucson is not easy.

Even with the federal programs like the Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program, the Tucson Housing and Community Development Department lists a number of obstacles the city has come up against in building new, affordable housing.

Some of those include supply chain issues, labor shortages, zoning and competition for developers statewide.

It requires not just the city to do these efforts, but it really does take all the partners, all the stakeholders to help us get there.

Without the development of new affordable housing.

We are left with apartment complexes like the Monterey Garden Apartments located in midtown Tucson.

And it's a microcosm of what's happening across the city.

Northstar Management and Consulting Inc. had managed the apartments for several years before buying the property in December 2021, after which they began terminating the leases of all 52 units.

Many of the tenants have lived there for years, are on rental assistance, fixed income or have disabilities and have nowhere to go despite looking for affordable housing.

Attempts were made to reach out to North Star for comment, but they didn't respond.

They put a note on my door the day before Christmas Eve day saying I had 60 days to get out of here, and I cried.

[packing dishes] I'm very stressed out.

I might have to have surgery.

I have to move.

I can't find a place.

I am lucky enough to have people who will help me.

I can stay with people, but there's a lot of people here that don't have that and what's going to happen to them?

There's just no place to find rent for my voucher.

My voucher is for $837.

You're wanting us to have three times our income.

well have half the people in here aren't going to have that.

And on the Pima County website, it shows all these apartments and it says they accept Section Eight and the rent's six something, but that's incorrect.

Like the websites need to be updated as well because I've gone to a lot of places just for them to say, Oh, we don't accept vouchers at this time, or the new owners don't want Section Eight.

Cathy: it's almost $200 just to find out if I qualify.

And I'm scared and I'm mad and I feel discriminated against.

Arizona Public Media reached out to several apartment listings on Pima County's website that accepts rental assistance.

We spoke with seven managers who said that they were at capacity and on average had a waiting list of 3 to 5 years.

Why landlords don't work with us right now is the market is very hot.

A lot of times our tenants can't get into a unit because the rent is higher than what our program allows.

And so we recently received a waiver from HUD to go higher, we're at the maximum.

Some tenants are successful at finding units, but most are struggling.

We've made significant changes in the past two and a half years, but a lot of landlords who stopped working with our program are not aware of those changes.

But even the tenants at Monterey Garden Apartments who are not reliant on rental assistance are being pushed into housing insecurity because the hikes in rent already imposed are eating into their disposable incomes.

I was paying $928 and it went up to $1024.

Because they are adding in water.

You know, it's supposed to be all utilities paid.

The rent increase actually really impacted us.

I mean, yeah, it's only about 100 bucks, but it's 100 bucks.

There's not really a whole lot of money to be getting them clothes or going out and going to dinner or having fun or anything like that because everything's getting so expensive at this point.

So it's it's going to be hard for me to find a place by the time they kick me out to.

If you look at reviews for North Star Properties online, you'll find consistent grievances left by tenants over the years.

People cite harassment and abusive behavior from management being cheated financially and multiple complaints of apartments under code with no attempts by management to make repairs.

Again, attempts were made to reach out to North Star for comment, but they didn't respond.

There's safety hazards throughout this property that have never been addressed but have been brought to their attention.

I've been flooded out four times.

They don't compensate you for any of that kind of stuff.

My heat was out for a year.

My toilet's been broken for about two years now.

I actually had a storage unit from them, too.

They hit my credit with, you know, additional charges when they weren't due kind of thing.

That's that's these people.

That's who you're dealing with.

You know truth is, I'm going to wind up living out of my car for a while.

I will.

I have to be out.

Same time as her end of the month.

I haven't even started looking yet.

When we were at the Monterey Garden Apartments to conduct interviews, we witnessed the eviction of Laura and Nick.

Laura: we can't have until tomorrow morning or an hour, can we have an hour?

Constable: an hour for what?

Laura: until he comes home and get my cat.

I don't know what to do.

Laura and Nick had been living at the Monterey Garden Apartments for over a year.

They shared a lease with Laura's mother, who paid half the rent.

But she passed away in August 2021, Not being able to pay the full amount.

They sought assistance from the Tucson Eviction Prevention Program.

The program accepted their case and were ready to pay back rent and three month's rent in advance.

Laura and Nick said that North Star requested written verification of this and would grant them more time before issuing an eviction.

But while they were getting it in writing from their case manager, North Star proceeded with the eviction anyways.

So even having jumped through all those hoops, they now have an eviction on their records and will likely not be accepted into any housing and face homelessness.

I'm just so focused right now on trying to make it work and emailing these people.

and it's just so frustrating.

To have an eviction on your record within the first two years they want, no place will take you.

No place.

There are people that do have challenges in life that do throw curveballs and they have no choice and end up in a predicament like this.

And I think that's more than those that are scamming the system.

We're not computer literate.

So it takes that even extra time for us to get all this figured out.

But nonetheless, we have done it.

Then they don't want it.

The United Nations states.

That forced evictions are a gross violation of a range of internationally recognized human rights.

Broadly defined as the permanent or temporary removal against the will of individuals from the homes and lands that they occupy without the provision of and access to appropriate forms of legal or other protections.

Lots of landlords, they are aware that the assistance is coming, but it's often to their benefit to follow through on the eviction, mainly because they know they can increase the rent for the next tenants coming in.

For the sake of financial gain In this market, we're seeing a big displacement of families that are at the lower end of the income spectrum, and some of them do have stable income, but just not enough to pay the rent that many of the landlords are asking for right now.

The landlord tenant law in Arizona heavily favors landlords.

One of the things that I saw when I was a tenant attorney is Landlord Attorneys come in with stacks of files which each represent a human being and a family.

In a lot of cases, the tenants don't show up either because they don't comprehend the notice and or they don't understand the law.

And if the tenants weren't there, it was very much like an assembly line process.

That's what's happening to these people.

The landlords have the ability, usually financially, to hire an attorney if they need to, to navigate this.

The tenants usually don't.

People need to be aware of what their rights are under the Landlord Tenant Act.

The landlord tenant act needs to be amended and also tenants need to be educated in layman's terms about what the process is.

These are basic needs that people need to be able to navigate a system that is stacked against them and to be able to prevent themselves from becoming homeless.

Speaker: You all know that the development has been moving forward.

One way tenants are empowering themselves is by joining organizations like the Tucson Tenants Union who are fighting for housing justice.

The rapidly growing group heard about North Star's plans and rallied together to help the tenants, even corresponding with North Star to see if the company would grant residents more time to find secure housing.

It didn't bring any changes.

This should be a problem that we're all facing together because if you're not in the process right now of either being evicted or your rent being increased.

You're going to be, you're going to be.

because if it's not happening to you, it's happening to your Nana.

When you make it personal, and you say, that person there, is my Mom, my sister This affects all of us together.

God bless you.

Right on!

[crowd cheering] Again, The Monterey Garden Apartments is just a microcosm.

Tenants all over the city are being priced out of their homes and the consequences are immense.

Studies show that the crisis will continue to disproportionately affect the most economically vulnerable and marginalized.

Women, children, and people of color.

Leading to greater inequality, gentrification, segregation.

and creating new forms of social conflict.

Tom: If you or someone you know is experiencing housing insecurity, we've compiled a list of resources along with this story on our website at AZPM.org/HousingCrisis.

Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara and we'll see you next week for an all new episode.