In 2022, something unusual happened in the City of South Tucson: three volunteers at a soup kitchen known for its left-wing political advocacy were elected to the city council.
They ran on an ambitious platform of fighting gentrification and housing the city’s poor. While some of it has come to pass, being inside the government has changed their perspectives and priorities.
As the end of their first terms on city council approaches, AZPM News looks back at their track record in the tiny city that Brian Flagg, a city council member and long-time local activist, calls a “one-square-mile place to experiment.”
The place where it began and the people who made it happen
The Casa Maria Soup Kitchen is a tiny space on a dusty city block. But it holds a remarkable amount of activity: volunteers hauling crates of fruits and vegetables, meat and eggs boiling on the stove, a constant stream of people collecting food.
For decades, South Tucson city council member Brian Flagg has lived and worked at Casa Maria. The soup kitchen is a Catholic Worker House, part of a network whose residents devote their lives to charity, voluntary poverty and political work on behalf of the poor.
“That sets us apart from Mother Theresa, and just charitable efforts, because they just put a Band-Aid on the system that’s responsible for this huge inequality of wealth,” he said.
Surrounded entirely by Tucson, the City of South Tucson occupies just one square mile. It has a majority-Hispanic population of fewer than 5,000 people, according to census data. Its median family lives on $45,000 per year, according to the American Community Survey.
The city’s mayor is Roxanna Valenzuela, who also runs Casa Maria’s affordable housing program. She said getting into government has come with one main lesson.
“It’s easier to be yelling and screaming and demanding change than to actually be in government, strategizing and executing something that is going to give lasting results,” she said.
Buying a motel and suing a major landlord offer a way forward on a housing agenda
When Valenzuela, Flagg and their ally Cesar Aguirre ran for city council, they called for rent control and building new affordable housing.
But their agenda took a different path, including through the historic Arizona Motel on South 6th Avenue. Fearing investors would flip it into a fancy development, Flagg contributed his inheritance of almost $1 million to purchase the motel for Casa Maria in 2023.
Then, Valenzuela moved in, hoping to reduce crime on the property.
According to police data, 911 calls from the property decreased modestly after Casa Maria bought it — from 172 in the two-year period before the purchase to 144 in the two years following it. One resident of the motel who requested to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation by management told AZPM that they’ve seen several crimes happen there.
But those numbers pale in comparison to police calls coming from two large apartment buildings in the city owned by Brian Bowers, described as a “slumlord” by Valenzuela: more than 1,700 between both buildings in 2023, according to a city lawsuit against Bowers.
The city sued Bowers in 2024 for allegedly causing a criminal nuisance with his buildings. He argued the lawsuit was part of a city effort to dispossess him of his property. But the two parties settled, with Bowers agreeing to several security upgrades.
“Being able to see the tools that government has to hold those who prey on our community accountable was very important,” Valenzuela said about the suit, which she called her first victory in office.
In the city’s main shopping plaza, signs of new life around a vacant supermarket
Months from the end of his first term, Flagg said being in office has changed him.
“I care much more about cops and public safety and thriving business community than I did when I was a younger guy,” he said.
South Tucson’s crime rate is almost triple that of Tucson, according to police data. Flagg said public safety, not housing, turned out to be residents’ top concern. This forced the Casa Maria contingent on city council — which gained two members, and a majority, in 2024 — to pivot.
The city got a million-dollar gift from the Pascua Yaqui tribe that it plans to use for public safety. It replaced its struggling fire department with subcontractor Rural Metro in a move city leaders say will improve service in the future.
Good fire and police service make South Tucson attractive to businesses, Flagg said, which generate the tax revenue the city needs.
At the moment, a vacant Food City supermarket, which closed its doors in October, is a gaping hole in South Tucson’s main business corridor along South 6th Avenue. Later this month, Valenzuela said, the city council will vote on repealing its grocery tax, hoping to attract a new supermarket to the property.
But in the shopping plaza around the vacant store, life goes on, including at Southern Blends Barbershop, opened last year by 35-year-old Adrian Quijada.
Quijada has deep ties to the area. After being “around the wrong people” in his youth and serving four years in prison — where he cut hair for staff and inmates — he returned to South Tucson.
“It has a bad stigma to it. But me, growing up, it was somewhere that wasn’t what it is now. I feel that we could do a change,” he said.
For Quijada, the empty parking lot around the shuttered Food City has proven to be an opportunity. He fills it up with trunk-or-treat events at Halloween and toy drives for Christmas. His priority, he said, is offering more to the children in the community he grew up in.
“I try to do my best just to do a different kind of change as well here,” he said.
Valenzuela, Flagg and Aguirre are running for their city council seats again this year. They are set to face several challengers in the July election.
