Carl Steiner walked to the window of a small gray building near downtown Phoenix and gave a worker his name. He stepped away with a box and a cellphone bill.
The box is what Steiner had come for: It contained black and red Reebok sneakers to use in his new warehouse job.
Steiner doesn’t have a permanent address. His letters and packages are delivered to a mail room for homeless people in the building at the Keys to Change campus, a collaborative of 15 nonprofit organizations that serve those like him.
He and thousands of others have received mail here for years. They use the address for job applications, for medication, to receive benefits like food stamp cards and even to vote. And for 20 years, the U.S. Postal Service provided at least 20% of the mail room’s budget.
But last month, the postal service ended its support of $24,000 a year because a nearby post office is “able to fully serve the community,” a spokesperson said in a statement to ProPublica.
Unlike a standard post office, Keys to Change allows people to receive mail without a government ID, a common problem for some who are homeless.
This year, Keys to Change will spend about $117,000 to help 7,000 people get their mail. Although the cost is minimal relative to the nonprofit’s budget, it’s a “crucial part” of helping people exit homelessness, said Amy Schwabenlender, the organization’s CEO.
“It really is a priceless thing that we can offer to our clients,” Schwabenlender said.
The loss of support from the Postal Service comes at a time of uncertainty for one of Arizona’s largest nonprofit homeless services providers and similar organizations nationwide. Keys to Change says it will seek donations to keep the mail room open.
But there will be less money for such services as President Donald Trump and his administration take a very different approach to homelessness than his predecessors.
Trump is calling for large reductions to assistance grants, as well as their restructuring. More than half of Keys to Change’s funding comes from government agreements, Schwabenlender said.
The president has also issued an executive order urging cities to remove people who live outdoors by enforcing camping bans and institutionalizing those experiencing mental health or substance use disorders. The order also calls for ending support for programs that prioritize housing and services.
With funding shifting to support a more punitive approach to homelessness, even small programs like the mail room could be strained. The loss of the Postal Service’s assistance is not related to these budget cuts, but for providers it leaves one more gap to fill. Some, like Keys to Change, said they’ll be forced to do more with less federal support as demand for assistance is increasing.
Record numbers of people are looking for help. Last year, Keys to Change served 20,000 people, up from 18,000 the year before, according to the organization, which is also seeing the loss of COVID-era relief funding.
“There’s a definite air of uncertainty and fear, and that is both amongst providers and among people experiencing homelessness,” said Donald Whitehead, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, a nonprofit organization that advocates for homeless people. Whitehead expects some of the Trump administration’s changes will increase, not reduce, the number of people on the street.
Carl Steiner opens a box of shoes for a new job at a warehouse. Ash Ponders for ProPublica
First image: Moreno and Joe Medina in the mail room. Medina has worked there since 2019 and was a former Keys to Change client. Second image: Medina sorts through envelopes to find mail for the unhoused community the facility serves. Ash Ponders for ProPublicaJoe Medina has worked in the mail room since 2019 and knows some of the people he serves by name.
A former client at Keys to Change, he started as a volunteer doing odd jobs on the campus before moving into a full-time job in the mail room.
On a recent Friday, he meticulously sorted letters into alphabetized bins.
Paul Babcock approached the mail room window and handed Medina an identification card.
But Medina immediately recognized Babcock and handed him a package.
“Thanks, I’ll see you again soon,” said Babcock, who has been homeless on and off since 2012 and used the mail room for all of that time. Babcock opened his delivery to find a sweatshirt. For the cold weather, he said.
Babcock said having an address has helped him while he lives on the streets. He has received mail from the Social Security Administration, replacement identification cards about five times and chocolate chip cookies from his mother. “I’ve gotten everything from here,” Babcock said.
When people don’t retrieve their mail, Medina sometimes tells others to put the word out so they know to come get it.
“The ones who are coming for their mail are doing something for themselves, no matter how small,” Medina said. Some visit multiple times a day hoping for a letter or a package, he said. But sometimes they leave disappointed.
Medina greeted a woman by name, before retreating to check the bins. “Nothing right now,” he told her.
In 2009, the Postal Service threatened to cut its funding for the mail room, according to reporting by the Arizona Republic. The contract had come up for review because the location doesn’t generate revenue. “We’ve been giving them a donation, and we can no longer do that,” a postal official told the newspaper at the time.
The Postal Service reduced its funding but didn’t eliminate it and said it would create a “public service” contract for the homeless services provider. It’s unclear if it moved forward with that plan. The latest Keys to Change mail room contract appears unchanged from the 2009 agreement, according to Schwabenlender.
A Postal Service spokesperson declined to comment on the terms of the mail room agreement, calling such contracts “confidential.”
When Postal Service officials contacted the Keys to Change in May to inform the organization that the contract would end, they said the agreement “requires financial transactions that include revenue generation,” according to emails provided to ProPublica.
In Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, more people are entering homelessness than leaving. For every 19 new people experiencing homelessness, 10 people find housing, according to a regional nonprofit that coordinates homeless services.
After Tammy Mcauley left an abusive relationship, her car broke down, causing her to lose her job as a housekeeper. She’s been homeless for a year and most recently lived in a shelter.
She walked up to retrieve her mail with her dog, Mousie, perched in a stroller.
“It makes it so that we can still be people,” Mcauley said of the service.
Later that day, a FedEx truck pulled up to the mail room. The driver dropped off two boxes from Walmart.
Medina knew who they were for and set them aside until they came to get them.
Medina greets a man outside the Keys to Change mail room. Ash Ponders for ProPublicaU.S. Postal Service Cuts Funding for a Phoenix Mail Room Assisting Homeless People was first published on ProPublica and republished with permission.
Nicole Santa Cruz writes about inequality in the Southwest.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.