Crack down on homelessness or prepare to refund property taxes: that is the choice facing Arizona cities, as they scramble to comply with a new ballot measure.
Arizona voters in November overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure, Proposition 312, which starting in 2025 will allow property owners to apply for property tax refunds if a city fails to enforce laws regarding illegal camping, panhandling, and public drug use.
It’s property owners who pay for the homeless crisis as they deal with vandalism, crime, and public drug use, the Goldwater Institute, which first drafted the ballot measure, tells the Sun.
“Your tax dollars, they’re supposed to go to public safety services,” a representative of the institute, Joe Seyton, tells the Sun. “If they’re not getting you the services that you are supposed to be getting, you should get that money back.”
Prop 312 came several months after another monumental shift in the homelessness landscape, as the Supreme Court held this year in Grants Pass v. Johnson that it is not cruel and unusual punishment for cities to enforce public camping bans, even in the absence of available shelter beds. Those two shifts have made Arizona cities realize “that they don’t really have any choice,” Mr. Seyton says.
“They spent years and years ignoring what residents were saying, ignoring business owners who were fed up,” he adds. “And you had all of these people paying this price for this crisis they didn’t create.”
Several cities, including Phoenix and Scottsdale, moved to enforce their camping bans following the Supreme Court ruling earlier this year.
Now, within weeks of Prop 312 passing, City Council members in Mesa — which has a population of more than 500,000 people — voted unanimously to ban urban public camping. Another bustling city in the state, Tempe, announced that it was implementing “strict enforcement of its urban camping ordinance as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision and the passage of Proposition 312.”
Proposition 312 was the “push that these cities needed” to realize they no longer can choose to ignore homelessness, Mr. Seyton says, noting that now they have to “pay the price” if they don’t crack down.
“And it looks like some of those cities are saying, ‘Yeah, we really don’t want to have to pay the price, so we’re going to start getting our act together,’” he says.