PHOENIX — From their modest apartment buildings alongside a block-long strip of gravel and scrub grass, the residents can see the tents and tarps and empty Mountain Dew bottles, hear the late-night fights and occasional gunshots, and smell the stringent, slightly sweet odor of burning fentanyl.

“It brings the value of the properties down,” said Shawn Matthews, a 46-year-old medical services driver who lives in one of the buildings. “But where else are people going to go?”

It’s the question communities throughout the West and the rest of the country are struggling to answer. This week the Supreme Court heard arguments about a law in Oregon that allows police to forcibly clear homeless encampments.

Here in Arizona, a novel response has emerged, one that has alarmed homeless rights advocates and mayors but that could win favor among a public that has grown weary, and in some cases angry, with public encampments. Voters will decide this November on a ballot initiative to award property owners tax refunds if they can prove monetary damages resulting from their local government’s failure to enforce nuisance laws.

The initiative’s authors see it as a potential model for other states. That’s what its opponents fear.

Such a model would represent a shift for many states and localities that have more often asked voters to spend money on housing, drug treatment and mental health services that researchers have found more effective than a punitive approach to addressing homelessness.

But patience for such spending may be thinning, even in liberal states. In March, California voters only narrowly approved Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to spend $6.4 billion to overhaul the state’s mental health system.

In the neighboring swing state of Arizona, Phoenix has been roiled for the last year by a lawsuit that forced the city to clear its biggest encampment, a shantytown of hundreds of people on the edge of downtown.

Matthews didn’t know much about Arizona’s ballot initiative but said it sounded like something he would support.

“They need a better environment,” he said. “Because it’s very dangerous to be living on the streets.”

...continued

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.