The Mesa City Council voted unanimously to ban urban camping on public property.
Without comment, the council voted on Dec. 2 to approve a new ordinance prohibiting camping on city property. Mesa already banned camping in city parks, but the new ordinance expands that prohibition to include other city-owned areas, like vacant land and parking lots.
Mesa is the latest Valley city — following places like Surprise and Phoenix — to enact urban camping bans in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that cleared the way for cities to crack down on homeless encampments.
That Supreme Court ruling overturned a 2018 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that stopped many cities in the western U.S. from criminalizing sleeping in public spaces if there were not an adequate number of shelter beds available in the area.
The Mesa vote came a month after Arizona voters approved a new law that allows property owners to seek property tax refunds if a local government fails to clean certain public nuisances, including illegal camping, loitering and public urination or drug use.
