Most Sedona residents can complain about the problems caused by tourists until we’re blue in the face, and, looking at our community’s dozens of social media pages, we do. Our chief complaints are that an ever-increasing number of tourists block parking at trail heads, clog our roads and overuse our limited facilities.
Tourists do provide one vital thing that Sedona — both the city and its residents — need: Their cash, in the form of sales taxes and spending at retail shops. Tourists are why the city of Sedona allowed its budget to balloon to $71.6 million this year after a paltry $51.2 million last year.
The more insidious problem we have is the lack of housing.
Part of this is caused by the increase in short-term rentals, which limits the long-term rental market for residents as homeowners, rightly or wrongly depending on your view, legally convert their properties into a far more lucrative business model, which was quite honestly the ultimate goal of Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and the Arizona State Legislature passing SB 1350 in 2016. Fine on a small scale, sure, but only the most obtuse would willfully ignore the negative impact of their proliferation as the limited housing market is overrun.
While partisans from both sides complain loudly about gridlock in Congress and one party steam-rolling their agenda when they have a majority, let us not forget that SB 1350 was an overwhelmingly bipartisan bill. In the Senate, 14 Republicans and 11 Democrats voted for it while in the House, 29 Republicans and 23 Democrats approved it. There were nine “no” votes, all Republicans. The short-term rental problem Sedona faces is equally stained by red and blue hands.
The other housing problem we face is the simple lack of housing options. Depending on how you measure the area, there are between 14,000 and 24,000 jobs in the Sedona area, but not all of them are occupied by the working-age residents inside Sedona city limits. Many are worked by residents from Camp Verde, Clarkdale, Cottonwood, Jerome and the unincorporated areas of the Verde Valley, with some coming from Flagstaff, Dewey-Humboldt, Prescott and Phoenix for some of the more lucrative positions.
The lack of apartments, the limited number of rental homes and the fact that Sedona is approaching buildout and cannot expand or annex into the U.S. Forest Service land surrounding us means we are hemmed in, and housing costs will be artificially inflated for a time to come. For those of us who are small businesses trying to hire and keep good staff at their jobs, housing problems for incoming new hires have become almost a bigger problem than doing the actual work required to turn a profit.
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention implemented a moratorium on evictions under the guise of slowing the virus’ spread, allowing renters to stay in their homes or apartments even as they got behind on their rents and could not afford to pay them.
After a while, getting a little bit behind might mean getting severely behind to the point when many cannot pay the full bill when it’s due.
This moratorium officially ended on July 31. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in June to let the moratorium extend for a month, but the swing vote, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, wrote in his concurrence that it was clear the court was telling the government that the moratorium could not extend beyond July 31 except by an act of Congress — which clearly never happened.
Now, the moratorium is expired and millions of Americans across the country will likely be facing evictions. Landlords who are trying to make do by paying their property taxes without rental income or the ability to move in new renters who could pay will have to decide whether to evict long-term residents or accept a lower portion of their back rent and allow those renters to stay.
If you are dealing with any of these housing issues, especially if you are facing eviction or deciding to evict someone, we would like to hear from you. If you’re facing eviction so that your long-term rental can become a short-term rental, we want to hear from you as well. We want to tell readers about your struggles and how the community could help with policies, programs or with calls for government action.
Please email us a editor@larsonnewspapers.com, subject “eviction.”
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
