Georgians can now sue cities that don’t enforce laws. That’s a good thing.

The details differ from state to state, but the underlying problem is the same. All across the country, local governments have kept laws on the books against illegal camping, loitering, obstruction, public drug use, shoplifting, public intoxication and public nuisance while declining to enforce them in practice.

Modeled after the Goldwater Institute’s Safe Neighborhoods Act, these new reforms address that failure directly by giving property owners a remedy when local officials refuse to act.

Georgia’s HB 295 lets property owners seek compensation when a local government adopts a policy, pattern or practice of declining to enforce certain public-safety laws, or when it maintains a public nuisance, and that failure reduces property value or forces owners to spend money mitigating the damage.

The compensation is limited, tied to documented costs or lost value and capped by the local property taxes paid on the parcel.

It is not a blank check. It is a remedy for a specific government failure.

Public order is not a luxury good

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

The need for that accountability was made clear in Midtown Atlanta, where resident Gregory Gould told Georgia lawmakers that human feces appeared on doorsteps and in stairwells, encampments popped up inside his building, and residents spent roughly $100,000 a year cleaning and securing their own property. Gould said he had been assaulted and later threatened while picking up trash.

“I get to live here, too,” he told lawmakers. “I shouldn’t have to leave.”

That sentence captures the moral core of the issue happening all over the United States. Public order is not a luxury good. It should not depend on whether residents can afford private security, repeated cleanups, legal help or constant property repairs.

Local government exists, in large part, to provide the basic conditions under which ordinary civic life can continue. When it stops doing that, the costs do not disappear. They are transferred to the people least able to avoid them.

In 2024, Arizona showed there is a better way. After years of worsening conditions in Phoenix’s “The Zone,” where residents and business owners dealt with used needles, human waste, crime and a sprawling encampment near the state Capitol, Arizona voters approved Proposition 312 with more than 58% of the statewide vote.

The measure gave property owners a way to seek relief when local governments failed to enforce public nuisance laws.

Since then, cities across Arizona, including Mesa, Tempe, Phoenix, Scottsdale, Goodyear and Surprise, have adopted or revived ordinances addressing public camping and related disorder.

The lesson from Arizona was not that homelessness disappeared, but that incentives matter. When local governments could ignore the consequences of nonenforcement, they often did. When they faced financial accountability for shifting those costs onto property owners, they had a reason to act.

Homelessness debate has been stuck in a false choice

Oklahoma has followed the same path. Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a law that allows property owners in cities with populations over 130,000 to seek compensation when local governments have a policy, pattern or practice of failing to enforce laws related to illegal camping, panhandling, loitering, drug activity, public intoxication and similar public nuisances.

Like Georgia’s law, Oklahoma’s measure is not designed to solve homelessness directly. It is designed to ensure that government cannot avoid its basic duties while residents bear the consequences.

For too long, the debate over homelessness has been stuck in a false choice: prioritize services and tolerate disorder or restore order and ignore suffering. But refusing to enforce the law does not make hard problems humane. It often leaves vulnerable people in dangerous encampments without sanitation, treatment or stability, while families, workers, and shopkeepers bear the consequences. Georgia, Arizona and Oklahoma are showing there is another way.

Georgia’s Safe Neighborhoods Act restores the proper order of responsibility and tells the rest of the nation that urban residents do not have to sit quietly as their cities decline around them. It does not ask property owners to solve homelessness. It asks government to stop making them pay for government’s refusal to act.

That is why this reform has national significance. It is a promise to hold local governments accountable to the people they have a duty to serve. If a city enforces its laws and takes reasonable steps to address public nuisances, it has nothing to fear. But if it turns nonenforcement into standard operating procedure, the people harmed by that decision now have a remedy.

Georgia was right to act. Other states should follow.

Local officials should be free to debate the best way to address homelessness, addiction, mental illness and public safety. But they should not be free to abandon their constituents, ignore their own laws and send the bill to everyone else.

Brian Norman is the director of state affairs at the Goldwater Institute, where he leads the institute’s nationwide government affairs strategy.

Send letters to the editor of 250 words or fewer with your name, city or town and contact information to letters@ajc.com.