AFFORDABILITY

High rents, stagnant wages, and steadily rising prices at the grocery store, gas station, and pharmacy have created a cost-of-living crisis in Tempe. The price of rent in Tempe increased over 70% from 2010-2022, and 2025 is on track to have the second-most evictions filed in any year since 2000, just behind 2024. Food deserts are appearing on both sides of the 60. Minimum wage workers are forced to work multiple jobs and unreasonable hours, just to stay in their hometown. City shelters and cooling stations have shut down at dangerous rates, causing serious harm to newly unhoused families and workers.

Tempe has the tools to address this crisis. The city can and should increase funding for housing vouchers and rental subsidy programs, expand public transit options, buy and build more non-congregate care facilities, reopen city shelters and cooling stations, set up public grocery stores, and invest in truly affordable mixed-income and public housing, all while allowing generous Tempe residents to provide life-saving mutual aid to our unhoused neighbors without fear of criminal charges.

COVERING THE COSTS

These are not small ideas, and they will require real investments from the city of Tempe.  We can fund these necessary programs through a combination of good governance, efficiency, real property vacancy fees,  and common-sense transaction privilege tax increases on short term rentals, transient lodgings, commercial leases, and other large-scale business activities.

By continuing to steadily raise city property tax revenues and increasing city transaction privilege taxes on transient lodgings and short term rentals to compete with comparable cities around the country and the world, we can add $17,000,000 to the city's 2026-27 budget. By modernizing city sales taxes with a 0.2% increase, we can add another $10,000,000. 

Whenever updates to our city revenue model require the support of Tempe voters, I will introduce legislation that refers the decision to a vote of our city electorate and work with community advocates to ensure that misrepresentations by out-of-state corporations and the ultra-wealthy do not unduly influence our public discourse.