The Independent published an article (“Unlicensed home facilities face pushback,” Sun City Independent, June 5, 2023) about unlicensed “sober living” businesses showing up within Sun City residential neighborhoods and adjacent communities.
These licensed and unlicensed neighborhood disrupting group home scams are hugely profitable businesses for the property owners at the taxpayer expense. The property owners risk nothing and benefit financially while the neighborhoods suffer. These group homes are clearly a way for human services agencies to push substance abusers, sex offenders, homeless and anyone else into residential areas and force the neighborhoods to put up with the problems group home residents create.
That is exactly what’s going on. And the dangers are real. From time to time, we see on the local news a sober living group home resident being stabbed, shot or assaulted by another group home resident. Attorney General Kris Mayes recently suspended payments to 100 group home scams for Medicaid fraud. Sober living group homes are a massive rackets disguised as something they are not.
Making the problem more disturbing and essentially uncontrollable is Sun City sits on “anything goes” county property. And no politician, county agency or attorney wants to touch this topic for fear of being demonized, even though the problems are obvious.
And it’s even more pointless to believe the Sun City HOA and HOA compliance office would do anything about these group home businesses even if they could. Sun City home owning seniors living on “anything goes” county property with no representation are the easiest population to be manipulated and have zero say. That’s why neighborhood disrupting group homes will only grow in number and are here to stay in Sun City.
We’d like to invite our readers to submit their civil comments, pro or con, on this issue. Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org.
