Arizona's House Voted 26-31 Against Exempting Historic Districts From Its Middle-Housing Law

The vote

The Arizona House voted 25-30 on June 1 against Senate Bill 1118, which would have barred middle-housing development on sites containing a building designated historic, unless demolition was necessary for health or safety reasons. That was a preliminary floor vote, not the bill's final disposition.

The bill reached the floor in that form through a striker amendment. SB 1118 had originally been titled 'rural hospitals; radiation protection grants' before being amended into 'historic neighborhoods; housing; zoning' by Representative Matt Gress, a Phoenix Republican.

Gress said he would seek reconsideration before the session's end, and he did: the House took up SB 1118 a second time and again voted it down, this time 26-31, on third reading on June 11, 2026, according to the bill's action history on BillTrack50. The Arizona Legislature adjourned sine die at 4:45 a.m. on June 13, 2026, ending the 57th Legislature's second regular session; SB 1118 is listed as dead as of June 14, 2026. Opposition came from homebuilder and housing-lobby groups; the City of Tucson had opposed an earlier, broader version.

What the bill would have carved out

Arizona's 2024 middle-housing law, originally House Bill 2721 and enacted as Chapter 197, requires cities and towns with populations of at least 75,000 to allow duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and townhomes as a permitted use within one mile of the central business district and on at least 20 percent of new developments exceeding 10 contiguous acres. Its compliance deadline was January 1, 2026, so the law had taken full effect only months before the vote.

Historic designation is the most common remaining lever for excluding density in cities that have lost single-family zoning authority. Central-city historic districts overlap heavily with the one-mile downtown radius the state law targets, which is why a historic carve-out would have removed a disproportionate share of the newly upzoned land rather than a marginal slice.

The striker-amendment route is itself notable. Converting an unrelated bill late in session is a standard Arizona practice for advancing contested measures, and it compresses the time available for analysis of the effect. Rep. Sarah Liguori, a Phoenix Democrat who voted no on the June 1 attempt, told colleagues that historic neighborhoods were themselves built on middle-housing principles and that the state should be expanding housing types rather than retracting them, according to KJZZ's account of the floor debate.

Status

SB 1118 died when the Legislature adjourned sine die on June 13, 2026, three days after its second and final floor defeat. Save Historic Arizona, the advocacy coalition that had backed the bill, said in a June 14 statement that 'toxic politics' and a 'disinformation campaign' had undone a bipartisan compromise, and pledged to keep pressing for historic-preservation protections at the state and local level.

Sourcing note: the June 1 preliminary vote and the June 11 final vote are corroborated across the Arizona Capitol Times, KJZZ, a Willo Historic Neighborhood Association vote-tracking post and BillTrack50's bill-action history; the bill's amended text was verified against the Arizona Legislature's published engrossed version.