Is a Casino in Flagstaff AZ Giving the Homeless Money to Stay Away?

by Ryan Vagabundo

A reader passed on this unusual tidbit that I thought was worth doing some research on.

So there's apparently a rumor going around that some casino in Flagstaff, AZ is paying the homeless to stay out of it. Word is they get $15 per day, and can hustle by living in a vehicle in the nearby Super Walmart parking lot.

The source of it appears to be this year-old Reddit thread, I'm told it's going around some other rather hobo-vagabond-y discussion forums.

At first look, and without doing any fact-checking at all, this makes no sense on multiple levels:

• If you have any familiarity with casinos, you know they are loathe to give anyone but their highest rollers $15 per day in any kind of value, let alone straight cash to NOT gamble.

• Casinos don't need to pay $15 to homeless to keep them out. They are private property and can use security and the local police for that. That approach is definitely cheaper than paying $15 a day to any Johnny Junk that comes by, and casinos are definitely willing to do it.

• How does the casino even identify them as homeless and qualify them for the offer? Real HomeBum ID?

I think this one can pretty readily be dismissed on its face as the ramblings of an unstable mind, particularly considering that the dude who posted it has since had his Reddit account suspended.

But maybe he's just getting the details of some legitimate casino promotion confused, maybe one that's actually worth looking into. So let's do some research to get the full poop scoop on this supposed Big Rock Candy Mountain in Flagstaff.

So the casino in question would appear to be Twin Arrows Casino Resort, which is actually near Flagstaff rather than in it. As is the case with many Native American casinos, it's kinda out in the middle of nowhere, in this case about a 30 minute drive from downtown up into the mountains a bit.

There isn't really a Walmart "near" it ... there's a Walmart Supercenter along the highway that goes there, but it's in Flagstaff and looks to be about a 20 minute drive away from the casino.

So the logistics of this now make zero sense. The casino supposedly has such a problem with panhandlers that they'll pay an insane amount to make them go away ... yet they're out in a very remote location where panhandling would likely be at an extreme minimum?

I also can't find any reference to a program like this through Google.

Nothing in the Twin Arrows promotions even resembles giving away $15 per day plus a meal. If this is based on anything in reality, it might be some bumbo signing up for a players card and getting $15 plus a free meal as a new player bonus ... that would be a one-time thing though (and an unusually generous one for any old rando), not an ongoing daily offer. Those "welcome offers" at casinos also change fairly often.

Yeah, so this is pretty clearly garbage.

If he didn't just deliriously make the whole thing up, I think the guy is getting a bunch of stuff mixed up in his mind.

The one accurate thing here is that Walmart parking lots are known sleep spots for all sorts of vehicle dwellers. Since the 1990s, the company has unofficially had a policy of tolerating RVers staying for a night as long as they buy something. Of course, this policy is totally unofficial, and some stores have gone on the offensive when the local vehicular homebums bomb the place out every night with their ratty vans and such. The one in Flagstaff appears to already have been blown up by the homeless, which is not a surprise. Arizona is a homeless magnet for the warm weather all year, and tweakers particularly like it for the fresh meth supply from the Mexican cartels just across the border. Flagstaff is at a higher elevation and is cold and snowy in the winter, but is probably a nice place to be in summer when the southern deserts are too boiling hot to live in a car.

This guy may also be getting the city's "Better Bucks" social program confused with a casino offer. Flagstaff apparently provides homeless with voucher books for essentials like groceries and bus fare. But it's a pretty safe bet that $15 for the casino isn't in there.

Whatever the case, I'm 99.9% sure this is just another hobo tall tale.