Crime … Depravity … Outdoor mental asylum.” And in Phoenix, where the number of people living on the street had more than tripled since 2016, businesses had begun hiring private security firms to guard their property and lawyers to file a lawsuit against the city for failing to manage “a great humanitarian crisis.” A group of fed up small-business owners in Santa Monica, Calif., had hung a banner on the city’s promenade that read: “Santa Monica Is NOT safe.
In Seattle, more than 2,300 businesses had left downtown since the beginning of 2020. Cities across the West had been transformed by a housing crisis, a mental health crisis and an opioid epidemic, all of which landed at the doorsteps of small businesses already reaching a breaking point because of the pandemic. That had seemed to them like an open question each morning for the last three years, as an epidemic of unsheltered homelessness began to overwhelm Phoenix and many other major American downtowns. “It’s the usual chaos and suffering,” he told Debbie. A man was weaving down the sidewalk in the direction of Joe’s restaurant with a saw, muttering to himself and then stopping to urinate a dozen feet from Joe’s outdoor tables. A young woman was lying in the middle of the street, wrapped beneath a canvas advertising banner. On this February morning, he could see a half-dozen men pressed around a roaring fire. He looked out the window toward Madison Street, which had become the center of one of the largest homeless encampments in the country, with as many as 1,100 people sleeping outdoors. He picked up the phone and dialed his wife and business partner, Debbie Faillace, 60. Fake flowers remained undisturbed on every table. The peace sign was still hanging above the entryway. He parked on a street lined with three dozen tents, grabbed his Mace and unlocked the door to his restaurant. He had been coming into work at the same sandwich shop at the same exact time every weekday morning for the last four decades, but now Joe Faillace, 69, pulled up to Old Station Subs with no idea what to expect.
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