A Sandwich Shop, a Tent City, and an American Crisis

The US — and Canada, I have to say — seem to lack the competence or perhaps the will to deal with the crisis at hand. I believe that part of the problem is that the ruling oligarchy doesn’t really care about such problems, being focused instead on how to extract more money from the people and not really concerned about the consequences.

Eli Saslow reports in the NY Times:

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. He parked on a street lined with three dozen tents, grabbed his Mace and unlocked the door to his restaurant. The peace sign was still hanging above the entryway. Fake flowers remained undisturbed on every table. He picked up the phone and dialed his wife and business partner, Debbie Faillace, 60.

“All clear,” he said. “Everything looks good.”

“You’re sure? No issues?” she asked. “What’s going on with the neighbors?”

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. On this February morning, he could see a half-dozen men pressed around a roaring fire. A young woman was lying in the middle of the street, wrapped beneath a canvas advertising banner. 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.

“It’s the usual chaos and suffering,” he told Debbie. “But the restaurant’s still standing.”

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. 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. In Seattle, more than 2,300 businesses had left downtown since the beginning of 2020. 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. 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.”

The Faillaces had signed onto the lawsuit as plaintiffs along with about a dozen other nearby property owners. They also bought an extra mop to clean up the daily flow of human waste, replaced eight shattered windows with plexiglass, installed a wrought-iron fence around their property and continued opening their doors at exactly 8 each morning to greet the first customer of the day.

“Hey, bro! The usual?” Joe said to a construction worker who always ordered an Italian on wheat.

“Love the new haircut,” Joe said a few minutes later to a city employee who came for meatballs three days each week.

Debbie arrived to help with the lunch rush, and she greeted customers at the register, while Joe prepared tomato sauce and weighed out 2.2 ounces of turkey for each chef’s salad. Their margins had always been tight, but they saved on labor costs by both going into work every day. They remodeled the kitchen to make room for a nursery when their children were born and then expanded into catering to help those children pay for college. They kept making the same nine original house sandwiches for a loyal group of regulars even as the city transformed around them — its population growing by about 25,000 each year, inflation rising faster than in any other U.S. city, housing costs soaring at a record pace, until it seemed that there was nowhere left for people to go except onto sidewalks, into tents, into broken-down cars, and increasingly into the air-conditioned relief of Old Station Subs.

“I need to place a huge order,” a woman said as she walked up to the counter wearing mismatched shoes and carrying a garbage bag of her belongings. “I own Dairy Queen.”

“Oh, wow. Which one?” Debbie asked, playing along.

“All of them,” the woman said. “I’m queen of the queen.”

“That’s wonderful,” Debbie said as she led the woman to a table with a menu and a glass of water and watched as the woman emptied her bag onto the table, covering it with rocks, expired bus passes, a bicycle tire, clothing, 17 batteries, a few needles and a flashlight. “Would you like me to take an order?” Debbie asked.

“You know why I’m here,” the woman said, suddenly banging her fist against the table. “Don’t patronize me. The king needs his payment.”

Debbie refilled the woman’s water and walked behind the counter to find Joe. For the past several months, she had driven into work with stomach pain and stress headaches. She had started telling Joe that she was done at Old Station, whether that meant selling the restaurant, boarding it up or even moving away from Phoenix for a while without him. She had begun looking at real estate in Prescott, a small town about 100 miles away with a weekly art walk, mountain air, a few lakes.

“What am I supposed to tell this lady?” she asked him. “I can’t keep doing this. Every minute it’s something.”

Joe reached for her hand. “It’ll get better. Stick with me,” he said, but now they could hear the woman tossing some of her belongings onto the floor.

“The king needs his ransom!” she shouted.

“I’m sorry, but it’s time to go,” Debbie told her.

“You thieves. You devils,” the woman said.

“Please,” Debbie said. “This is our business. We’re just trying to get through lunch.”

Their restaurant was located a half-mile from the Arizona State Capitol in . . .

Continue reading.