From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   A Sandwich Shop, a Tent City and an American Crisis   
   By Eli Saslow, March 19, 2023, 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 3   
   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.”   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)