A once-desperate sandwich shop owner sees ‘a miracle’

Joe Faillace looked out the windows of his sandwich shop this month and barely recognized the neighborhood where he worked for nearly four decades. There were no tents in sight, no emergency sirens, no campfires, no drug users slumped on his patio or on the sidewalk. Instead, he watched customers walk through quiet, clean streets to his restaurant in time for a lunch rush that is now doubling its average daily sales from the start of the year.

“The difference in the last six months is something I never thought was even possible,” he said. “It’s a completely new place. Every day feels like a miracle.”

The transformation is in fact the culmination of a tedious, litigious and arduous process that has consumed much of downtown Phoenix since September 20, when a Maricopa County judge ordered the city’s largest homeless encampment, a tent city with more than 1,000 residents. residents known as The Zone. The judge ruled that the encampment had become a public nuisance, a place of “lawlessness and chaos” with such high crime rates that it violated the rights of local businesses, and should therefore be removed within 45 days.

The city spent more than $30 million in October to open three homeless shelters and then worked with a team of local nonprofits to clean up The Zone, block by block. Outreach workers provided temporary shelter to more than 700 people living in The Zone, and 585 ultimately accepted help and chose to move in. The city also added 362 temporary beds for longer-term housing and turned a nearby parking lot into a sanctioned camping area with security and portable toilets; several dozen people are now pitching their tents there.

In Phoenix, advocates for the homeless remain skeptical about whether the solutions will be enough to solve the crisis long-term. According to the latest official count, nearly 10,000 people are homeless in Maricopa County, a 70 percent increase since 2017, and the average rent continues to rise at three times the national rate. Some people who have spread out from The Zone have already begun gathering in tents and on sidewalks in other parts of downtown Phoenix.

“Our city staff and local nonprofits have mounted a heroic effort over the past several months to reach our unsheltered neighbors, move them indoors and ultimately clear this area,” said Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego. “I want to emphasize that this does not mean the end of our work to tackle the national homelessness crisis.”

Phoenix police will continue to patrol The Zone every day to ensure homeless campers don’t return, and local politicians and business owners have already begun meeting to discuss how to rebuild the neighborhood. “A lot of places have long-lasting scars from all of this, including Old Station,” Joe said. His wife and longtime business partner, Debbie, decided to leave the restaurant in the spring and move to a home in Prescott, Arizona, a few hours away. Joe hopes to rebuild his customer base in the coming months, sell the restaurant to recoup his retirement money and join her in Prescott sometime next year.

“She couldn’t stand being down here anymore with all the bad memories,” Joe said. “This has always been our place, so it’s a whole new world doing without her. It’s weird. It’s lonely. But at least now I have customers.”