A lonely outpost in Tent City
Joe and Debbie Faillace built a small sandwich shop in downtown Phoenix, said Eli Saslow in The New York Times. Then a tidal wave of homelessness and human misery crashed down on them.
HE HAD BEEN coming into work at the same Phoenix sandwich shop every weekday morning for the past 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. 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 street. 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.
“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 past three years, as an epidemic of unsheltered homelessness began to overwhelm Phoenix. 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 Phoenix, where the number of people living on the streets 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 on to 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.
Debbie arrived to help with the lunch rush, and she greeted customers at the register while Joe prepared tomato sauce and weighed out turkey for chef’s salads. They kept making sandwiches for a loyal group of regulars even as the city transformed around them—its population growing by about 25,000 each year, 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. 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 in an industrial neighborhood that had always attracted a small number of transients. Over the years, Joe and Debbie came to know many by name and listened to their stories of eviction, medical debt, mental illness, and addiction, and together they agreed that it was their job to offer not only compassion but help.
They had given out water, opened their bathroom to the public, and cashed unemployment and disability checks at no extra cost. They hired a sandwich maker who was homeless and had lost his teeth after years of addiction; a dishwasher who lived in the women’s shelter and first came to the restaurant for lunch with her parole officer; a cleaner who slept a few blocks away on a wooden pallet and washed up in the bathroom before her shift.
But the homeless population in Phoenix continued to grow. Soon there were hundreds of people sleeping within a few blocks of Old Station. They slept on Joe and Debbie’s outdoor tables, defecated behind their back porch, smoked methamphetamine in their parking lot, washed clothes in their bathroom sink, pilfered bread from
their delivery trucks, had sex on their patio, masturbated within view of their employees, and lit fires that burned down trees and scared away customers. Finally, Joe and Debbie could think of nothing else to do but to start calling police.
Within a half-mile of their restaurant, police had been called to an average of eight incidents a day in 2022. There were at least 1,097 calls for emergency medical help, 573 fights or assaults, 236 incidents of trespassing, 185 fires, 140 thefts, 125 armed robberies, 13 sexual assaults, and four homicides. The remains of a 20- to 24-week-old fetus were burned and left next to a dumpster in November. Two people were stabbed to death in their tents. Sixteen others were found dead from overdoses, suicide, hypothermia, or excessive heat. The city had tried to begin more extensive cleaning of the encampment, but advocates for people without housing protested that it was inhumane, and in December the American Civil Liberties Union successfully filed a federal lawsuit to keep people on the street from being “terrorized” and “displaced.”
And now Joe and Debbie arrived for work on another morning and noticed a woman sprawled on the sidewalk with her face against the pavement. “Let’s give her a bit to get sorted,” Debbie said. But at lunchtime, the woman had barely moved, and two hours later she was still lying there, as the temperature climbed and Debbie began to imagine the worst possibilities. Debbie picked up the phone and dialed 911. “I’m concerned,” she said.
“It sounds like someone who could be resting,” the dispatcher told her. “Maybe,” Debbie said. “But I’m about to go home for the day. Can you do a wellness check?”
The dispatcher explained that it wasn’t possible to send a full team of emergency medical workers to check on every person on the street, and she suggested that Debbie approach the woman herself to ask if she needed help.
“I’ll stay on the line with you,” the dispatcher offered. Debbie stood by her car and watched the woman’s chest rise and fall. “Fine,” she said. “Keep doing nothing.” She hung up and drove home. A while later, the woman got up off the sidewalk and walked to a tent across the street.
THE WOMAN’S NAME was Shina Sepulveda, and she had been living in the encampment for a few weeks or maybe for a few months. It was hard to know for sure, she said, because she had been experiencing delusions. What she remembered was escaping from a cult in Mesa, Ariz., building the first internet search engine, losing billions of dollars to a government conspiracy, cutting wiretaps out of her brain, retaking her dynastic name of Espy Rockefeller, and then moving onto a sidewalk across the street from Old Station Subs.
For as long as she had been homeless, she’d tried to nap during the relative safety of the day. At night she put on makeup and sat down at a plywood desk, where a handwritten nameplate introduced her as “Doctor, Poet, Psychologist, Partner at Law,” and where in reality she was now the 47-year-old caretaker of a half-dozen people—because, even if many of her stories were fantastical, she had earned a reputation for being generous and kind and for knowing a bit about everything.
“Hey, Espy, can you help me?” Brandon Mack said as he walked over from his tent. He lifted his shirt to reveal two stab wounds from a few days earlier. He had fought over a coveted corner spot on the sidewalk, walked to the emergency room, gotten 18 stitches, and then returned to recover on a molding mattress in a partly burned tent.
Espy took out a pair of scissors, scrubbed them with hand sanitizer, and started to cut away a few of his stitches. She wiped away the pus and blood with napkins, tossing them into the street. Then she turned her attention to the next person in need of help. Cecilia wanted soap, so Espy handed her a bar she had scavenged from the nearby shelter. C.J. was drunk and needed help getting into the street to go to the bathroom. A man known as K.D. was moving his tent down the sidewalk because he’d gotten into an argument with a neighbor who insulted his pit bull. “Nobody talks down to Dots,” K.D. said. “I’m ready to go off. I’m armed and dangerous.”
“I was a police officer,” Espy told him. “If you really have to shoot, don’t aim to kill. Just fire a warning shot.”
JOE CAME INTO work the next morning and saw a bag of drugs in the road, human waste on the sidewalk, a pit bull wandering the street, and blood-soaked napkins blowing toward his restaurant, where he and Debbie were scheduled to meet with a real estate agent. “Are we getting any bites?” Joe asked the agent, Mike Gaida.
“Oh, yeah. I get calls every week,” Mike said, and he explained that at least 25 potential buyers had looked over the financials and recognized a strong family business for the reasonable price of $165,000. Several bailed once Mike mentioned the encampment, but at least a dozen potential buyers secretly came to check out the property. “Most of the time, they don’t call back,” Mike said.
A few days later, when Joe arrived for work, he heard the sound of a gunshot coming from across the street and a bullet pinging off a nearby fence. He hurried inside and called police. “Yeah, it’s Joe again, over at Old Station,” he said, and a few minutes later two police officers were walking the perimeter of his restaurant, searching for the bullet. Soon Debbie would be waking up and getting ready for work.
“What the heck am I going to tell her to keep her from losing it?” Joe wondered, and he began to rehearse the possibilities in his head. It was only one bullet. Nobody had gotten hurt. Police had come right away. The shooter wasn’t targeting the restaurant. The gunshot was random. It could have happened anywhere.
Joe went outside to get some air. K.D. was ranting on the sidewalk, contorting his fingers into the shape of a gun, and then firing it off at the sky. “This could be the last straw for her,” Joe said, and then he saw Debbie driving toward the parking lot, steering around K.D. and hurrying through the gate.
“Wow. Tough morning?” she asked. He took her inside the restaurant while he tried to come up with the right words. It was only one shot. The restaurant was still standing. They’d run Old Station together for 37 years, and maybe they could hang on for a while longer. But instead, Joe told her the only thing that felt true.
“The whole thing’s a disaster,” he said. “I get it. It’s OK. I understand why you’re done.”
A version of this story originally appeared in The New York Times. Used with permission.