Old Station Subs owner Joe Faillace gave an update on the homeless crisis in Phoenix, Arizona, after he won a legal battle to clear a homeless encampment outside his restaurant.
“I think it’s a permanent fix,” Faillace said on “America’s Newsroom,” explaining that the police were monitoring his restaurant.
“There’s definitely more police presence,” he said. “This was the first time that I can remember that I came down to my restaurant and there was just no one around. It was just clear. It was nice.”
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The neighborhood where Faillace has worked for almost 40 years, according to The New York Times, has been completely changed after a Maricopa County judge “ordered the city to clear away its largest homeless encampment, a tent city of more than 1,000 residents known as The Zone” on Sept. 20.
“The difference over the last six months is something I never believed was even possible,” he told The Times. “It’s an entirely new place. Every day feels like a miracle.”
Faillace told Fox News that one of the reasons he believes he won the case was that the homeless crisis in Phoenix has become extremely serious.
“I think that’s one of the reasons why we won the case was because it’s just gotten out of control,” he said. “The pee, the poop, the defecation, fornication, the deaths: there was a fetus left in the street one day.”
“Somebody murdered somebody and threw him in the dumpster,” the shop owner said, referencing how a body was found burning in a downtown Phoenix dumpster in March.
Faillace said that he didn’t realize how insane the situation in Maricopa County had become until The New York Times interviewed him for a story about the homeless crisis that was published Tuesday.
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“It was insane,” he said. “It took the New York Times guy coming down here and talking to me for four days to make me realize how bad it really was.”
Faillace, who is 70 years old, said that he was more focused on the day-to-day work he had running his sandwich shop. “You have to get up, you have to go to work, you have to make a living, you want to survive,” he said.
The homeless crisis has spread far beyond his neighborhood, Faillace explained.
“They just need to change their mindset,” he said of local leadership. “It’s just not in The Zone anymore. It’s all over the city.”
“There’s homeless everywhere now,” he said.
