Joe Faillace looked out the front windows of his sandwich shop this month and barely recognized the neighborhood where he has worked for almost 40 years. There were no tents within view, no emergency sirens, no campfires, no drug users slumped over on his patio or the sidewalk. Instead, he saw customers walking down quiet,…
Patients with heat stroke and burns from the asphalt are swamping hospitals. Air-conditioners are breaking down at homeless shelters. The medical examiner’s office is deploying trailer-sized coolers to store bodies, for the first time since the early days of Covid. For 31 straight days — from the last day of June through Sunday, the second-to-last…
Why It Matters The Zone has become a flashpoint in a national debate over how to address the growth of street encampments where residents live in deep poverty and some face mental health challenges or fentanyl addiction. “This isn’t a life. It’s an existence,” Shina Sepulveda, who is homeless and lives in the Zone, told…