Hi, I'm Uisas Low and I'm a writer at large for The New York Times.

For this week's Sunday read, I'm going to be sharing a story that I wrote for the paper,

it's about a couple that has been running a sandwich shop near the Arizona State Capitol

in Phoenix, Arizona for 37 years.

And now surrounding that business is one of the largest homeless encampments in the

country, where on some nights, 1,100 people are sleeping outdoors, intense, in clapboard

structures on wooden pallets in the middle of the road, sometimes just face down on the

sidewalk within blocks and sometimes, frankly, within feet of their business.

I write about how the big issues in the country impact people's lives and I've seen homelessness

increasing around the country in a lot of my reporting trips and also in the city where

I live in Portland, Oregon, where homelessness is the number one issue for everybody here

and also increasingly the number one political issue for many cities across the American West.

So once I started thinking about that issue, I began calling business owners around the

country and trying to figure out where is a place that I can go to not only inform people

about this story but hopefully to make them feel it, to make them understand what it's

like.

I talked to dozens of business owners.

I thought maybe I would go to San Jose or Sacramento or San Francisco or Salt Lake City.

And in this canvassing of making a bunch of calls, I learned about what was happening in

Phoenix where there is a homeless encampment on the edges of downtown that is larger than

all but maybe one or two encampments in the country.

One of those calls was to Joe and Debbie and I think what immediately made their story

...