Businesses fed up with Fresno’s homelessness crisis. Is anti-camping law solving anything?
Local shop owners say they’ve lost patience with Fresno’s homelessness crisis and the city’s response to it as people with erratic or antisocial behavior living on the street keeps costing them business.
The frustration from merchants in parts of the city where public loitering is most pervasive comes months after the Fresno City Council adopted an anti-camping ordinance that made homeless loitering a misdemeanor crime. The ordinance, which took effect in late September, gives police the authority to arrest and jail homeless people who defy orders to leave an area.
City Hall leaders stressed they needed a law with teeth to use against homeless people who refused help. And while the new law was well-received by many local businesses when it was introduced, merchants say they haven’t seen any meaningful change in the first few months since the new law gave officers the power to make arrests. .
Owners said their bottom line is hurt by folks who loiter outside for long periods of time, relieve themselves in the open and panhandle, sometimes aggressively.
Eyesores of homeless encampments on empty lots and people sleeping on shopping center sidewalks — which the new law aimed to target — are still evident near the downtown DiCicco’s Italian Restaurant on Blackstone Avenue.
Owner Joanna Vitucci Lopez said it’s common to see people meandering around the entrance and leaving human waste in the restaurant’s parking lot, crimping earnings by about 30 percent, she said.
“When people pull up and they see four or five or six men sitting there, with a mess around them, they feel unsafe so they just don’t stop, or they get back in their car and drive away,” she said. “I have no lunch time business anymore. All of my business that I do have is basically Door Dash and delivery.”
Like many business owners who have a stubborn problem with people loitering, Vitucci Lopez said she can’t always get police to respond to the 70-year-old location. Even when they do, the loiterers return within a couple of days.
“I understand the police have far more dangerous things to worry about than people around my restaurant,” she said. “But if I can’t pay my bills, I can’t pay my taxes.”
She hired her own security, which has prevented any significant theft issues, but the guard’s ability to deal with people who won’t leave only goes so far.
Police have made more than 200 arrests under the new ordinance as of early December. Records show officers have largely targeted enforcement in downtown and busy corridors across the city, like Blackstone Avenue and River Park.
Fresno’s homeless population is significant at 1,800 or so unsheltered people living on city streets while the roughly 1,000 shelter beds are almost always full.
Luis Jovel, who has owned Luis’s Custom Shoes & Cowboy Boot Maker at Cedar and Shields avenues since 1990, said he faces many of the same quality of life issues as Vitucci Lopez.
“They are yelling bad words and there are people who are talking like they have somebody next to them, but there is nobody there,” he said. “Very scary.”
His shop tends to skew toward an older crowd, he said, and many customers tell him they’re afraid to walk past unhoused people acting erratically outside his door.
Some people sleep up against the building to cut down on the cold wind at night, he said. There is the occasional defecation in the bushes, he said.
While he wants to be compassionate by giving them what he can, he said, he’s afraid he’ll enable bad habits. The constant loitering is bad for business, he said.
“What happens is when you help them or when you are nice to them, they don’t want to leave,” he said.
Jovel said he wants the city to build more shelters, noting there is no shortage of unused buildings and space in Fresno.
A business owner in the Tower District who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation from people encamped near his store said he struggles to attract shoppers from the north side of town. The owner worries that pervasive loitering has soured his shop’s reputation for some consumers.
The store he’s owned about eight years is often a victim of vandalism, but not theft, he said, which he attributed to people who are encamped in parts of Tower District who may be struggling with drugs or mental health issues.
He said he communicates with the Homeless Assistance Response Team, a police officer crew known as HART, but only sees short-term results before the loitering resumes.
“I think they’re trying to do something, but I don’t think it’s solving anything really,” he said.
At least one other ex-owner in the Tower District made his frustrations clear. Louie Maglieri said in June he would never again own a business in Fresno after his frustrations came to a head following a fire at his eatery, Oggi Cosi Si Mangia on Van Ness Avenue just south of Olive Avenue.
He said he had too many run-ins with the unhoused and not enough solutions to make re-opening the Italian restaurant worthwhile.
“I just canceled everything and moved on,” he told The Bee in June. “I’m done.”
This story was originally published January 7, 2025 at 12:54 PM.
