Tacoma’s deadliest street is spiraling out of control. How did it become a ‘war zone’?

For months, Janelle Wright entered motel rooms in Tacoma, battleworn and scanning for threats, with two sharpened hatchets hanging from her hips.

The hazards that sometimes lurked behind the doors of HomeTowne Studios on South Hosmer Street could hide between the folds of bedsheets: a needle with unknown substances waiting to stick a careless hand. On other occasions, violent guests and trespassers posed a grave risk to her safety.

Wright, 40, said she chased people off the property and ran from those who attacked her when she accidentally startled them awake from drug-induced slumbers in rooms. She followed others who had guns. Unruly guests and unwelcome visitors caused havoc, leaving behind fentanyl and other hard drugs or paraphernalia.

At night, people would break into rooms. Guests would rip off latches and remove pins from room doors, leaving entryways exposed for them to illegally return. A security guard was brutally assaulted. Wright said she nearly got assailed at a nearby bus stop by a man huffing some drug.

When a beaten and bloodied victim pleaded for help after fleeing armed attackers from a motel across the street, Wright said she and other staff hunkered down with him for several hours in the front office until police showed up.

It would be a dangerous job for any law enforcement or security officer. Except Wright was a housekeeper.

“This is not Renton, this is not Kirkland, this is not Bellevue,” she said. “This is Hosmer. It’s basically its own town, it’s its own city, its own rules.”

A News Tribune investigation illustrates the chaos enveloping the deadliest street in Tacoma, South Hosmer Street, a commercial strip home to small businesses, homeless camps and the city’s biggest cluster of motels and hotels that have increasingly become a battleground in a desperate fight against rising crime. Stories shared by those who live and work there paint the corridor as a perilous place spiraling out of control.

After three homicides on South Hosmer Street between 2020 and 2021, there have been five reported so far this year, more than any other street in the city. Each occurred within a three-block radius near the corridor’s southernmost tip. All were connected to an open or shuttered motel or hotel.

The troubling stories at HomeTowne Studios, which prompted Wright to quit her job in July, are alarmingly frequent throughout the corridor in Tacoma’s South End.

South Hosmer Street — which former Tacoma Mayor Bill Baarsma was “almost certain” was named after city pioneer Theodore Hosmer, the Hosmer House namesake — runs adjacent to Interstate 5 in the south central part of a diverse district made up of working families, many of whom travel elsewhere for jobs, according to Councilman Joe Bushnell, who represents it. The area has historically lacked investment, he said.

Driving down the relatively non-descript five-lane street, motorists will find a central gas station, a Chinese seafood restaurant and a Jehovah’s Witness church among the rows of motels, hotels and other establishments, which include a few strip malls offering standard fare: manicures, massage, smoking products and coin laundry, for example.

The street has “always been a problem,” according to Stephen Hagberg, the city’s Community Police Advisory Committee chairman, who said he grew up less than a mile away from the strip.

“During the ‘80s, we had problems with the gangs. That went away for a while; things got better,” he said. “Now we’re into a whole different world, with shootings and drugs going along on Hosmer, making things worse again.”

The nature of crime is different now too, because it is more random, according to Patricia Barre, who returned to her childhood home on 90th Street near the corridor eight years ago.

“It’s frightening, truthfully. I have a whole security system. I have cameras all around my house,” Barre said, noting that people constantly walk past her home at all hours. “I feel like I live in my own prison.”

The economically struggling area, which scores “very low” in overall equity in a city ranking system, has been marred by an increase in open-air drug use, shootings and general lawlessness, according to businesses and neighbors.

There has been a fair amount of finger-pointing and deflection for the street’s troubles.

People who run businesses there criticized short-staffed law enforcement for slow or non-existent responses to calls and the city for inaction. They said that people experiencing homelessness were causing at least some of the problems. Police said each call was unique, they answered requests for aid by prioritizing violent offenses over property crimes and that often people assume officers did not show up to a scene only because officers did not make contact with them. City officials said that they have made South Hosmer Street a focal point.

Homeless service providers argued that unhoused people were an easy target for blame yet just as vulnerable to the street’s dangers as anyone. Motel and hotel managers insisted that they are doing their utmost to keep trouble at bay under chaotic conditions.

“It’s very hard every day to try to come to work in a war zone,” said Taran Johal, manager at the family-run Rothem Inn.

In interviews with business proprietors, neighbors and others, there was disagreement over whether the street had hit rock bottom and was slightly improving or if it was mid-plummet with the worst yet to come. Wright said she and other former and current HomeTowne Studios employees had reached a consensus.

“Them cheap hotels need to be shut down because it’s attracting so much,” she said.

Any beliefs that the corridor could be rescued are tempered by acknowledgments that it will be a lengthy endeavor.

“I don’t see anything changing quickly at all,” said Tami Rasmussen, the former regional manager at the since-sold Econo Lodge. “It’s going to take an awful lot of time.”

The motel, which will transition into low-income housing, garnered a particularly menacing reputation. The presence of drugs, prostitution and human trafficking of young girls were commonplace, according to Rasmussen. Staff carried mace and Tasers.

She said the motel has gotten worse since it changed hands in March. Younger gang members and people experiencing homelessness seized deserted, boarded-up rooms, she said. Shootings are a regular occurrence.

So unnerved by crime in the area, the new owners, Sage Investment Group, took the bold step of trying to engage drug dealers, including one self-described “King of the Econo Lodge,” to see what it might take to move them out of the area, according to Emily Hubbard, the company’s co-founder.

“They all, of course, want large paper bags full of cash,” Hubbard said.

There are efforts underway by law enforcement and city officials to address immediate and deep-rooted issues on the commercial strip, including with increased police presence and by engaging business leaders and others to participate in a long-term solution.

Tacoma Police Chief Avery Moore told The News Tribune in June that at least part of the corridor would receive more police attention under the department’s hot-spot plan, which will be data-driven and focused on crime-prone addresses in the city.

Neighbors who recently spoke with the newspaper in the 90th Street neighborhood near South Hosmer Street reported a heightened police presence over the past month or so, including police vehicles parked in the corridor’s center lanes.

“Officers know that Hosmer is an area where there has been a lot of violent crime,” said Tacoma Police Department Lt. Jeff Katz, the community policing division commander for the area. “They know where they’re going.”

Katz said he could not pinpoint one specific reason why the corridor has been so troubled, except to say that “it’s a complex web of social and historical factors that lead to that.”

Recent pandemic-era and legislative policies also have affected how police respond to calls, he said. Pierce County Jail booking restrictions limiting bed space to largely the most serious offenders has eliminated jail as an option for lower-level illegal activity, such as property crime and trespassing, and state laws passed last year dictate when and how law enforcement may use force.

Bushnell, the councilman, said he is working with the community to come up with the long-term course of action, which he hopes will bring systemic change to the area.

“It’s not fast enough. People are hurting now,” he said. “Right now, the future looks bleak.”

Those who live nearby have added home security systems, noticed more gated yards in their neighborhood than before and limited their children’s outside play.

“With the bullets flying and stuff, it’s not safe,” said Kristy Enick, who lives in a neighborhood on 90th Street.

Crime on the corridor

The number of crimes reported on South Hosmer Street, from 72nd to 96th streets, increased nearly 72 percent from 2014 to 2021, according to a News Tribune analysis of South Sound 911 data, which excludes domestic violence and sexual-related offenses, as well as incidents still subject to ongoing investigations.

Most of those incidents occurred between the 7900 and 8800 blocks — a roughly half-mile section where reported crimes more than doubled from 219 in 2014 to 447 last year, the analysis found.

Data through July 16 showed that the crime rate was on pace to slightly increase this year.

While rising violent and property crime is a citywide problem with particular hot spots, South Hosmer Street stands out: Data shows that a significant chunk of its 1.5-mile stretch has been among the highest-crime areas in Tacoma.

Since 2014, eight South Hosmer Street blocks rank in the top 40 of city blocks with the most reported offenses, according to the analysis, appearing more often than any other street on that list.

Charelle Gogue said she has already grown familiar with the sounds of police sirens and gunshots in the month since she moved into her parents’ 90th street home after relocating from Guam in July.

“I don’t know if it’s a shooting or fireworks,” said Gogue, 33, as she found reprieve from a beating early August sun underneath a front-yard canopy. “It’s hard to tell sometimes.”

Her parents, who have lived there for a decade, were not strangers to the reputation of the corridor: It was the “devil’s playground,” she said they had told her.

The 8800 block of South Hosmer Street, the area that includes Wright’s former employer and the Econo Lodge, had the 11th most crimes reported since 2014, the News Tribune analysis found. The adjacent 8700 block ranked 16th.

A major shopping center immediately north of South Hosmer Street – the 1900 block of 72nd Street – ranked third.

The source of the most reported crimes since 2014 came from a block much further north that includes the Tacoma Mall – largely general theft, shoplifting, stolen vehicles and theft from vehicles – highlighting what the data showed elsewhere: Commercial hubs in Tacoma are generally the most exposed to illegal activities.

That includes violent crime, unlike in larger cities, which see it most at multifamily housing developments, according to Mike Smith, Criminal Justice Department chair at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Smith, who helped develop the city’s recently revealed hot-spot initiative, said in an email that it was unclear why violent crime in Tacoma happens in the clusters that it does, though perhaps part of the reason is that the city has comparatively fewer large, low-income apartment complexes.

Evidence suggests that three factors needed to exist for a crime to occur, he said: A suitable victim, a motivated offender and a lack of a capable guardian.

The troubles on South Hosmer Street have been, in some ways, a microcosm for the city, where violent crime has nearly doubled in the past 12 months, including 31 homicides so far in 2022, which is on pace to break the record of 33 set in 1994 and again last year.

The corridor has seen a spate of dangerous incidents this year.

A hotel employee shot and injured a knife-wielding man who attacked two workers and a bystander; Tacoma firefighters were reportedly threatened by a large crowd of people — some armed with guns — at a motel as they treated an unresponsive patient, prompting a massive police response; and a man pointed a firearm at passing vehicles and others, allegedly pulling the trigger twice while aiming at a security guard, but the gun did not fire.

Residents of the 90th Street neighborhood described how the dangers down the road can spill into their own driveways. After a woman banged on her door at 3 a.m., seeking help after she had been shot at leaving the Econo Lodge, Enick said she was left so uneasy that she recently obtained a license to carry a concealed weapon.

Enick, 38, has lived in the neighborhood for 10 years. She said she believed that South Hosmer Street’s crime problem was drug-related and fueled by certain motels. The Econo Lodge, she said, was the epicenter.

Joyce Maina, who runs a home for adults in need of care in the neighborhood, said she will not step out at night and tells clients not to leave the house unaccompanied. Still, Maina, 53, said hers is a tight-knit area where neighbors watch over each other, and she believes it had become more peaceful as of late.

“It’s hard to tell” if that peace will last, she said.

There is no doubt that some of the lodging properties on the strip have contributed to the escalation of crime, according to Bushnell, although he did not fault the establishments. Instead he blamed drug dealers for using them to target people struggling with addiction and thus bringing other criminal activity often associated with the trade.

The city has considered corrective action on certain properties on South Hosmer Street by applying a code that targets chronic nuisance establishments, based on the occurrence of specific recurring activities such as illegal drug activity, prostitution and disorderly conduct, although no actions had been taken as of late August, according to city Tax and License manager Danielle Larson.

Most often, city spokesperson Maria Lee said, city officials have been able to resolve issues without using the code.

Proliferation of problems

Wright arrived at HomeTowne Studios in August last year through a smartphone app for temporary jobs.

Moving from Seattle to work, Wright said she was oblivious to the violence and drugs that awaited her. It was an ordinary first day. Within a week, a coworker quit after being pricked by a needle left on a bed. Wright quickly became accustomed to being on high alert.

“I’m looking at my surroundings immediately, before I even come into the building,” Wright said. “I’ll see who’s creeping, who’s trying to get in on the side doors, who’s getting high.”

Wright said she started off cleaning rooms by herself, but, as problems worsened, housekeepers began teaming up in pairs. She liked to listen to music during work — often upbeat tunes to help stay positive. When Wright smelled drama, though, she tuned in to metal: Rammstein’s aggressive “Du Hast” was a favorite.

Issues among coworkers and dangerous situations led Wright to leave her job several times, but she always returned because she had bills to pay, she said, and needed the roughly $20 an hour she was earning in a supervisory role by the end of her employment. Wright said her predecessor had made less than $15.

It was not until her final tenure that her housekeeping uniform became battle-ready. She bought her first hatchet at Lowe’s. The second was a gift from a long-time worker who often acted as impromptu security. Wright said that while she “almost” had to use her weapons, she never did.

South Hosmer Street is home to nine of the city’s 23 currently licensed hotels and motels, according to city data. An operating Motel 6 – technically on 76th Street but facing Hosmer Street – received the 10th city license in the immediate area in August.

The corridor had been even more congested prior to the recent sale and closures of some lodging properties, including the Comfort Inn, Howard Johnson and Econo Lodge.

On a street known for trouble, the proliferation of motels and hotels is in the thick of it — a few more frequently and severely than others.

In January, Demonte Williams, 29, was discovered shot in the Howard Johnson motel parking lot — the first of five homicides on South Hosmer Street thus far this year. Each had a similar theme: a person shot, or at least found shot, in a lodging establishment parking lot. Or in the case of 40-year-old Joshua Ferrell — his motel room.

In two of the four cases where an arrest had been made as of late August, charging documents provided potential motives for the slayings: A possible drug robbery and a domestic argument. In another case, an altercation preceded the gun violence. In another, the victim was killed in a drive-by shooting.

Police calls for service at 12 motels and hotels on South Hosmer Street collectively grew more than 24 percent from 2018 to 2021, a News Tribune analysis found, reflecting data for some properties that have since ceased operations after being sold.

Most often, people sought police intervention at three lodging establishments: the Econo Lodge, HomeTowne Studios and the Howard Johnson — sites of four of the five reported homicides this year.

Between 2018 and 2021, the three properties collectively drew more than 3,900 calls for service, according to the News Tribune’s analysis. Nine other hotels or motels on the street – including the Holiday Inn Express, where one homicide was reported this year – together prompted fewer than 3,500 calls (It is worth noting that, for 15 months until July 2021, the Holiday Inn Tacoma Mall operated as a Pierce County COVID-19 isolation and quarantine center).

The new owners of the now fenced-off Howard Johnson motel, which was sold in June 2021 and is no longer licensed for lodging activity, did not return messages. Emails sent to addresses that records indicated belonged to the motel’s former owners also went unanswered.

Lori Chandler, district manager at Westmont Hospitality Group, which owns HomeTowne Studios, raised many of the same concerns as Wright. Although the company did not permit staff to carry weapons, “I get it,” she said.

“The city doesn’t have control,” Chandler said. “The criminals have control and they know that.”

The Econo Lodge, the site of two homicides this year — one after it closed — and four since 2020, averaged more than one call for service per day from 2018 to 2021, more than any other motel or hotel on South Hosmer Street, the data shows.

The 1,600-plus calls that originated from the motel over that period were most frequently for welfare checks, disturbances, reports of an unwanted subject and 911 reports where the caller could not be contacted, according to the data.

The reason behind the high volume of calls was simple: The motel needed a lot of help, according to Rasmussen, the former regional manager at the Econo Lodge, who retains the role for the Quality Inn & Suites under the same ownership.

“I expected police to do their job,” she said.

‘What can we do?’ Hotels at a loss

The Econo Lodge was, and continues to be, a magnet for drugs, human trafficking and other nefarious behavior, according to Rasmussen. She said that she and other motel staff would filter guests, require identification – including for visitors – and call the police on bad actors. Often, people ejected for trespassing would migrate to a nearby lodging establishment, get kicked out and try elsewhere, creating a flow of unwanted traffic.

For two years, some 60 people stayed at the motel without paying rent, causing issues that were fueled by drugs, gang activity and prostitution, she said. They could not be removed due to the pandemic-related eviction moratorium in place at the time, she added, costing the establishment north of $1 million in lost revenue.

Since the Econo Lodge’s sale and closure in March, Rasmussen claimed that an estimated 50 squatters had taken up quarters there, and at least some who congregated at that motel wandered over to the adjacent Quality Inn to cause problems.

Someone recently broke into a Quality Inn room and, after security went inside, sprayed the entire floor with bear spray, forcing guests to check out. Rasmussen watched an employee shoot an assailant armed with a knife. She said she has had a gun pointed in her face by someone breaking into a vehicle. A guest and a housekeeper were nearly struck by a stray bullet through a window.

“Who wants to wonder about, are you going to be alive if you come to work today?” she said.

Room rentals were down 60 percent this year, she said, and the owners have considered selling that property, too.

“You can’t continue to run a business like that,” she said. “You won’t survive. Just won’t survive.”

Those who run other motels or hotels on the corridor suggested their establishments, not unlike other types in the area, were at the whim of the environment despite their efforts to fend off blatant criminal activity.

Law-abiding guests could be unwittingly thrust into an unpredictable climate. The customer base has become almost exclusively local since the pandemic, at least at some motels, although tourists and out-of-towners still stop by. On occasion, Wright has offered would-be patrons a warning.

“Every night we get somebody’s room being broken in(to), somebody trying to break in your room either through your door or through your window,” she recalled explaining to one group which ended up not sticking around. “Which one do you prefer?”

At the Rothem Inn, most guests are working people who, perhaps with an eviction or two on their record, are in need of a relatively inexpensive place to sleep and shower as they get back on their feet, according to Johal, the motel’s manager.

“People will pay more to not have to stay in this area,” he said.

Like other properties, the Rothem Inn has faced problems with nefarious foot traffic and guests. Johal said lobby windows had twice been smashed in the past two years, and a maintenance worker was struck by a glass bottle heaved by an unruly patron.

“As business owners, we can only combat so much,” he said, rattling off the motel’s security measures, including implementing a no-visitor policy and denying access to people who appeared to be on drugs or intoxicated, as he called for more police intervention and criminal accountability.

Right now, he added, it is “a slow death of all of us.”

Chandler, who oversees HomeTowne Studios, said the motel has experienced guests overstaying their welcome, collecting zero rent from 27 rooms for two years amid a legal battle that remains ongoing. The vast majority of those room occupants were involved in criminal acts, she said.

“It’s not a homeless person looking for shelter,” she said about the street’s bad actors. “There’s always something else to it.”

The predictability of facing that “something else” prompted the motel to recently enact a no-cash payment system, and its next step is to cease renting rooms to locals, according to Chandler. This year, the motel installed more than $20,000 worth of fencing, closed off one of two entrances into the property, hired daily night guards and brightened the interior and exterior with LED lighting.

“I can’t do anymore than what we’re already doing,” she said. “It’s really exhausting for all of us.”

Motels no more: Influx of affordable housing planned on troubled Tacoma corridor

Shay Pate is general manager of the Holiday Inn Tacoma Mall on South Hosmer Street. Pate said the hotel has dealt with a rash of vehicle break-ins in the parking lot, despite maintaining security. As others did, Pate said she felt as if the bulk of responsibility to address the street’s woes was being put on business owners.

“We’re so busy keeping homeless people out of our lobbies and damaging our property, it’s like, ‘What can we do?’” she said.

The precariousness of the situation has enveloped those entrenched in the most dire circumstances.

Living conditions were not ideal at the largely boarded-up Econo Lodge in early July: The grounds were littered with trash, and people who remained in a room overwhelmed by personal artifacts said they had no hot water. A gated fence outside abutted the room’s back window, creating an obvious hazard in the event of a fire.

Evelyn Horton, 93, who shared the room with a granddaughter and others, acknowledged being only partially aware of her circumstances: They moved into the motel in November and changed units in February. The building had been sold, and she was not sure how they were paying rent.

“I don’t know what’s going on now, to tell you the truth,” Horton said from bed, lamenting the fact that she had not been able to shower for quite some time.

Horton was there during a shooting but said she did not see anything. She later moved in with a relative, while her granddaughter stayed behind.

Hubbard, co-founder of the company that bought the Econo Lodge, said that about a dozen rooms remained inhabited as of late July, as a result of holdover rental agreements between the former owner and people who could not be immediately evicted due to pandemic-era rules.

The immediate area remains dangerous.

Hubbard said contractors were shot at while performing demolition work on two unoccupied buildings, readying for the property’s forthcoming transition into low-income housing. The investment group installed watchtower surveillance cameras, which she said assisted law enforcement in making significant drugs and weapons busts, but the cameras were shot at, too.

“It’s definitely very much a hotbed of illegal activity, and it is affecting our business,” Hubbard said.

At a laundromat just a block north, an employee noted that a vehicle had crashed into a neighboring market’s front windows.

Mark, the employee, who did not provide his last name, said that people have entered the laundromat defiantly smoking cigarettes and that he has to kick out people sleeping on the sidewalks in front of the property every morning.

“Hosmer has always had action,” said Jimmy Brown, a worker who provides homeless services. “It’s just never been, I want to say, this bad.”

Desperate times on the streets

Homeless service providers concede that South Hosmer Street is tough, but, although they remain vigilant, they do not feel unsafe.

They also said it is unfair to lay broad blame at the feet of the area’s considerable number of unhoused people, who they saw as too often marginalized and broadly caught in the crossfire of violence.

Like business owners who suggested they were casualties of the street’s hazards, service providers who frequently visit the street said people experiencing homelessness too were vulnerable, whether it be having belongings stolen or, in some cases, drug addictions exploited.

The street’s access to drugs makes it an attractive destination for people struggling with addiction, including those experiencing homelessness, according to Brown, a team member with Comprehensive Life Services, which offers mental health assistance to unhoused people and others.

The concentration of lodging establishments has “made the area more exposed to that kind of activity,” said Luis Rivera Zayas, who is part of a homeless outreach team for the Tacoma Rescue Mission that visits South Hosmer Street several times weekly.

He said he knew of one group that disappears for a week when benefits arrive to spend their money on a room and indulge in “bad behaviors.”

Other times, the drug use occurs in the open, as recently witnessed by The News Tribune on 82nd Street, where a row of tents was set up between The Best Western Plus and Hampton Inn & Suites.

Desperate strangers are often faced with making a quick call about whether to join together to afford a room for a few nights, according to Joe Perva, who works for the Low Income Housing Institute, which operates Aspen Court, a temporary homeless shelter in the former Comfort Inn.

The resulting dynamic, particularly when involving other factors such as substance abuse, can be complex and volatile and breed conflict.

“It’s easy to get lost in a setting like that when you feel like people don’t care,” Perva said.

Stephanie Fallon, the homeless outreach manager for Comprehensive Life Services, emphasized that not everyone seeks out unlawful activity on South Hosmer Street. More so, she said, people experiencing homelessness are in “survival mode” and want to be near others who can protect them, which has thrust them into the corridor’s bad environment.

With resources lacking — including housing, mental-health treatment and substance-abuse programs — moving encampments simply meant shifting the problem elsewhere, Fallon said.

There are larger encampments in the city than on South Hosmer Street, according to service providers. Federal pandemic-era guidance not to disrupt such camps has made them generally more prevalent since 2020 and perhaps more visible on the condensed, commercial road.

Businesses band together

Perva was the lead organizer when area business leaders convened in May for the first monthly meeting of the Hosmer Business Association, a new consortium focused on improving the neighborhood. In April, he walked the street alongside Mayor Victoria Woodards, Moore and others.

Those efforts align with the first two phases of Bushnell’s five-step process to bring meaningful progress to South Hosmer Street: to orient and organize. The third phase is engagement, which Bushnell said will precede creating a vision and identifying funding sources, and then executing the plan.

While the group’s formation presents a potential for grant funding and a new avenue to workshop solutions, it is also only the most recent attempt from area stakeholders seeking to improve South Hosmer Street. Local resident groups have been at work, too, according to Darren Pen, a community mobilization specialist for Safe Streets Campaign, a grassroots neighborhood safety organization.

Pate recalled similar business-group meetings when the Holiday Inn Tacoma Mall was remodeled in 2018. She understood how such an association could help with landscaping, streetlights and covering up graffiti.

“But the unsafe situations?” she asked. “Why is that falling on us?”

Lee, the city spokeswoman, pointed to recent outreach efforts, including the visit from Woodards and other city officials to learn about the specific concerns of people who live and work in the area, as a sign that Tacoma was focused on improving South Hosmer Street.

“Ultimately, we want Tacoma to be a safe, thriving, healthy community,” she said in an email. “We value all community members, including property and business owners, and the Hosmer area continues to be a major priority for us.”

When the Hosmer Business Association met for a second time in June, its members came with concerns for Moore, the police chief, who spoke and listened to the group of roughly 45 people gathered inside the Tacoma Nursing & Rehabilitation Center, just south of where South Hosmer Street ends.

They again stressed that they felt police were too often sluggish or unresponsive to calls for help.

“When we called for action because we’re being assaulted, basically what I was told when I called was, if I’m actively being shot at, you’ll come out,” said Julie Duncan, a former prison guard and then the general manager for HomeTowne Studios. “Otherwise you’re not going to come.”

Moore said police were doing their jobs, but he noted the force has to prioritize violent crimes over other calls.

“A murder takes precedent over everything,” he said. “Property crime’s important, but not as important as someone being physically assaulted. But we don’t just not show up.”

Other businesses wanted guidance on when to call 911 and how to report vehicles without license plates; one apartment manager described drug dealers shutting down an entire side street at certain hours; another decried the exorbitant costs of hiring off-duty officers for security.

Some agreed that homelessness and brazen drug use presented bigger issues for lodging establishments than the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought staffing shortages and a 62 percent drop in business across Washington, according to an industry group.

Moore, who acknowledged the severity of the drug problem and described being shocked by the homelessness in the area, suggested that there would be no change without the community working in tandem with the city and police.

“It’s literally everybody’s responsibility, and if we don’t accept that responsibility, we will always have a crime problem,” he said.

An uncertain future

Whatever it might ultimately be, the path toward fixing South Hosmer Street appears steep, according to people interviewed for this story.

The demand for housing, mental-health and substance-abuse resources far outweighs the current supply, often presenting barriers for people experiencing homelessness. The police department was short some 50 officers as of February. The street is not pedestrian friendly. The historical problems on South Hosmer Street have left its bad stigma deeply entrenched.

“Currently you don’t want to walk around at night out there,” Bushnell said.

Most people interviewed were not encouraged that meaningful change was underway.

“Do I have hope? Absolutely.” said Chandler, the HomeTowne Studios representative. “Am I optimistic right now? No.”

Meanwhile, Wright no longer has to worry about “playing Robo Cop” the moment she shows up to work. Duncan also quit in July, not long after saying she felt unsafe and unable to protect her staff.

For Wright, stints at the hotel beginning last year affected her personal life. The job required wearing a tough exterior, which she worried might not be easily shed. She said she often felt overwhelmed and had been suicidal at one point.

“I’ve been in North Philly, South Philly, you know, Dallas, Texas. I’ve had to protect myself (from) gang violence and everything else,” she said. “By far, this little strip is the worst strip I have ever encountered.”

Wright is still working as a housekeeper, but in downtown Seattle, at a Pine Street hotel with more elegance, better pay and, so far, no fentanyl. She said it was good to be away from Hosmer Street, but at first, she felt out of place and had a hard time shaking the thought that anyone she walked past might try to hurt her.

“I’m looking like Mortal Kombat. I’ve got my face mask on and I have the blade here, looking just like Jago off Killer Instinct or something,” Wright said in late July, from the lobby of her new apartment, referring to combat video games. “I be like, ‘Round 1, fight,’ you know what I mean? And that’s where my mentality is still stuck, like I’m still at Hosmer.”

Now, when Wright goes into work, she’s “just a regular housekeeper,” she says. Her hatchets stay with her but tucked into a purse, ready in case any of Hosmer’s ills follow.