News

Restaurants Struggle,

Landlords Step In Written by RYAN KRULL

As food writer Cheryl Baehr’s cover story in last week’s RFT attests, St. Louis restaurants are being devastated by COVID-19. “In mere weeks, the St. Louis restaurant community as a whole has gone from touting several James Beard Award nominations as a sign of its ascendance to having its very existence threatened by a global pandemic,” she wrote. Many restaurants’ biggest cost after food and labor is rent. This means a lot of beleaguered restaurants will have to turn to their landlords for a break, and at least some of those landlords have proven willing to ease the financial burden. The RFT has written plenty about bad landlords, but in this situation it looks like some property owners in St. Louis are trying to cut their tenants some slack.

“Our landlords have been great,” says Zach Rice, who with his wife Mary owns Three Monkeys in Tower Grove South. “They’ve given us a break on rent through April. They’re committed to keeping us in here. They want to see this neighborhood succeed.”

Even if a landlord isn’t motivated by a sense of civic duty, there’s also the reality that if they evict a commercial tenant for not paying rent, it’s unlikely that a new business will want to move in and set up shop during a pandemic.

“People correctly associate certain businesses such as restaurants as being on the ‘front lines’ of the economic impact this will have,” says Paul Behrns, a CPA with SFW Partners. “But it is im

JOANN’s Masking Dangerous Conditions, Employees Say

Written by JAIME LEES

Three Monkeys co-owner Mary Rice interacts with a customer. | DOYLE MURPHY

portant to remember there will be a domino effect that goes far beyond the restaurant itself. With a large-scale stoppage it is not only the restaurant and its employees who are affected, but also those in the restaurant food and equipment supply industry, the landlords who own the space restaurants operate out of, and the banks who lend the funds to these businesses.”

As Kyle Howerton puts it: “My initial reaction is that this is really bad for everyone.” Howerton is a principal at AHM Group, a small St. Louis-based investment firm that rents the space to Three Monkeys as well as other residential and commercial properties along Morganford Road. “There is light at the end of the tunnel. But everyone has to work together.”

All the sectors of the economy, Howerton says, need to realize that people shouldn’t be punished for a pandemic outside their control.

For their part, AHM has provided commercial tenants several months of free rent. The rent came with the stipulation that a portion of the money be used to put cash in the hands of those tenants’ employees.

“Just as much as the business owners themselves, the people we really worry about are the hourly employees at those businesses who are more likely to be paycheck to paycheck. They’re the people everyone should be most concerned about,” Howerton says. Landlords like AHM have to answer to the banks who loaned them the money to buy the property in the first place and who can foreclose on the properties if AHM misses payments.

“I’m sure 99 percent of landlords out there are in constant communication with their lenders and working with them to see if they can defer payments for a month or two,” he adds.

Liz Austin is the vice president of marketing for Green Street St. Louis, the real estate and development company behind the Chroma building in the Grove as well as many other properties around St. Louis.

“We’re panicked,” she says. “It’s been hard to see these amazing people struggling right now.”

Austin says that Green Street has been able to able to offer deferred rent to some of its retail tenants, but the extent to which it can do this depends in large part on the lending bank. Austin stressed that at the moment there are still a lot of unknowns, including how the reently passed government relief will benefit tenants long-term.

The one silver lining of this specific crisis, she says, is that everyone is in it together.

“It’s taken all of us to build this restaurant and boutique business scene in St. Louis,” she adds. “It will take all of us to save it.” n

Since our government has completely failed our health care workers by leaving them without enough proper personal protection equipment, the nurses and doctors on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19 have been largely on their own out there.

Hospital workers across the country have been trying to sanitize and reuse disposable gowns and have been unable to use fresh masks throughout the day. Normally, a nurse would grab a new mask between each patient, but now they are being forced to reuse even crappy paper masks indefinitely because there aren’t enough to go around.

The good news is that a bunch of Americans have stepped up to take care of our health care workers. Across the country, people are getting out their sewing machines to make and donate washable masks for these medical professionals that they can at least wear over their other masks to protect them from fluids, etc.

So when news stories started coming out about JOANN Fabric and Craft Stores offering materials to sewers to make masks for the cause, many were overjoyed. People want a way to help, and it seemed like JOANN was making it easy on them. They even promised to deliver the masks to places that needed them. All a customer had to do was show up, pick up some kits, sew them and return them to the store.

That meant that some employees would have to be working at the stores, of course, but JOANN’s website said this: “JOANN teams in our stores will be on hand to ensure we are following government-recommended social distancing guidance. And we will routinely sanitize our work areas and keep the equipment clean.”

We called a local JOANN outpost to get more information about the program. For example, were employees now meeting customers outside like local restaurants have been doing with curbside service? We found much more information (and disappointment) than we were expecting. An employee we spoke to was beyond frustrated with the situation and work con

ditions, describing a long list of troubling conditions. Here’s a summary of the employee’s complaints:

Employees are being told they must come into work during this pandemic (even though the St. Louis area is currently under orders to stay at home). Management is telling employees that the stores are “essential” like hospitals, because they sell fabric that could be made into masks.

Management is telling employees that they can’t wear gloves while on shift and to just wash their hands frequently instead.

Management is not giving employees breaks to wash their hands frequently because they are understaffed.

JOANN said it would be donating supplies to stock stores with face mask kits, but no kits have been delivered to the St. Louis area.

Employees have been instructed to tell callers that they’ve run out of face mask kits, when really none were ever available. Employees have been instructed to tell callers that there is plenty of material available to make masks, but not to mention that they are completely out of elastic.

JOANN is reassuring customers that surfaces will be cleaned frequently, but employees are too busy with hundreds of customers per day to sanitize properly.

Sanitizing materials are expired. (In one instance, the sanitizer expired in 2012.) JOANN has disabled Instagram comments because customers were writing in with concerns about the safety of employees who were being asked to come to work.

After publishing this story online, the RFT heard from multiple employees at other stores who reported similar problems. The employee we originally spoke to said that a local JOANN staffer had recently walked out during her shift because customers were not obeying social distancing guidelines in the checkout lane and managers were not enforcing it.

The employee also said everyone there was worried about their customers, most of whom are older and seem to not understand the gravity of the situation. They worry that JOANN stores could become hotbeds for the virus because of the lack of consistent surface cleaning combined with the advanced age of most of their customers.

We checked JOANN’S Instagram page and it does, indeed, look like they shut down Instagram comments as negative comments began piling up. It looks like the company has had a harder time keeping guard over Facebook comments, because we still found a bunch asking for mercy for JOANN employees. The company did not respond to RFT’s request for comment.

In the meantime, if you already have the supplies at home, there are instructions on how to sew masks on the JOANN website. Your health care workers still need you; they just don’t need you to go to a busy fabric store.

Stay home. Sew. Save your country. n NEWS Continued from pg 7 Release Inmates to Slow Virus Spread, Advocates Say Written by DOYLE MURPHY M issouri jails could be headed for deadly outbreaks of the coronavirus if they don’t start releasing inmates, according to a group of advocates, academics, law enforcement and clergy.

In a letter to the chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court, the group outlines a plan to release people who pose little threat to society, including those held on low-level, nonviolent felonies and municipal violations and people who are elderly or can’t afford cash bail.

“Missouri’s jails are filled with some of the most vulnerable people in the state, and the reality of incarceration means jails are hot spots for disease even under normal circumstances,” Mary Fox, director of the Missouri State Public Defender office, said in a written statement. “COVID-19 is unlike anything Missouri has seen, and reductions in the jail population will be necessary in order to avoid significant suffering and death.”

Jails in the metro area have already begun the process of releasing inmates to reduce the numbers of people locked up in facilities. Last week, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner and District Defender Matthew Mahaffey of the St. Louis Trial Office of public defenders announced they had identified 56 people with “low-level offenses or significant health issues” who were awaiting trial, and they planned to ask the court to release them immediately.

“The harsh health realities of COVID-19 demand unique collaboration from all persons, groups, and organizations within the criminal justice community in order to ensure justice is pursued in a humane and consistent manner,” Mahaffey and Gardner said St. Louis prosecutors and public defenders have identified people to be released. | DANNY WICENTOWSKI

in a joint statement.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that St. Louis County planned to release more than 100 people, and St. Charles County had cut its jail population by about 20 percent.

So far, the efforts to slow the spread of the virus by holding fewer people in jail have been county by county. In the letter to the Missouri Supreme Court, advocates asked for a statewide directive to release people. The letter writers note that it not only protects inmates but also jail staff, including corrections workers and nurses. “With the virus rapidly spreading across Missouri and the rest of the country, and people cycling in and out of city and county jails daily, it is a matter of when — not if — the virus will infiltrate Missouri’s jails,” the letter says.

Along with public defenders, the letter was signed by a wide variety of organizations and individuals, including ArchCity Defenders, the NAACP, Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center, American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri and City of St. Louis Sheriff Vernon Betts.

“This letter reflects the broad consensus of concerned individuals and organizations across the state that the current population in Missouri’s jails presents a clear and present danger during this public health crisis,” Blake Strode, executive director of ArchCity Defenders said in a written statement. “There are people all across the state caged in jails, many of them serving sentences on lowlevel charges or detained on cash bonds that they cannot afford to pay. We feel very strongly that everyone should do their part to significantly reduce the number of people behind bars, and we are hopeful that the Court will agree.” The request for a statewide order was opposed by the Missouri Association of Prosecuting Attorneys.

“Local authorities such as sheriffs and judges after input from prosecutors and defense attorneys are in the best position to review and make decisions about the release of any individual inmate,” the organization said in a news release. “They are able to consider not only public health issues but also the nature of the offense, the criminal history of the defendant, the defendant’s record of appearing in court when ordered to do so, whether the defendant is in custody for reoffending after an initial offense, the defendant’s probability of reoffending, and the safety of the victim.” n