The Great Salt Lake Shelter Shell Game
By: K Marlo Yost
Tags: Utah, Salt Lake City, Politics, Homeless, Sociology

Awaiting that “Brighter Future”

I spent most of 2019 in Salt Lake City’s downtown homeless shelter, which is a massive old red brick building crumbling away near the city’s main transportation hub. Directly across the street from shelter to the north is the $375 million Gateway shopping mall. The Gateway is one of Salt Lake City’s premier shopping and entertainment destinations. Across from the shelter to the west is a luxury apartment complex where the rents start at an astronomical $1,400 a month; for a studio. Two blocks to the east is another high-end apartment complex, and next to that is the gigantic Vivint Solar Arena, home of the Utah Jazz. In the same zip code as all these properties, the average per-capita income per month after taxes, according to the Utah State Department of Numbers, is only about $1,810. So subtract that $1,400 studio rent and that leaves just a little over $400 for food, transportation, utilities, and other bills. And that’s a studio, which would be around 5 to 600 square feet of living space.

Those high-end apartments were still being occupied, however, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out that a lot of moneyed interests had designs on the land underneath the current homeless shelter.

There was money to be made, lots of it, and the homeless were in the way.

In early 2017, shortly after the multi-billion-dollar real estate conglomerate Vestar purchased the Gateway Mall, a secret plan was hatched to remove the homeless from downtown Salt Lake City, sending them far enough away that they wouldn’t be a factor in the plans to capitalize on the increasingly valuable real estate in the downtown area. The Shelter the Homeless organization that owns the current site agreed to sell the land and the building to the city for $4 million dollars.

$4 million dollars. Considering the location and the infrastructure near the site, that wasn’t a bargain, it was a rape.

Early in 2019, an ominous message was scrawled on the whiteboard in the lobby of the Men’s section of the shelter. The message read:

-Get your housing now! The shelter will be closing in 3 months!-

It was the first that any of us had heard of it.

The first reaction, of course, was panic. The shelter was closing? What the hell did that mean? Where were we going to go? It was 20 degrees outside! The shelter didn’t close in 3 months, it was delayed by an uncommonly wet spring, cost overruns, construction delays, and political bickering. Here in mid-November, just before the heavy snows and the cold weather arrives, the old shelter is finally being readied for the bulldozers.

The main thrust of this relocation plan was the construction of three new homeless shelters, all of them many miles away from the lucrative downtown area. One for the women, one for the men, and one coed shelter for men and women who had to remain somewhat closer to the downtown area for special circumstances. The new shelters wouldn’t be called shelters, however, bad PR. They were rebranded as “Resource Centers.”

The operators of these new facilities conducted a careful analysis and stated that they needed $40 million to succeed in their mission to reduce the homeless population. Money needed for case managers, counselors, housing locators, medical providers, housing vouchers and general staff. But, acting true to form, only $17 million was approved by Lt. Governor Spencer Cox and his legislative committee on the homeless. Lt. Governor Cox even went so far as to slash $500,000 from palliative (end of life) care for the homeless. This despite projections of a $1.3 billion budget surplus.

The message was immediately clear; out of sight, out of mind, out of money.

The new shelter arrangement had another glaring problem. It did away with 400 of the beds that are currently available. That was at least illogical and at worst insane. Inevitably, a certain percentage of the population will suffer homelessness under current conditions. That percentage has increased dramatically in recent years as the income distribution gap and the inaccessibility of affordable physical, mental and emotional healthcare has gotten worse.

Not only that, but the population of Utah is growing at the rate of over 58,000 people a year, the vast majority of those new residents locating in Salt Lake County. It made no sense whatsoever to be reducing the number of available beds for the homeless, but they did it anyway. It looked like the assumption was being made that none of those new residents are going to experience the physical, psychological, emotional, or financial problems that lead to homelessness. It remains unexplained as to why such recklessness went into the implementation of the homeless relocation plan.

The staff at the shelter (who are for the most part generous, altruistic and wonderful people) were soon tasked with wearing T-shirts and aprons that optimistically said: “How I can help with your housing today?”

But the whole “help with housing” thing is, sadly, a bit of a cruel joke.

The majority of the population at the shelter don’t qualify for any kind of housing for one reason or another. Many are too hopelessly handicapped with any one or more of a variety of mental health issues for successful housing placement. They shouldn’t be in a shelter, of course, but the availability of adequate psychiatric care is abysmal in Utah, the result of decisions made by politicians far removed from the reality of homelessness.

Some of the homeless are too lost in addictions that desperately need treatment to be seriously considered for housing. But we have a war on drugs, not a war on addiction. There again, politicians.

Others are already on Social Security, Disability, Veteran’s pensions, and various other support programs that have long since become inadequate for Salt Lake County’s expensive housing. Some of the people in this category have been waiting for over 3 years for some assistance in this regard.

Others are caught somewhere in the limbo between qualification for either Disability, Social Security, adequate job training to overcome a bad criminal record or the “Chronically-Homeless” designation and are therefore just… stuck.

Despite all their talk, the overtly conservative Utah state legislature is never going to seriously fight for lower rents or housing costs, not when so many of them are either property managers or developers themselves or are beholden to those businesses for campaign money.

Utah’s legislature is never going to seriously fight for better health care or medical coverage either. In fact, they defied the will of the voters and torpedoed the Medicaid expansion that Utah voters had approved.

Likewise, Utah’s legislature is not going to seriously consider a minimum wage increase, and you can be forgiven for giggling at the thought. A living wage has never been a priority in Utah, and neither has the idea of actually asking the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes to support programs for addiction treatment, mental health treatment, housing assistance, job training or assisted living. The waiting lists for those programs are absurd as they are, and getting longer.

There isn’t likely to be any serious reform of Utah’s draconian criminal justice system either. The impoverished will still be discouraged from asking for a fair trial and fines for minor infractions will continue to increase, disproportionately affecting the poor. Long-past felony convictions will continue to prevent people from getting jobs or apartments, even if they were non-violent, and timely expungement of felony convictions will remain a pipe dream.

Utah has a particular conservative mindset that is seemingly committed to encouraging the ongoing moral crimes of bigotry and discrimination. This is particularly true with regard to the homeless, who are disproportionately represented by minorities and people from the LGBTQ community. And with conservative media providing a plethora of daily hit pieces that infuriate some of our less enlightened local residents, that’s only getting worse.

As a result of this, Utah continues to be a national social embarrassment, leading the nation in anti-depression prescriptions(1st), nearly leading the nation in suicides(5th) as well as medical bankruptcies(6th).

The homeless here are hated. It really is that simple. And yes, some of them earn that hate by being abrasive and parasitic, or at least appearing that way. And some homeless people really don’t care, that’s one reason why it’s so hard to resolve. Being homeless inevitably results in having your dignity dragged away day by day by the very circumstances of your existence. After a while, it can get to the point that even the prospect of interacting with another person arouses no interest. It can make someone become disconnected.

The homeless are a population without champions, without lobbyists or corporate sponsorships, and that’s unlikely to change. They must live with the stigma and deal with the fact that to many of the housed; every single one of us was the guy who stabbed that other guy or shot that woman or robbed that place of business or kicked that little dog.

Many of the homeless are easily the most empathetic, compassionate and gentle people you’ll ever meet. Sadly, sometimes that’s the very reason why they have ended up homeless.

Look; until someone actually experiences something for themselves, it’s just impossible to fully comprehend it. The problem with almost everything that you have ever read or heard about the homeless is that it came from some source who had studied the problem EXTERNALLY, and pointedly had NOT actually experienced it.

The belief that is constantly peddled by irresponsible media outlets and some conservative politicians is that the homeless are irretrievably broken. This is a patently false and absurd viewpoint, but it nevertheless works when politicians attack the homeless with laws that invalidate their very existence. Criminalizing activities such as sleeping in a public space or in a private vehicle, camping in a non-designated campground, eating in public, panhandling and venturing anywhere near “restricted access areas.” Laws such as these are somehow supposed to help alleviate the problem but only end up dramatically exacerbating it. Even providing food for homeless people has somehow become criminalized in 71 cities across America. But you can’t just legislate away the results of extreme poverty by way of criminalization, damned if conservative lawmakers don’t just keep right on trying, however!

Last year in the Salt Lake City area over 120 homeless people died, and that’s too many. Nearly 100 of those deaths were from exposure, meaning that those people literally froze to death. And now that the current downtown shelter is about to be plowed under, the temperatures are nearing that time of the year when they usually plunge below freezing for the remainder of winter. That grim reality coupled with the fact that more than 400 of Utah’s homeless who would normally have been inside will now be out in that cold, means the annual body count is inevitably going to be much, much higher.

Tough policy changes and a sea change in attitudes towards the homeless are what is required to even begin to solve the crisis of homelessness, and until the political will is there, Utah is just playing a shelter shell game. A deadly one at that.