Why Utah’s plan to quickly move people out of homelessness failed annotation

FOX 13 Investigates: Why Utah’s plan to quickly move people out of homelessness failed

SALT LAKE CITY — Darinn Ball doesn’t want to live outside.

The 43-year-old, who has been experiencing homelessness in Salt Lake City for the last year, says he’s often too cold to sleep. The restless nights make it difficult for him to hold down a job that could help him get “back into society.” And his living situation has also impacted visits with his kids.

It affects “everything,” he said in an interview in the North Temple area near where he’s been pitching a tent each night. “I’ll start crying about it.”

But every time Ball tries to get into a bed at one of the shelters, he says there’s no room. So he ends up back on the streets again — along with hundreds of other people he expects would go to the shelters if they weren’t at capacity statewide.

“Almost half of us want to be in some type of housing or some type of resource that would get us off the street,” he estimated.

When state leaders closed The Road Home in Salt Lake City in 2019 to make way for three smaller homeless resource centers spread throughout the valley, some homeless advocates questioned whether the new system would have enough emergency shelter beds — especially amid Utah’s burgeoning housing crisis and booming population growth.

The pitch from leaders involved at the time was that the new facilities would move away from a “warehousing” approach of providing homeless services and shift to a more services-based model. Under the new system, people experiencing homelessness would have access not only to food and shelter but also to housing and employment assistance and medical care.

Those additional services, they said, would help move people out of homelessness more quickly – freeing up space in the shelters and eliminating demand for additional beds.

“The idea was that there was more affordable housing being developed in the pipeline,” said Preston Cochrane, former executive director of Shelter the Homeless, which owns the three new resource centers. “And you would be moving people out of shelter who had qualified into a housing program or housing in general.”

But data shows that, since 2019, people are spending more nights in shelter — not less — as a shortage of deeply affordable housing has made it more difficult to move people off the streets.

With shelters currently at capacity across the state, Utah leaders are now beginning to work toward the creation of a new homeless shelter.

Homeless Coordinator Wayne Niederhauser estimates there’s a deficit of 600 to 800 permanent emergency shelter beds in Salt Lake County – and “maybe even 1,000,” he told the Utah Homeless Network Steering Committee on Wednesday.

“We have to answer that question: Where do people go?” he said in an interview.

‘I don’t want to go back to the street’

Last spring, when the hundreds of additional beds that were opened to get people experiencing homelessness off the streets during the winter closed, Niederhauser volunteered to help people leave the shelter.

He still remembers a woman with a walker, who cried as she gathered her belongings together.

“‘Why do I have to go back out to the street? I don’t want to go back to the street. I like it here,’” he recalled her saying. "But there just wasn’t the resources to keep her and others. And it just… it was a tender moment for me to experience that. And you know, someone in a situation like that, that’s really hard. I’d like to see us not have to do that.”

This year, the state opened 460 additional beds through the winter in Salt Lake County, with another 295 opening on the coldest “code blue” nights in the state, according to a shelter bed availability dashboard.

Those extra beds have been full almost every night, advocates say — demonstrating a high demand among the homeless for a warm place to sleep.

“Every time we open up a code blue shelter, every time we open up an overflow, every time we open up more capacity within a standard shelter, it fills up within a day or two," said Wendy Garvin, executive director of the nonprofit Unsheltered Utah. “So my experience is that people desperately want shelter.”

But even for those who can get into a resource center, leaving has presented its own challenge, data shows.

In 2019, the state set a goal to reduce the average number of nights people experiencing homelessness spent in shelter by 10% each year over the next five years — down from 55 nights that year.

Had that plan worked, the average person would have spent 40 nights in shelter by 2022.

But instead of dropping, the average number of nights spent in shelter statewide has only grown. As of 2022, the latest year for which data is available, people spent an average of 65 nights in shelter before they exited homelessness. That number ballooned even more in Salt Lake County, from 60 nights in 2017 to 88 nights in 2022.

“It used to be an emergency shelter bed, you’d be there for a few days or a few weeks,” Garvin said. “But now we have people who have been in the shelters for [up to] eight years. That is not a life that is appropriate for people to be living in. We need to be moving them into housing.”

The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has defined “high-performing communities” as ones where people spend an average of just 20 days in shelter.

A lack of housing available to the very poorest Utahns has been one of the biggest obstacles to achieving that goal in Utah, according to those who work with the population. State leaders estimate there’s a gap of about 77,000 units of deeply affordable housing statewide. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic and increasing living costs have pushed more people to the brink of homelessness.

“When you have kind of this perfect storm come together, including COVID, I don’t think anyone was prepared to say, ‘Yeah, we have enough beds,’” said Cochrane, who’s now the CEO of The Other Side Village.

Despite the challenges, Niederhauser notes that the state has successfully moved 8,000 people out of homelessness over the last four years. And for those who can get into them, he says the new resource centers have provided a “much better” experience for Utah’s homeless.

He acknowledges, though, that it’s been more difficult than expected to help people move out of homelessness as quickly as the state had forecasted. And he recognizes that people may be frustrated that the state didn’t create more beds at the time when the new system was created.

“I’m convinced that the vision was correct,” he said. “Getting people into shelter and out of shelter quickly: That’s the part that didn’t happen.”

Partial funding, partial results?

Recognizing a need for additional shelter space, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox requested that state lawmakers set aside $193 million for homeless resources, including the development of a new, low-barrier shelter.

But lawmakers fell far short of that during this year’s legislative session — budgeting around $66 million overall. That money includes $50.7 million for emergency shelter (about half of which has been set aside for the development of a new shelter), as well as $4.4 million for homelessness prevention and $11.1 million for behavioral health, according to the governor’s office.

Many who work in homeless services say they’re grateful for every dollar they can get from the state, with Niederhauser telling the Utah Homeless Network Steering Committee Wednesday that he knows they “could end up with nothing.”

But Andrew Johnston, Salt Lake City’s director of homeless policy and outreach, notes that service providers need “consistent, ongoing investment” to address homelessness moving forward.

“The reality is we haven’t paid enough to help [the homelessness system] work,” he said, speaking to FOX 13 in late February before the Legislature had settled on a final amount for homelessness funding. “If we only partially fund stuff, we’re going to get partial results and it’s going to feel like we’re not making progress.”

With the budget set, service providers are now working to keep as many of the additional shelter beds that were available this winter open as possible, in an effort to stave off a spike in outdoor camping.

“There’s a clear connection between the number of shelter beds we have available and the amount of camping we have outside and our ability as a city to enforce our city ordinances,” Johnston said. “Fewer shelter beds,” he added, means “more people camping.”

Garvin estimates there’s a small contingent of people experiencing homelessness who would choose to camp even if there were more shelter beds.

But when those who don’t want to camp are forced to, she said it can make it even more difficult for service providers to help them exit homelessness.

“It’s degrading,” she said. “And I think that it chips away at their humanity over time. My experience has been that when people don’t have access to shelter or resources for a long enough period of time, they almost become used to this way of life.”

While they work to keep winter beds open past April, officials involved in addressing homelessness have also turned their eyes towards the creation of a new permanent shelter.

Niederhauser said the state is currently working to identify land for a new shelter, after which the public will be able to engage in the process.

Using recent history as a guide, he said “people will probably oppose that.”

Cochrane noted that he saw community opposition bubble up recently as January, when the Millcreek City Council considered whether to turn an assisted living facility into permanent supportive housing units.

“I heard a lot of just really... mean comments,” he said. “Many of which were just based on their own perceptions, without understanding all of what has gone into this. And so again, community plays a big part in solving homelessness. You can’t just leave it up to providers; you can’t just leave it up to the city council or the mayor or anyone else. It really does take a village, as we say, to solve and end homelessness.”

Cochrane's organization, the Other Side Academy Village, is working to create a tiny home community that could help some chronically homeless people move off the streets as early as this summer.

Another project under development to help the homeless is a state-owned microshelter at 700 West and 500 South, which is expected to provide an extra 100 beds for people who have resisted the more traditional, dorm-style shelters.

But until those and other sites become operational, Ball says he – and many others who want a shelter bed but can’t get into one – will continue to camp outside.

“When I go trying to get help from the shelters, it’s just so full,” he said.

Sometimes it feels easier to “walk away” and come back to his camp, Ball said, because the amount of time he spends trying to get into a bed takes time away from his other necessities.

“You’ve got to sit there and look at the time and say, ‘OK, I’ve still got to make 15 bucks,’” he said. “’I need toothpaste. I need deodorant. I need to eat a hot meal tonight.’ And then you’re sitting there for hours and hours to get into a bed or even talk to someone. It’s crazy.”

DMU Timestamp: March 13, 2025 19:03

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