In the end, it just didn’t add up.
Years ago, the state of Utah was tired of the clutter and crime that surrounded the big homeless shelter in Salt Lake City’s Rio Grande neighborhood. It was unpleasant to be around, didn’t seem to be helping the homeless that much and was an impediment to a profitable redevelopment of the area.
So, in 2019, the state bought the shelter, tore it down, sold the land for development, and replaced it with three shiny new “resource centers” in Salt Lake City and South Salt Lake. Those were supposed to do a better job, not just of keeping the homeless from starving and freezing, but of assessing the individual needs of every unsheltered human being, moving them through the system and into permanent housing.
Sounds good. But the new system started with a flashing red light.
The three resource centers had a combined 700 beds. That’s 400 beds fewer than were available at the old Rio Grande shelter. At a time when, because the total population of Salt Lake County was growing rapidly, and the cost of housing ever on the rise, we could expect the homeless population to soar as well.
Add to that the serious underfunding of the centers’ operations and the lack of new affordable and supportive housing for their clients, and the evidence of homelessness on the streets of the Capital City just kept getting worse.
So, in the session just ended, members of the Utah Legislature did the math, faced the facts and came up with money and means to better shelter our homeless neighbors, cleaning up our streets and parks in the process.
It was a remarkable accomplishment in a session otherwise marked by prurient priorities and distractions.
function onSignUp() { const token = grecaptcha.getResponse(); if (!token) { alert("Please verify the reCAPTCHA!"); } else { axios .post( "https://8c0ug47jei.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dev/newsletter/checkCaptcha", { token, env: "PROD", } ) .then(({ data: { message } }) => { console.log(message); if (message === "Human
