This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The Rio Grande neighborhood is in crisis, and it's getting worse. This toxic brew of tragedy, tribalism and criminality endangers our community's most vulnerable citizens and threatens the well-being of those who live and work nearby and the economic engine that keeps our city vibrant and helps pay for the services our homeless neighbors so desperately need.

We're heartened, though, by plans jointly developed by the city and county and recently announced. These include replacing The Road Home with two smaller resource centers and using improved behinds-the-scenes processes to reroute most people to other, better-suited services. The net result being a new day for those who experience homelessness and for the neighbors who've shouldered this burden for too long.

We appreciate the vision and effort required to come this far, and we're optimistic about the outcome. Yet our optimism isn't unbounded and our support isn't without caveats.

So we have new processes that promise to bring the number of people requiring emergency shelter from the 1,200 at The Road Home down to 500, and we have money from the state for two new resource centers. Easy math says that you divide 500 by 2 and get 250 beds per resource center.

But the problems we're tackling aren't easy.

The crisis on Rio Grande is fueled in large part by the sheer size of The Road Home. It's widely understood that smaller resource centers will foster better oversight and have less likelihood of attracting criminal elements and triggering anti-social behavior. But how small? Easy math says "250 beds."

We don't agree.

As part of the public process that resulted in the joint plan, stakeholders visited Chicago, which caps its shelters at 125 beds. Closer to home, the YMCA domestic violence shelter (with fewer than 100 emergency beds) on 300 South was frequently extolled for its ability to blend seamlessly into its neighborhood. Both numbers are a far cry from 250.

We urge Mayor Jackie Biskupski and the City Council to cap resource centers at 150 beds each—and to memorialize that cap in statute. We then urge the city and county to look outside of Salt Lake City to find additional emergency shelter space.

In addition to the size of the new resource centers, we are concerned about how they are slated to roll-out. The current plan calls for the new resource centers to be accepting new clients while The Road Home remains open as its population is drawn down. This seems straight forward, but will result (however briefly) in a net increase in the number of emergency shelter spaces within the city—which is the opposite of the promised outcome. No matter how much confidence we have in the plan, there is no way to know for certain how successful the draw down will be. Salt Lake City cannot be expected to assume all the risk in what amounts to a well-funded, well-intentioned and well-conceived experiment.

The city and county need to rethink the roll-out, such that The Road Home closes within days of the new shelter space coming online.

Let's not compound old mistakes with new ones. Let's reward the good faith and long suffering of the Rio Grande neighborhood.

D. Christian Harrison is president and chair of the Downtown Community Council.