Getting rural areas, where resources are thin and the homeless are less visible, to embrace the cause has been an uphill battle logistically and politically. And though pilot projects are underway in urban areas along the Wasatch Front, officials have no hard data to prove strategies are working.
Still, you won't find naysayers among the hundreds of people - local, state and federal officials, politicians and homeless providers - who convened Wednesday in Salt Lake City for Utah's third annual summit on homelessness.
"We're at a tipping point," said Palmer DePaulis, new director of the Department of Community and Culture, the state agency driving the plan. Acknowledging there have been setbacks, DePaulis said he is confident "we're headed in the right direction."
Most homeless are clustered in metropolitan areas. And therein lies the problem for rural counties where it can be hard convincing elected officials to pay to house a few transients when dozens of young families and low-paid professionals, such as police and teachers, are struggling to afford homes.
"Our homeless population is not the typical homeless population. We don't have a soup kitchen, or vagrants sleeping in the park," said Heather Hoyt, a Uintah County administrator. "We have families who are being priced out of rents and couch surfing or doubling up."
Compounding the problem in places like San Juan County are bureaucratic tangles with American Indian tribes who would rather forego housing opportunities than give up any of their sovereignty, said Blanding Mayor Toni Turk. "We've had to learn how to let them teach us what they need."
Despite these hurdles, Turk said a project is underway to build affordable hogan-style homes on Indian land. And Uintah County is opening a homeless shelter this winter.
Other counties are focusing on prevention by curbing domestic violence or making sure that people released from jail and the foster care system land on their feet.
Whether any of this has made a dent in the homeless population is impossible to say.
Due to data collection problems, homeless tallies produced by a new computerized tracking system are understated, said Lloyd Pendleton, the man widely known as "the energizer bunny" of the 10-year plan.
At the plan's launch in 2004, Utah reported 23,700 homeless. A computerized 2006 census pegged the number at 15,015. Pendleton said neither number is reliable.
For now, all eyes are on a two-year experiment in Salt Lake County. Beginning in August 2005, providers there took 17 street dwellers and placed them in virtually free apartments of their own, no strings attached.
Midway into the project, all but one of the clients is still housed, freeing up beds at the state's largest homeless shelter, The Road Home. One is employed, a handful have sought help for their mental illnesses or addictions and nearly all are receiving regular health checkups.
But one untested selling point is the assumption that "housing first" saves money.
Jim Wood, an economist at the University of Utah hired to track costs, released preliminary data on Wednesday showing each of the 17 have racked up an average of $32,800 in hospital and mental health admissions, jail bookings and shelter and detox stays. That's up from an annual average of $15,000 prior to their entering housing.
But Wood says driving the costs are rent and medical bills, which will disappear as clients get stabilized and get hooked into federal housing aid.
What is housing first?
Part of a national movement promoted by the Bush administration, the 10-year plan is rooted in a "housing first" philosophy, which involves moving the chronically homeless out of shelters and off the streets, and putting them in permanent housing blanketed with medical and financial supports.
Who are the chronically homeless?
Those with mental health and substance abuse problems who have defied attempts to help them become independent. These men and women consume more than half the resources devoted to combatting homelessness, but are less than 11 percent of the state's homeless population.
