This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated.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.
With an unprecedented $27 million over the next three years to address homeless services and as the epicenter of the need and opportunity, Salt Lake City welcomes this collective approach and investment by state, county and city entities. Our opportunity and challenge is in changing the experience of communities hosting shelters and those they serve.
The beauty and the brunt of the recent state legislative investment is the expedited timeline of action in order to ensure the continued allocation of funds. For good and for bad, government is not designed for speed.
As unprecedented as this opportunity is, so is the process by which we make decisions that will wholly impact the way we serve people experiencing homelessness and the communities that host shelters of the new design for decades to come. In my experience thus far, what we endeavor to create is apples to the oranges of Rio Grande.
This transformation requires the kind of collaborative stakeholder buy-in and time that we have so far seen from county and city processes over the last 18 months. As government, we could take a lot of time to collect input, evaluate results and debate recommendations, but thanks to the Legislature we will not. Decision time is coming at us like a Mack truck.
Prior to the coming 2017 legislative session and in order to access year-one funds, Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County mayors need to have agreed upon a plan for development of homeless shelters to serve some 500 individuals and Salt Lake City to have chosen the sites of development.
As Salt Lake City residents, we have and will continue to have opportunities for input as to these criteria and how shelters might "fit" into a community.
Of particular and mounting concern to me as a Salt Lake City Council member faced with the currently unknown potential of a site near neighborhoods and businesses I represent is how will we, as a city, manage the potential impacts of such a placement? Specifically, how will Salt Lake City Corporation predict and deploy resources in a manner that ensures growth of quality of life in any given community?
With the majority of Salt Lake City's portion of State Street in District 5, my constituents have already experienced the impact of inadequate homeless resources through the resultant climate of crime that bleeds into the surrounding businesses and neighborhoods. What is happening around State Street is unacceptable and is a direct output of the issues embedded around Rio Grande. For the sake of humanity and community we can and must do better.
The situation around State Street is one we may well experience in other areas of the city should we not prepare ourselves to predict and deploy resources in a holistic and collective approach before a destructive climate is established. This community is the canary in the coal mine as we face the reality of the incredible opportunity that expanded investment and ownership of homeless services is and what it means for our city and residents, both housed and homeless.
In addition to addressing the need for improvements in Rapid Rehousing, shelter population size (which Salt Lake City Council will discuss at our next work session meeting on Sept. 6), and affordable and low-income housing expansion, we must establish a program for predicting and deploying city and partner resources in communities before they suffer the degradation in quality of life that the area surrounding State Street has experienced.
This approach to evaluating and deploying services quality of life indicators — which we already collect as a city in a myriad of data — is a new model I have been building with dozens of stakeholders and our mayor's administration that I call Critical Communities. This is a project our council is committed to and an investment we can make through budgetary means, though ultimately is a commitment left to the mayor's administration to make with administrative direction.
Salt Lake City residents should expect a holistic and dynamic outcome from these many processes better than we've seen anywhere in the country that ensures quality of life for neighborhoods hosting shelters and for the individuals being served, because we are capable of this.
Salt Lake City Council Member Erin Mendenhall will be hosting a town-hall meeting to discuss crime around the State Street area with residents and business owners Sept. 12 from 6 to 8 p.m. in the multi-purpose room at Salt Lake Community College South Campus.