In November, Utah’s top homelessness policy board met to discuss how the state’s massive homeless campus, planned for northwestern Salt Lake City, should function.
The panel took pitches from experts on what role the facility should play in Utah’s homelessness response, revealing an ideological split between the system’s longtime operators and a new wave of policymakers and lobbyists who want to chart a different course.
On one end, service providers and advocates who work with homeless individuals say the current approach — even if imperfect — is effective but woefully underfunded and in need of additional housing capacity.
The new camp, however, supports making involuntary treatment for substance abuse and mental illness central to how Utah deals with homeless people.
That debate has simmered and may influence the current legislative session, where lawmakers could determine which tack Utah takes.
“You need to expand capacity for involuntary residential drug treatment and involuntary residential psychiatric treatment, and we just don’t have that,” said Devon Kurtz, the public safety policy director for the conservative think tank Cicero Institute. “... Our [current] model is one size fits all.”
Kurtz, who has become an influential voice in shaping homeless policy, supports using at least part of the proposed 1,300-bed shelter to force more people into help. Such a move would markedly increase the number of chronically homeless Utahns held to receive treatment and, supporters contend, free up space in the emergency shelter system for people who need a temporary hand up.
The ideas espoused by Kurtz and others would mark a major change in Utah’s homelessness response, which now generally consists of trying to get people into housing as quickly as possible and connecting them to other resources, like drug rehabilitation, if need be.
Heather Hogue, co-chair of Utah Homeless Network, worries that more involuntary treatment would trample the civil rights of unsheltered Utahns and only make homelessness less visible.
The state, she argues, should focus instead on building more housing — as it has in recent legislative sessions.
“As service agencies, as advocates, we’ve been saying for a decade,” she said, “that no homeless response system is going to be completely successful without the addition of real, permanent housing.”
Political interest in homelessness
(Utah Office of Homeless Services) A conceptual rendering shows what the planned homeless campus could look like in Salt Lake City.
The duel over how Utah should improve the services it offers to homeless residents — and how the proposed campus at 2520 N. 2200 West fits into the system — comes after the state saw yet another jump in homelessness last year.
The growing problem has piqued the interest of state leaders, including Gov. Spencer Cox. He has asked legislators to fund a portion of the campus construction, send additional millions to Salt Lake City’s tiny-house community, The Other Side Village, and approve ongoing funding to help so-called high-utilizers, people who have been unsuccessful in emerging from homelessness despite cycling through multiple programs.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Other Side Village on Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026.
In total, Cox’s budget includes $30 million in one-time spending to build the campus and expand the village. Another $20 million a year would target chronically homeless individuals.
In a recent Instagram post, he called for “expanding on-demand, appropriate shelter” and boosting “treatment capacity” for those with mental illness.
State Republican leaders have signaled that they believe the campus, and its eventual operations, align with a summertime executive order from President Donald Trump that calls for sidelining policies that seek to get homeless people into housing first and shift instead to boosting involuntary treatment.
“If done correctly, this transformative campus has the opportunity to improve public safety, clean up our cities, and change lives,” House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, said in a statement when the location of the campus was announced. “We will work with the Utah Homeless Services Board to take full advantage of President Trump’s recent executive order — which squarely aligns federal agencies with Utah’s focus on public safety, support and accountability — including exploring opportunities to reprioritize existing resources to improve public safety and achieve lasting outcomes.”
Cox, Schultz and Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, did not reply to requests for comment.
Dems critical of campus
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) The site of the new homeless campus is seen in Salt Lake City last October.
Democratic legislators, for their part, express concerns about the planned campus and its operations. At a west-side legislative session preview earlier this month, they criticized its site, lamented its $75 million price tag and questioned the idea of holding people against their will.
“None of us at the state voted for what I call the internment camp,” Utah House Minority Leader Angela Romero, D-Salt Lake City, said, “that they want to build over here.”
In a later interview, Romero urged the state to adopt a more compassionate approach and consider other models of providing help to homeless Utahns.
Her House colleague, Rep. Sandra Hollins, D-Salt Lake City, assured attendees she would vote against any bill that brought the campus to the west side. And Sen. Jen Plumb, another Salt Lake City Democrat, accused state leaders of plotting to build “a warehouse where they could put people that they didn’t want to see.”
Calling for more involuntary treatment
Kurtz, who first started lobbying in Utah in 2022, believes that the Cicero Institute’s publications influenced the Trump order. Leaders, including Cox, hoped the federal changes in homelessness dollars would help fund the campus — and its behavioral health care operations. In December, though, a federal judge blocked the order from taking effect.
If the order did take hold and more federal dollars flowed to the Beehive State, it could supercharge a movement to make involuntary treatment and behavioral health care pillars of the state’s response to homelessness.
Kurtz and Randy Shumway, chair of the Utah Homeless Services Board, want to use at least a part of the campus for substance abuse and mental health treatment ordered by a judge.
“I am recommending that we create a secure residential placement facility. … It would not be voluntary,” Shumway argued to lawmakers in September. “They would be there for a period of probably 90 days with the opportunity to detox in order to get mental and behavioral health care, to get substance use disorder support, to get physical health care and to be surrounded by a community that’s helping them in healing.”
Shumway was not available to comment on this story. At the September meeting, he proposed at least 300 beds for mental health treatment at the campus and recommended a separate facility for substance abuse. He did not say how many people that site could treat.
Kurtz said by strengthening efforts to assist people who have fallen through the cracks, leaders would help Utah’s overall homeless services work better.
“These are people who, if you put them into the current system, will fail repeatedly, and will actually slow down the ability for other people to get help,” he said, “because there’s only so many slots.”
Shumway and Kurtz also seem to have an ally in The Other Side Academy’s co-founder Joseph Grenny. He told Shumway’s homeless board in November that the missing piece in the state’s response, in his organization’s view, was involuntary detention for people who may be committing petty crimes or need to detox from drug use. The whole campus facility, he maintained, should operate more like a jail.
Grenny also called Utah’s system “broken,” saying that most of the state’s service providers are encouraged to address one issue contributing to a person’s homelessness rather than taking a more holistic approach.
Housing remains key, others say
Another set of service providers and advocates believes that, while more treatment for those with mental health and substance abuse issues is necessary, dedicating a large campus to involuntarily holding those Utahns would be costly, ineffective and redirect resources away from other programs.
Hogue and others pushed back on the narrative that the system was broken, pointing out that 75% of people who enter an emergency shelter leave within three months.
Kathy Bray, CEO of Volunteers of America, Utah, which runs shelter, drug treatment and counseling programs, said that leaders should assess provider capacity and use existing resources before tying everything to the campus.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Volunteers of America, Utah runs the Geraldine King Women's Center, seen here on Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026.
“I’m not convinced that everything is supposed to be in one place because of the strength of community providers,” she said. “It’s bridging … to try to make sure that we’ve got people landing in the right places for the services they need.”
Even if there is capacity in some programs, Bray and Hogue agree that gaps need to be filled, specifically: creating more affordable housing of all types.
“The challenge is we have a lot of homeless people who need more services. I mean that’s reality, and we’re trying to figure out what gaps to fill,” said Josh Romney, board president of Shelter the Homeless. “And I think in a rush to provide services, we could potentially fill the wrong gaps. … Right now, I think the greatest need we have is transitional and permanent supportive housing.”
Romney, Hogue and Bray, in separate interviews, also agreed that the state needs more shelter beds to reduce the number of people sleeping outdoors and that more work needs to be done to prevent homelessness — a route, they say, is more cost-effective.
In total, they pin Utah’s homelessness crisis on affordability and believe the system has good bones, but say it needs tweaks to pull more people off the streets.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) A person sits on a block of concrete near Rio Grande Street in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026.
All sides seem to agree that an injection of funding would improve outcomes for homeless Utahns and that a deeper bench of mental health professionals and case managers is a priority.
In the end, they concur that increasing the flow of Utahns through the system should be a goal and that expanding treatment for those with deeper issues is necessary.
They just differ on how to do it.
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