After he wrapped up presenting on the state of homelessness to legislative committees earlier in the week, State Homeless Coordinator Wayne Niederhauser came to the Utah Homeless Council in August with a request: “We have a gap statewide in emergency shelter and we’re going to need about $5 million to fill that gap this year, in addition to winter response.”
As tens of millions in pandemic-era federal aid is drying up — and homelessness in Utah has continued to rise — the organizations that provide services to the state’s unsheltered population have been left short on funds, limiting their resources to meet growing needs.
Prior to the council approving additional funding for service providers throughout the state, Carol Hollowell, the executive director of St. George’s Switchpoint Community Resource Center, wondered, “When there’s gaps in the emergency shelter system statewide, where can we cover those gaps ahead of time?”
“Maybe the Legislature’s going to have to weigh in on this,” Niederhauser said.
Rep. Steve Eliason, R-Sandy, sits on the Utah Homeless Council and has put forward legislation to fund homeless services in recent years. He told The Salt Lake Tribune that programs to address homelessness should now be funded through the coming “six months.”
“But beyond that, if the Legislature doesn’t act, they will hit a fiscal cliff. So we’re very well aware of that,” Eliason said.
In fiscal 2024, which ends June 30, the vast majority of money going toward housing and homelessness services is one-time funding, and the largest chunk of that comes from the federal government. And for the second year in a row, deeply affordable housing funding requests were more than double what the state had available.
To address homelessness in the state, and expand available deeply affordable housing, Niederhauser told The Tribune last month, “We are going to need to get more funding through the Legislature.”
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) State Homeless Coordinator Wayne Niederhauser, center, in September.
An annual report released by the state’s Office of Homeless Services in June indicated that in fiscal 2022, the amount of people experiencing homelessness for the first time increased by 10%. It was the second year in a row that number went up.
The number of people accessing resources for the unsheltered population — and those on the brink of becoming homeless — grew overall, too. Approximately 13,425 people entered emergency shelters, transitional housing or permanent supportive housing in 2022, up from 12,340 in 2021 and 11,923 in 2020.
Rising homelessness doesn’t surprise Michelle Flynn, the executive director of The Road Home. The nonprofit helps connect people to such resources.
“We’ve seen this coming,” Flynn said, pointing to the end of COVID-19 rental assistance, additional food stamp funds and the elimination of the child tax credit.
“That need will increase, and it’s not really the direction we want to go as a community,” Flynn continued. “We need to have enough crisis shelter, and that need is greater than what we have right now. Our goal really is to keep people in their homes.”
Salt Lake City’s director of homeless policy and outreach, Andrew Johnston, summarized the state of funding to tackle homelessness as “precarious.”
Much of the state’s unsheltered population is concentrated in and around the state’s capital. But, Johnston said, many of the people needing help in the city are coming from all over Utah, making it a statewide issue.
“It doesn’t really matter if you grew up or live in Salt Lake City, or Ogden, or St. George,” Johnston said. “That’s where you’re going to have to go if you want services for homelessness, frankly. … That’s a reality that we’ve known for a long time, and we’d like to spread it out more — but from a Salt Lake City perspective, that means we need help.
Eliason said that in addressing homelessness, the Legislature needs to “strike a balance” between the state, local governments and nonprofits as to how it will be planned and paid for. Lawmakers in recent years have looked beyond Utah’s urban centers to meet people’s needs where they live.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Beds for unsheltered women at the Gail Miller Resource Center in 2019.
“We have allocated funding around the state like we’ve never done before as communities step up to serve homeless people in their local communities, instead of just shipping them to the capital city, which has been all too common,” Eliason said. “And so, we want to support those efforts, and that’s going to require more money.”
Both Flynn and Johnston said they would like to see the Legislature increase the amount of dedicated funding going toward addressing homelessness — offering providers guaranteed money they can rely on year after year, allowing them to plan ahead.
No matter what the Legislature ends up doing, Eliason said the issue will be a “huge focus” next session. The body will likely look at a “broader range” of services to help people step out of homelessness, he added.
That range will likely go beyond services and housing to make changes in entities that also have an impact on homelessness, like the Department of Corrections.
But Niederhauser said there’s still a lot to do in addressing what he sees as the root of the growing number of unsheltered people in the state — a deepening housing affordability crisis.
“We pass bills and say (to local governments), ‘You need to give us an affordability plan, and you need to do this, and you need to do that,’ we’ve passed all kinds of bills to do that over the years,” Niederhauser, who previously served as Senate president, told lawmakers at the August committee meeting. “But we don’t give them the tools to address the housing affordability.”
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