Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.
Everybody wants there to be a decent and effective shelter for the growing number of homeless human beings in Salt Lake County, but (almost) nobody wants such a facility next to them.
The Utah Office of Homeless Services is going to have to pick a place anyway. And soon. Some combination of carrots and sticks will likely be necessary to bring the plan to fruition, as it is not fair either to the homeless or to the communities where they now congregate to leave things the way they are.
The difficulty in selecting a site for Utah’s newest brainstorm for sheltering the homeless — a 30-acre tract of land for a 1,200-bed shelter — means that the previously set deadline of having such a facility ready to open this October just won’t happen.
That means that local governments, advocacy groups and the homeless themselves, will spend yet another numbing Utah winter scrambling to protect the most vulnerable among us. And it means that state and local officials are likely to spend another few months, at least, pointing fingers and blaming one another for a problem that never seems to end.
The Utah Legislature has already allocated $25 million to create the new campus for serving the homeless. But there’s been no formal set-aside of money to actually operate the center, nor to provide the high levels of security that will be necessary to protect both those who need help and those who live or operate businesses nearby.
Such a lack of operating funds is part of what has doomed the 2019 state plan that closed the Road Home shelter in Salt Lake City’s downtown Rio Grande neighborhood and replaced it with three “service centers.”
Those centers were supposed to be much more aggressive in providing active services to people experiencing homelessness, moving them away from the need for shelter and into more permanent housing — with, if necessary, support services that would keep the target population from winding up back on the street.
It didn’t work.
An ongoing lack of supportive housing meant that those who were supposed to cycle through the service centers didn’t have anywhere else to go. So many either stayed in the service centers, not creating room for anyone in the pipeline behind them, or wound up back on the street. Or along the Jordan River. Or in the foothills above Federal Heights.
Now that some six years have been squandered in a failed attempt to decentralize services for the homeless, the state is shifting back to a central shelter and service center. If they can find a place for it.
Many bright and concerned Utahns, in government and the private sector, have been working on this problem for years, but a leadership vacuum remains. Wayne Niederhauser, the state homeless services director, seems to be drawing $210,000 a year to explain, over and over, that solving the problem will take a little longer.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is among those already active on this issue, at least in terms of donating funds. It could go further, applying its highly visible position and assuming a leadership role to convene others around a common push.
Officials have considered many locations for a homeless campus, narrowing the list to seven, then to five, before admitting at least temporary defeat.
The old Oxbow Jail site in South Salt Lake keeps popping up on the radar, but voters turned down a Salt Lake County bond issue that would have closed that site as a jail. And South Salt Lake city officials — their city already the host of the main county jail, one of the new homeless service centers, a juvenile detention center and more — strongly objected to becoming the home of yet another such facility.
Those objections are understandable. They have the sympathy of Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson.
But it is also true that anywhere in South Salt Lake would better serve the purpose of sheltering and rehabilitating the homeless than would some of the other considered locations.
Many of those eyed spots are far afield in the western and southern parts of the county, not near any established residential neighborhoods but also far from access to public transport, health care, jobs and other things necessary to walk homeless individuals back to self-sufficiency or, when that’s not possible, ongoing services.
Those needs may push the focus for services for the homeless back to Salt Lake City, though state officials should take care to do it in a way that doesn’t make it seem like the city is being punished. Building up the surrounding community with enhanced infrastructure, even tax breaks for nearby property owners, could help.
No place will be perfect for the new center for services to the homeless, especially in the eyes of those who will find themselves living nearby. But it’s time to select a site, and to make it up to the surrounding community by funding services and police presence, so that whatever location is selected doesn’t just become another dangerous warehouse.
Editorials represent the opinions of The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board, which operates independently from the newsroom.
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