Last week, the former Speaker of the Utah House of Representatives, Greg Hughes, and other leaders of the Pioneer Park Coalition criticized state and local officials for delays in the opening of new homeless shelters in Salt Lake County. Hughes was quoted in the Deseret News as saying that the transition from the current homeless shelters to the new ones, "was meant to be done in the summer, when bed counts are lower and transition from existing shelter to new resource centers would give you the highest rate of success,"
Hughes is obviously correct in noting that it would be easier to move vulnerable people and their belongings from one location to another during the summer when several hundred less people use the shelter and the weather is less of an obstacle. What is less obvious is why he thinks the new model will be less successful during the time of year when there is a need for more shelter beds. Is it because there may not be enough beds at the new shelters for the annual surge in people who show up at homeless shelters when the temperatures begin to approach freezing?
It would be disappointing to learn that some of our state leaders intentionally created a new homeless system that they knew would probably have enough beds in July but might not have enough beds in December. Utah is a better place than that. Every year thousands of Utahns support our state's homeless shelters with their money and their time. Major Utah employers have stepped up and hired homeless people through the Dignity of Work phase of the Operation Rio Grande initiative that Hughes spearheaded.
During the upcoming months we will learn if the new shelters are able to hold all of the people who would have been able to sleep at the old shelter. This will be an important indicator of success on the day the third shelter opens. It will also be important indicator of success or failure on the coldest day of January. A shelter system with a waiting list during the harshest days of winter is a failure, no matter how it successful it is in other ways.
Preventing people from freezing to death is a bigger priority than closing a shelter on a deadline. If there is not room in the new shelters for all of the people sleeping at the old shelter then the old shelter needs to be maintained as an overflow shelter for the winter until a new overflow shelter is constructed. Hughes and the other leaders of the Pioneer Park Coalition have the connections and influence needed to secure a location and funding for a new overflow shelter if it turns out we need one.
It would be even better if they used their influence to speed the construction of specific types of housing that are needed to reduce demand for homeless shelters and the length of time people stay in them. If we built more affordable housing for families with children, then demand for beds at the family shelter would go down. If we built more housing for seniors whose Social Security income has not been growing as fast as rents, we would see demand for beds decrease at both the men's shelter and the women's shelter. If we built more recovery housing for low income people exiting treatment for substance use disorders, we would see more people successfully avoiding additional periods of homelessness and incarceration.
Our homeless services system will only be successful if everyone has access to emergency shelter, as well as long-term housing.