After nearly a decade of growth, street homelessness in Salt Lake County may finally be in decline. The latest data from Salt Lake Valley Coalition to End Homelessness’s annual counts of homeless individuals and housing inventory offers several early indicators of success for Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall’s “public safety plan” and state legislative reforms, both of which prioritized enforcement of anti-camping laws — policies which critics have argued would make the problem worse.
Earlier, as of 2023, unsheltered homelessness in Salt Lake County had grown 62% compared to pre-pandemic levels — rising at six times the rate of sheltered homelessness over that period. An unprecedented number of homeless encampments appeared in parks, along trails and in vacant lots and buildings.
State lawmakers took notice of this growing public health and safety crisis and enacted reforms in the 2023 and 2024 legislative sessions. In response to these reforms and public pressure from Gov. Spencer Cox and legislative leaders, Mendenhall signaled that the Salt Lake City Police Department would prioritize enforcement of its public order ordinances, such as prohibitions against unsanctioned camping.
Today, according to the new data, street homelessness has declined 20% compared with just before the policy changes at the Salt Lake Police Department. Total homelessness declined marginally after years of growth. The proportion of homeless individuals staying in shelters increased both by percentage and absolutely, indicating that many of the individuals who left unsheltered homelessness likely moved into shelters.
The decreases in unsheltered homelessness among high-risk subpopulations are especially notable. In 2024, 30% of homeless people with substance use disorders were unsheltered, along with 25% of those with serious mental illness. After the public safety plan’s implementation, those proportions dropped to 19% and 13%, respectively. The trend among chronically homeless individuals was similar, dropping by roughly half both as a proportion and absolutely over that period.
Perhaps most notably, these improvements were achieved without increasing permanent housing subsidies. Many critics of enforcement policies argue that the only effective way to reduce unsheltered homelessness is through increasing the supply of subsidized housing. Yet, subsidized housing capacity actually declined between 2025 and 2026 — the period in which the largest decline in unsheltered homelessness occurred.
These data alone are insufficient to deduce causality with academic rigor. But they do speak to whether the state and city’s focus on enforcement has made homelessness worse. There is no indication that it has.
These trends are likely the result of several factors, not just enforcement of camping bans. Since 2024, the number of individuals in jail who self-report as homeless has increased by 43%. Most of these individuals, however, were likely jailed for other, more serious offenses rather than for camping, because Salt Lake County’s district attorney declines to prosecute most camping ban violations. Moreover, a bill passed in 2025 made significant changes to jail capacity and overcrowding policies, making it easier to hold more offenders before trial.
Increased shelter capacity in Salt Lake County also likely played a significant role in reducing unsheltered homelessness. In 2024, there were 0.78 unutilized shelter beds for every unsheltered person living in Salt Lake County. By 2026, there were 1.5 open beds per unsheltered person.
This improvement in capacity was enough to accommodate every remaining unsheltered individual, though there are several reasons why it has not “solved” the problem. Some unsheltered individuals have behavioral or criminal histories that may prevent them from being allowed in certain shelters with available beds.
Unsheltered homelessness is more common among single men, who may be more likely to have such limitations compared to other demographics. And some individuals continue to refuse shelter for a wide range of personal reasons, from drug use to criminal activity to discomfort with congregate sleeping.
Policymakers and residents alike must interpret homelessness data with caution — the methodological limitations of this kind of data are numerous. But, Salt Lake City’s experience thus far suggests that shelter capacity, public order enforcement and political will can reduce street homelessness, and that other cities facing these crises have more effective tools at their disposal than they have been led to believe.