National outlets declared Utah had solved chronic homelessness in 2015 through a “simple” program of taking people off the street and putting them in a home.
A decade of this “housing first” experiment reduced the number of chronically homeless — or, those homeless for over a year with addiction or mental illness — by 91%.
There was only one problem: it didn’t last.
As synthetic drugs, skyrocketing costs and misaligned systems kept people in a cycle of instability, it became clear a bed cannot repair a life in crisis.
By 2025, after homelessness surged during COVID-19, Utah recorded its highest levels of homelessness — including chronic homelessness — ever.
Nearly 4,600 Utahns slept in a shelter or on the sidewalk on a night in January, an 18% increase from 2024, driven by a jump in chronic homelessness from 906 to 1,233.
In October, former state Senate President Wayne Niederhauser, who became the state’s inaugural homeless coordinator in 2021, announced his retirement after a long career in public service.
In his place, Gov. Spencer Cox appointed two 28-year-olds: state Rep. Tyler Clancy, a detective in the Provo Police Department, and Nick Coleman, Niederhauser’s assistant.
The ascendant policymakers were in high school when Utah prematurely proclaimed victory over chronic homelessness. Now, the two are tasked with making that goal a reality.
Step one, they said, is to never call the solution “simple.”
Utahns looking for ‘big ideas’
For Clancy and Coleman, the complexities of homelessness hit close to home.
When he was a pre-schooler, Coleman and his Ukrainian mother found themselves in a Salt Lake City shelter after a bad marriage dissolved, he told the Deseret News.
After studying philosophy and business at the University of Utah, Coleman was hired as Cox’s director of strategic initiatives where he did a deep-dive into homeless policy.
Coleman then served as assistant state homeless coordinator under Niederhauser until he was appointed as interim coordinator during the 2026 legislative session.
When Clancy resigns from the Legislature in March, Coleman will stay on as his assistant. They are already united on what their strategy will be, according to Coleman.
“The headline for this is that compassion without accountability doesn’t last, and that accountability without compassion doesn’t end up healing,” Coleman said.
Clancy also formed his worldview through firsthand encounters with homelessness.
While he studied family life at Brigham Young University, Clancy worked as executive director of Pioneer Park Coalition, a nonprofit focused on homeless services.
As a police officer Clancy “sat with homeless folks on the curb” to observe the on-the-ground impact of state policies on Utah’s homeless population.
Despite this resume, Clancy and Coleman have far less experience in public service than their predecessor as they gain stewardship over the $150 million, including $30 million in grants, distributed by the Office of Homeless Services.
In a statement to the Deseret News, Cox praised the “energy and seriousness” of his homeless services team. According to Clancy, youth lends itself to bridge-building and brainstorming and a rebirth of Utah homeless policy.
“What the citizens of Utah are looking for is big ideas,” Clancy told the Deseret News. “They don’t want more of the same. They don’t want excuses.”
Cox’s homelessness priorities
Over the past few years, Cox and Clancy have shifted Utah’s homelessness conversation away from shelter space and toward the unique situation of each individual.
At the center of this change is a proposed “transformative” central campus where the chronically homeless can access treatment options in one location, potentially with the help of expanded involuntary commitment policies.
“Our mission is to make Utah the worst place in the country to camp on the street — and the best place to get help,” Cox said in his annual State of the State speech last month.
But the ambitious vision Cox and Clancy have articulated of investing in a cohesive system that links law enforcement with long-term recovery is up against a tough budget year.
The campus — modeled after projects in Florida, Nevada and Texas — is estimated to cost $75 million to build, and around $30 million each year to operate.
Cox’s priority for the 2026 legislative session was to secure a second round of $25 million to begin construction on the campus and another $20 million in ongoing funds to run it.
The plan relied on the Trump administration’s change to the federal grants process, favoring Cox’s proposal, to make up the difference. But it is currently held up in court.
Additionally, President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” reduced the state’s income tax revenues by roughly $300 million, erasing the state’s budget surplus.
These realities have turned Cox’s budget request into a “placeholder” while he figures out how to implement the ideas behind the campus with a focus on those “who are cycling through jail, emergency rooms, and the streets.”
“In a tight budget year, we’re focused on a targeted, phased approach that puts resources where the data shows we can get measurable results, while continuing to evaluate long-term infrastructure needs like the central campus,” Cox said in a statement.
But the answer was never going to be easy money. Utah has spent more than $200 million on shelter space since 2015 and nearly $270 million on homeless services just since 2020.
“We invest millions of dollars in homeless services … but if we don’t have the system in place that has the right amount of pressure to push people to those well funded services, it’s all for naught,” Clancy said.
The biggest challenge for chronic homelessness, according to Clancy, is a system that has for too long treated all homeless individuals the same, instead of having radically different, and targeted interventions for “high utilizers.”
What are ‘high utilizers’?
The thing Clancy wants people to know about the 16-acre, 1,300-bed “transformative” campus is there is nothing magic about it that will solve chronic homelessness.
The campus will only work if the resources — and the criminal justice pathways to the resources — are functioning together to treat people as individuals.
This session it is Coleman’s job to convince lawmakers to devote a slice of the strained budget to do exactly that, hopefully providing a proof of concept for the campus.
Because amid the millions spent on homeless services there remains a massive loophole: a subset of the population using taxpayer-funded resources to get worse, not better.
While 75% of the 30,000 individuals who interact with Utah’s homeless services in a given year successfully exit homelessness, 25% are near-permanent participants.
This group often takes up 75% of shelter beds, according to one service provider. They also overlap significantly with a group of “high utilizers” swamping the Salt Lake City police.
Between 2024 and 2025, around 1,000 individuals, or 12% of Salt Lake City’s arrested population, accounted for 45% of all police activity, with an average of 12 arrests each.
The top 50 high utilizers — who often are themselves, or prey on, the chronically homeless — had an average number of arrests in the 20s, department data found.
“So if we pulled on any lever, it would probably be to help in this space,” Coleman said. “Then we think that we might be able to come back to Legislature and say, ‘We’ve started the program, it’s working, here’s the outcomes.’”
Coleman’s pitch to appropriators is that in addition to preserving current shelter infrastructure the Legislature can boost existing programs to target high utilizers.
This priority is shared by Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall, who said in August that addressing the criminal element of chronic homelessness “will have a disproportionately positive impact on capacity across the system.”
Senate President Stuart Adams agreed “repetitive users are most” of the problem. Adams isn’t “backing away from a campus,” but he said he wants to give Cox a chance to show that a focus on high utilizers will work.
2026 policy proposals
This year has seen fewer homeless proposals than last year, when Clancy spearheaded efforts to:
- Start a zero-tolerance drug policy inside and around shelters.
- Pressure shelters to focus housing programs on treatment.
- Create case files for the homeless population statewide.
- Enable first responders to connect overdose survivors with services.
- Prohibit syringe exchange programs inside homeless shelters.
- Encourage the end of federal housing-first restrictions on funding.
This year legislative investments will be used to kickstart non-legislative changes, Coleman said, like ensuring criminal sentences account for high utilizers’ recent history and designating isolated shelter space for high utilizers.
New bills include HB308, sponsored by Rep. Clinton Okerlund, R-Sandy, which focuses reporting requirements on “reaching a functional zero level of homelessness for each type of homelessness and subpopulation.”
Clancy is also sponsoring HB205 and HB355 which would prohibit unauthorized syringe exchanges on public property, create geographic restraining orders for high utilizers and let Utahns sue the state if shelters are a public nuisance.
Clancy’s law enforcement background is already influencing the Office of Homeless Services, Coleman said. The new assistant director, Nathan Meinzer, previously ran the specialty police squad around the Gail Miller Resource Center.
But some worry the tough-on-crime emphasis endorsed by Cox could interfere with traditional homeless resources.
“Punishment and services shouldn’t be mixed,” said Bill Tibbitts, deputy director at Crossroads Urban Center. “You mix the two and the whole thing ends up feeling like a jail.”
Providers like Tibbitts are lobbying for SB255, sponsored by Sen. Nate Blouin, D-Salt Lake City, which would create a task force to propose ways to house Utah’s chronically homeless ahead of the 2034 Winter Olympic Games.
Senate Minority Leader Luz Escamilla, D-Salt Lake City, who represents the area where the campus will be built, has also introduced a series of bills to push back on the plans:
- SB239 would require Clancy to enforce a “comprehensive plan” for campus services and ensure community safety or lose funding.
- SB246 would make the Utah Homeless Services Board include a member living near the campus appointed by a local community organization.
- SB279 would create a new 50% tax credit for owners of property within a one-mile radius of the central campus once it is constructed.
Is there unity around a campus?
Escamilla appreciates Clancy’s criminal justice investments and agrees the state needs more beds. But resists the idea of placing all of the state’s hopes in one massive compound.
“The resources are needed, but the idea of the one location for $55 million was not realistic,” Escamilla said. “I’m glad that we are focusing back on what we need to do right now.”
In September, state officials announced that the site for the campus would be in empty fields just to the north of the Salt Lake City International Airport.
A state analysis showed the parcel will likely not require an extensive federal wetlands review. The purchase will likely be finalized this spring with city approval, Coleman said.
On Monday, House Majority Leader Casey Snider, R-Paradise, introduced a bill that would block the campus if state and private partners do not honor commitments to conserve that corner of the Great Salt Lake, he told reporters.
However, as Clancy enters his new position, stakeholders appear on board with his future plans.
Michelle Flynn, director of The Road Home network of shelters, agrees that Utah needs a targeted approach for high utilizers while preserving the infrastructure that works well for the majority of homeless Utahns.
“This is not about a lack of effort or care. It is about capacity,” Flynn said in a statement. “Our homeless response system was not originally built to support this level of complexity at scale.”
What this session shows is Utah is not attempting to put “all its eggs in one basket,” as some critics allege. In fact, Clancy and Coleman hope by highlighting the many different faces of homelessness they can do the opposite.
Instead of one massive sum for a campus, Clancy said he is pushing for incremental expansions to the state mental health hospital and innovative independent-living arrangements like Switchpoint and the Other Side Village.
Putting an end to chronic homelessness has never seemed less simple, but, according to Clancy, it has also never been more attainable because now, after years of disunion, everyone appears to be pulling in the same direction.
“I’ve never seen more alignment on the key pillars that the governor’s outlined,” Clancy said. “That’s what gives me hope is seeing the collaboration that’s been going.”