While on duty, Brian Redd, Salt Lake City Police Department chief, met a woman whose backpack had been stolen.
“She was an obvious drug user,” Redd said. “So I asked her, I said, ‘Tell me your story. What are you doing down here?’”
Redd quickly found out the woman was recently released from jail. Her first priority: finding drugs.
“Hey, there’s a better way,” Redd said. He offered to take her to the Department of Homeless Services and enroll her in a detox program. “We can help you. You’re better than this.”
The woman looked at him. “No, I want to do drugs,” she said.
Redd shared this story Thursday at the annual conference for Solutions Utah, a nonprofit homelessness advocacy group.
This story highlights a theme becoming increasingly apparent: solving homelessness reaches beyond just putting a roof over someone’s head.
If the problem isn’t housing, what is it?
Gloria Gong, executive director of the Government Performance Lab at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, said homelessness is the combination of two problems: economics and support.
Economic factors are the most commonly considered element of homelessness.
The basic supply-and-demand trend of modern economics proves that as more people desire homes, especially in Utah, Gong said, sale prices rise.
“Demand is going up, prices are going up, and that means people keep getting pushed closer and closer to the edge of what they can afford,” Gong said.
The price tag, however, is not the only issue leaving people in the lurch. Many people need resources beyond a roof over their head.
“This other groups of folks, it’s not just a question of housing,” Gong said. “You could have given them a completely free unit of housing and if they don’t have some extra support, they can’t stay housed.”
Disabilities, like substance use or mental health, prevent them from supporting themselves and securing consistent, adequate living conditions.
“This is something at the intersection of public safety and the medical system and public health and homelessness.”
What’s being done to solve the problem?
Robert Marbut, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development senior adviser, said the important shift required to solve this problem is measuring success in a new way. Instead of looking at how many people are placed in government-funded homes, he suggests looking at numbers of how many people become self-sufficient after using government-provided resources.
He shared the efforts of several states that found success in addressing homeless by promoting people-focused resources.
In San Francisco, some long-term Permanent Supportive Housing housing has been turned into transitional treatment centers, and more funding has been devoted to combatting open-air drug use.
The mayor of Philadelphia, Cherelle L. Parker, has combined successful secular and religious groups, making the battle against homelessness a group effort. She also directed hundreds of law enforcement officers to Kensington, a Philadelphia neighborhood with serious fentanyl problems.
“There’s a police officer in every single intersection,” Marbut said. “And they’re saying, ‘You can go to jail, or you can go to treatment.’”
The city of Austin, Texas, under its revised Homeless Encampment Management plan, has cleared out 2,300 encampments, Marbut said, closing unsafe sites while connecting individuals to needed resources.
These efforts show a new focus: helping homeless individuals become not just housed, but healthy, increasing their chance at eventual independence.
“We’re trying to get back to the self-sufficiency,” Marbut said. “That’s our North Star, and that’s what we’re aiming for.”
Utah’s actions to confront homelessness
Utah is taking new measures to tackle homelessness.
The Utah Department of Corrections recently announced Project ARCH, a program to provide treatment to people with repeated criminal convictions who cycle in and out of homeless shelters.
Project ARCH is funded by $1.4 million earmarked by the state during its legislative session. The first beds are expected to be available in July, and state officials hope the program will have all 180 beds up and running by September.
Project CONNECT is another Utah program aimed at pairing social workers and police officers with to Salt Lake City’s most arrest individuals.
“We are going to connect people to services,” Redd said. “We’ll send our social workers. We’ll send our officers. We’ll work with our partners to try and resolves these issues.”
For people, by people
These solutions are people-focused, and people-supported.
“We’re going to work together,” Gong said. “Even if we don’t agree with each other, we can do this together, and that’s particularly important to solve these problems that are so hard.”
Addressing the homelessness problem requires collaboration of city and state representatives, local officials and the public.
“At the end of the day, it’s a human issue,” said Tyler Clancy, state homeless coordinator. “We can never lose sight of that.”
