Utah is Solving its Homelessness Issue
One of my favorite fictional road signs used to proclaim: “Welcome to Utah! Now set your clocks back 200 years!“ As humorous (and as accurate) as that thinking was 30 or 40 years ago, Utah is now showing us that its people have a heart, that they know how to solve problems, and old habits can die a painful death when they are confronted with objectivity. Utah is now leading the U.S. out of the Dark Ages with how to handle homelessness.
Who would have thunk it? One of our most conservative states has gathered the facts, analyzed the problem, evaluated it, and arrived at a sound conclusion about it: It's cheaper and more humane to put homeless people into houses than it is to criminalize homelessness and put the downtrodden in jails.
Holy progressiveness!
How did Utah accomplish this? Simple. Utah is solving its homelessness problem by giving people homes. In 2005, Utah figured out that the annual cost of E.R. visits and jail says for homeless people was about $16,670 per person, compared to $11,000 to provide each homeless person with an apartment and a social worker. So, the state began giving away apartments, with no strings attached. Each participant in Utah’s Housing First program also gets a caseworker to help them become self-sufficient, but they keep the apartment even if they fail. The program has been so successful that other states are hoping to achieve similar results with programs modeled on Utah’s.
It sounds like Utah borrowed a page from Homes Not Handcuffs, the 2009 report by The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty and The National Coalition for the Homeless. Using a 2004 survey and anecdotal evidence from activists, the report concluded that permanent housing for the homeless is cheaper than criminalization. Housing is not only more humane, it’s economical.
This happened in a Republican state! Republicans in Congress would probably have required the homeless to take a drug test before getting an apartment, denied apartments to homeless people with criminal records, and evicted those who failed to become self-sufficient after a year or so. But Utah’s results show that even conservative states can solve problems like homelessness with decidedly progressive solutions. (from Nation of Change, Jan. 18, 2014)
To all of my friends and colleagues from Utah (yes, I claim a few), I say with all humility: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!
I recall many years ago when traveling through Las Vegas that about 30 or 40 miles from the city, both going and coming, spaced about a mile apart in the desert were men standing alone by the side of the road. My assumption was that Las Vegas police, finding a person on the street, would drive them out of the city in the direction they wanted to go and drop them there in the middle of the desert. I certainly hope they were given water, because as hitchhikers, very few would pick them up.
Ron