End Salt Lake County homelessness in 10 years?
Significant help from the private sector is also needed if the Salt Lake County Long Range Planning Committee's 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness is implemented as it was presented to the City Council.
Former city Mayor Palmer DePaulis, committee chairman, gave the council a sneak peek at the draft plan Thursday and expects to present it officially to the Salt Lake County Council of Governments in June.
Commissioned in 1997, the planning committee is now set on developing a plan to end chronic homelessness within the county by 2014, as states have been ordered by President Bush's administration.
In researching the issue in Salt Lake County, the committee found 435 people in Salt Lake County who are "chronically" homeless. These are folks who seem stuck in a revolving door of homelessness. DePaulis said many are Vietnam veterans and are drug-addicted and have mental health issues.
"In one way or another they are very broken people," he said.
At Salt Lake City's largest homeless shelter, the Road Home, the "chronically homeless" make up only 11 percent of the people that come to the shelter but they consume 52 percent of the shelter's resources.
Getting this group into permanent housing, then, would "significantly reduce homelessness and the societal costs of homelessness over time," according to the planning committee's draft report.
Some of the key points set to be implemented in the first year include:
• Rapidly rehousing people who have become homeless within 90 days of their becoming homeless
• An end to discharging people into homelessness, ensuring that everyone discharged from jail, prison, a hospital or drug/mental health treatments centers has a place to live.
• Increase housing for people escaping homelessness by 1,200 units, including another 600 units of supportive, transitional housing with another 600 residential subsidy units becoming available by 2014. Those units will be surrounded by aid groups, like job placement, mental health and drug-addiction treatment service providers.
• Creating a database file that can be used to track the chronically homeless on an individual basis.
• Developing Assertive Community Action Teams that will proactively seek out street people and try to convince them to get into programs that will help them end their homeless condition.
While sympathetic to the cause, some council members wondered if it could really be accomplished. Carlton Christensen said he has a homeless, drug-addicted cousin who refused to get help and seems to want to remain homeless.
"How do you get somebody who's chronically homeless like that?" Christensen said.
DePaulis said the community action teams will be highly specialized workers, experts in convincing people to leave the streets and get help.
Of course, the big issue will be funding, and such an ambitious plan will take money.
"It's expensive but it is what we consider the best model," DePaulis said. "We need to raise money."
E-mail: bsnyder@desnews.com
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