County tackles homelessness
Officials propose building of 600 housing units
The plan — created by the Salt Lake County Council of Governments— aims to get homeless people into housing faster and then offer support services like job training and drug-abuse treatment.
"This plan is directed to not only surround the chronically homeless population with services but to allow them in an independent way to grow back into society," said Palmer DePaulis, chairman of the county's Long Range Planning Committee.
But several residents at Thursday's public hearing at the Salt Lake Main Library urged DePaulis not to let services to the homeless population take a back seat in the housing-first priority plan,
George Dimas, former director of the National Council for Alcoholic and Drug Dependency, encouraged more of a "housing plus" model where services are considered equally with housing. Dimas added that the plan lacked specifics on how it would practically accomplish its goal to eliminate chronic homelessness.
"I find the plan kind of superficial; I don't find it has any guts. I don't find any specificity," he said. "I see these plans come and go. I feel we're destined for failure unless we become specific."
The plan's overarching goal is to take the chronically homeless — those who have been in shelters at least four times in three years or continuously over a year — out of short-term solutions like shelters and put them in homes. By doing so, the shelters will be able to service the short-term homeless better and the chronically homeless will have a higher chance of success, DePaulis said.
At the Road Home, a downtown shelter and service provider, the chronically homeless make up about 12 percent of the clientele, but use about 57 percent of the agency's resources.
"If we can take care of that small group, it goes a long way," Mayor Peter Corroon said. The plan also has a few concrete goals such as building 600 housing units for the chronically homeless, placing 48 people in houses by 2006 and creating an inventory of all housing units for the chronically homeless.
Those goals will make a dent in the county's homeless population, DePaulis said, which includes 1,750 chronically homeless people. Salt Lake County has 70 percent of the state's homeless population and has an estimated 10,000 people who are homeless at some point each year.
"Underscoring the creation of affordable units is critical to our efforts to get people out of the system and back into mainstream community," said Matt Minkevitch, director of the Road Home. "I think we can help prevent people going back into the shelter. We're starting to see some light at the end of this tunnel."
Kerry Bate, executive director of the Salt Lake County Housing Authority, said the county's plan was a step in the right direction but that he worries about funding the program to see actual outcomes.
A single housing unit can run $200-$300 a month just for property maintenance like roof repairs, plumbing and furnaces, he said. Without more federal money or state dollars to buoy the program, Bate said the plan may just burden service providers that are "already stretched very very thin."
"We're just going to take the money from one underfunded, starving problem and move it to another," he said.
E-mail: estewart@desnews.com
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