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On Wednesday leaders for South Salt Lake City hosted a public forum about a proposal to convert an old motel, located at 3300 South and 300 West, into a shelter for up to 80 homeless families with children. The person chairing this meeting read into the official record a clergy letter that we submitted talking about the ethical imperative to make sure children have a warm, safe, place to sleep. A news report about the public hearing from KSL includes these three paragraphs about why Salt Lake County desperately needs a second family shelter:
Since 2020, Utah has seen a 27% increase in families experiencing homelessness. In the past year, the Road Home outreach staff reports serving a total of 86 households — 270 people, including 180 children — who were living somewhere not meant for human habitation.
"These are families that were not couch surfing. They didn't have an aunt and uncle that they were living with or a grandma that they were living with. They were living in a camp. They were living in their vehicle — some of them were living on the outside of buildings where there were overhangs," said Sarah Strang, Road Home chief operator.
Additionally, the Road Home reported having to turn away approximately 834 families — approximately 3,100 people, 2/3 of whom were children — in the past year.
Crossroads Urban Center's Poverty Summit tomorrow morning will feature a panel discussion about how we can ensure that family homelessness does not grow in ways that will soon require the creation of a third shelter for families with children. All homeless shelters are designed to meet the needs of people who have met with some type of hardship who should be able to move out of homelessness within 90 days. This serves the needs of most families with children who become homeless but there are a small share of families headed by parents with various types of disabilities who need more support for a longer period of time. If there is not a better place for these families to move they can slowly fill the shelters, leaving no safe place indoors for families who only need help for a month or two.
A couple years ago the Salt Lake Valley Coalition to End Homelessness determined that Salt Lake County needs 150 units of permanent supportive housing for families with children so that families who need more support than a shelter can provide a place where they can get those supports. In the years since that estimate was created the number of permanent supportive housing units for families, or Family Supportive Housing units, has increased but there has not been a single unit of this type of housing that has been created.
That is why we are very excited that our poverty summit tomorrow morning is going to include a impressive panel of Utah's experts in this area who will be helping us to come up with answer to three important questions:
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How many units of Family Supportive Housing do we need in Salt Lake County now?
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What kind of services do parents and children coming out of chronic homelessness need? and,
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What policies and funding are needed to produce more of this important type of housing.
Our panelists for this conversation will be:
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Michelle Flynn is the Executive Director of the Road Home which operates the Midvale Family Resource Center and units of permanent supportive housing for families with children,
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Moe Hickey is the Executive Director of Voices for Utah Children, which advocates and advances policies and practices that are good for all of Utah’s children,
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Dan Nackerman is the Executive Director of the Housing Authority of Salt Lake City, which is the biggest provider of permanent supportive housing in Utah and which provides housing or rental assistance to over 3,000 low income households,
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David Damschen is the CEO of the Utah Housing Corporation which administers Utah's low income housing tax credit programs which play a critical role in the production of most, if not all, permanent supportive housing units built in Utah and,
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Julie Patterson of Powerful Moms Who Care, which organizes women with lived experience of homelessness to be advocates for themselves and their children.
If you care about this important issue please come to the Poverty Summit tomorrow morning and be part of conversation about how we can build a system in which no child in our state ever is forced to sleep in a car or a tent during a snow storm. The summit is free and open to the public. Full details about the agenda can be found on the Crossroads Urban Center website.
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