Crime Rate Soaring in Salt Lake Neighborhoods with Homeless Resource Centers

The Salt Lake neighborhoods where “resources” are provided for the homeless, became magnets for drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and violence.

Richard Markosian

October 8, 2022

Utah Stories attended press conference organized the Pioneer Park Coalition where the coalition released its plans to curtail the problems of homelessness and crime that are plaguing Salt Lake City.

The Pioneer Park Coalition is made up of concerned residents, citizens, and business owners who believe that the homeless policy for Salt Lake City needs to change.

Amy J. Hawkins, Chair of the Ballpark Community Council said, people, want to frame this as an either-or situation, which is not. “Either I’m compassionate towards people who are going through the extraordinary trials of homelessness…Or I’m compassionate towards my neighbors who are having to contend with what to tell their children or their dogs eating human waste full of heroin.” She says it should not be an either-or situation they should be able to help everyone.

The Pioneer Park Coalition’s grand plan was announced along with business owners including Nicole Thomas who chose to leave downtown with her business Latter-Day Bride, which she operated in downtown Salt Lake City for twenty-three years. She says she had to move due to the perpetual problems she suffered due to the homeless population including a vicious attack on one of her employees.

Thomas said, “Salt Lake City’s approach to homelessness and crime is failing. Change must happen now. As business owners, and concerned residents we can no longer stand by and watch this city deteriorate. Millions of dollars are being thrown at the homeless crisis.”

Thomas believes that housing the homeless “will not work.” emergencies homeless shelters and homeless resource centers are some of the “biggest magnets for crime in the city according to 2021 police statistics. Police were called to the woman’s homeless resource center 1,177 times.”

Of the top thirty places where police were called last year, the leading places were where “resources” were being provided for the homeless, which have proven to be magnets for drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and violence. Some of the leaders include the Gail Miller Homeless Resource Center and the Gerald E. King Woman’s Homeless Resource Center and the Magnolia Apartments. All three neighborhoods around these facilities have deteriorated since the facilities opened.

Thomas says “full statistical transparency” is needed including holding those who operate these facilities accountable when violence is occurring outside. This accountability was written into their charter when they opened their facilities. But nobody is being held accountable. Later during the questioning period, it was asked what would happen if the facilities couldn’t improve or stop the drug trafficking and violence around their facilities. Scott Howell responded that they should “shut them down.”

Unlike all of the above-mentioned facilities, the neighborhood around where the Otherside Academy is located on 700 East and 200 South, has improved and the neighbors have embraced the tenants who occupy the buildings of this successful organization that operates to turn around the lives of ex-convicts and felons.

“Accountability is the key. And we now need to start holding all of these organizations and centers accountable for what is happening,” said James Behunin, Executive Director of the Pioneer Park Coalition.

Sanctioned Campgrounds

Long-term plans include sanctioned campgrounds around the valley offering showers, meals, and other services. PPC believes these camps should be spread across the Wasatch Front into cities such as Draper, Harriman, and Bountiful. But Behunin admits any homeless service areas will be a tough sell to neighborhoods, but they are already evaluating various state-owned lands.

Homeless “Transformational Campus”

Another plan includes a homeless campus for “Transforming Lives” said Behunin. A transformational resource center that could include “wrap-around services” including drug rehab services, psychiatric care and vocational training. Behunin says that the Haven for Hope Facility in San Antonio, Texas offers this model and it’s been transforming lives and has resulted in an 80% decline in homelessness in San Antonio. This 17-building, 24-acre facility is located in the heart of a former warehouse district in the city. Where a facility like this would be located in Salt Lake City is still uncertain.

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Richard Markosian

I am a story teller and journalist. I have a passion for farmers, local craftspeople, and folks who aspire to create, build and grow their business in the local marketplace. Why local? By supporting locally-owned businesses we create more opportunity for entrepreneurs, and we claim our sovereignty to shape our communities how we want to see them. I aspire to build Utah Stories Magazine into a household Utah name, and assist Utah businesses and makers with marketing. On the journalism side of things my passion is investigative journalism that offers true insight into issues. I believe strongly in the forth estate: strong, meaningful, insightful journalism is essential to a free market Democracy.

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Utah Homelessness Crisis: Tyler Clancy Challenges ‘Housing First’ Failures

“It’s not normal to see someone sleeping on the sidewalk in a sleeping bag with a needle sticking out of their arm.”

That sentence should not be controversial. In a sane society, it would barely need saying. But in Utah — where politicians, nonprofits, consultants, and bureaucrats have spent more than a decade congratulating themselves for “addressing homelessness” while the streets of Salt Lake have become more dangerous, more drug-soaked, and more morally disorienting — it lands like an indictment. And it came not from a crank, a talk-radio host, or a downtown business owner at the end of his rope, but from Tyler Clancy, Utah’s newly appointed homeless coordinator.

That matters because if Clancy is serious — and after sitting down with him, he appears to be — then he represents something Utah’s homelessness system has not had in a very long time: someone willing to say the obvious out loud. The old script is dead. Everybody knows it, but almost nobody in power has wanted to admit it.

For years, Utah’s homelessness policy has been built on a polite fiction — that if we build enough units, distribute enough funding, and avoid being too “judgmental,” the crisis will gradually resolve itself. That story was easier to maintain when Utah was receiving national praise for “solving chronic homelessness.” It is much harder to sustain now, when the conditions on the ground tell a very different story.

Magnolia Apartments opened to help alleviate homelessness, but the results were not all positive.

Part of that failure became painfully clear over the last four years. By most accounts, former homelessness coordinator Wayne Niederhauser was a decent man and a very nice guy. But one person close to him described his tenure as that of “a tiger without stripes”— someone with the title, but not the appetite to challenge the sprawling network of nonprofits and service providers receiving millions in taxpayer dollars. That lack of accountability has had real consequences. Multiple former and current residents have told Utah Stories that of the roughly 60 original tenants who moved into Magnolia when it opened, about 20 have since died — most, they say, from accidental drug overdoses.

If those accounts are even close to accurate, they should have triggered a public reckoning. Instead, the system kept moving, protected by good intentions, insulated from scrutiny, and largely unbothered by outcomes that would be considered a scandal in almost any other context.

That is the machine Clancy is stepping into, and unless he is willing to confront it directly — not just coordinate around it — his role risks becoming one more layer of management over the same failures. The reality he inherits is not complicated in the way policymakers like to suggest. It is visible, immediate, and increasingly impossible to explain away.

Open drug use, fentanyl addiction, untreated mental illness, rising disorder, and a growing sense among both the public and the homeless themselves all indicate that the system is not working. Complexity exists, but it has also become a convenient shield for cowardice. It is the language people use when they want to avoid saying what is plainly in front of them: Utah has spent years managing visible human collapse while calling it compassion.

The Lie Utah Told Itself

For years, Utah’s approach to homelessness rested on a narrative few in power were willing to question. It sounded compassionate. It polled well. And it avoided uncomfortable truths.

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