A town hall meeting discussing the new proposed Utah homeless campus was organized by Solutions Utah on November 20th at the Thomas S. Monson Building on North Temple. Watching the presentation were around one hundred attendees including elected government officials and staff, students, community council representatives, and staff of The Other Side Academy.

The thirty-acre homeless campus has been discussed for several years to better share the burden of Utah’s homeless crisis. The facility is touted to be “multi-tiered”, addressing myriad problems from which the homeless suffer. A site for the campus still has not been chosen. A facility called Haven for Hope in San Antonio offers something similar. It’s a “low-barrier” one-stop shop for all the problems suffered by the homeless. 

Two prominent businessmen and homeless advocates spoke on the state-wide plans, mostly about what is not working in homeless services, and how to improve the modality of those services. 

Randy Shumway, Chair of the Utah Homeless Services Board, and Joseph Grenny, acclaimed author and Founder of The Other Side Academy, each gave presentations at the townhall meeting. Shumway mostly spoke about the campus’ critical infrastructure of wrap-around services. Grenny spoke about how assets don’t solve human problems, but rather, how outcome-focused support and measurement is key. Measuring services provided is the norm in homeless services, while measuring outcomes is almost non-existent.

Randy Shumway is CEO of the Cicero Group. “We see article after article in the media that focuses on the facilities rather than the human crisis that actually is surrounding this population,” Shumway said,  emphasizing that a solution to the homeless crisis we find ourselves in cannot be solved by “bricks and mortar.”

Shumway added that the “guiding principles” that come to homeless treatment need to happen at the individual level, “to help them achieve human dignity.” Shumway drilled home the point that law and order cannot be sacrificed. 

The shelter resistant population who choose to camp outdoors rather than enter a shelter is not a condition we can tolerate. The audience burst into laughter when Shumway pointed out that, “Every time I pay my taxes, I’m ‘tax-payer resistant’, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still have to pay them.” 

Utah Stories has interviewed dozens of people who are “shelter resistant.” Currently, Tosha and her partner are camping by the Jordan River. They told Utah Stories it isn’t that they “resist the shelter,” but that they cannot handle the degree of violence and mental illness that exists in the Gerald E. King women’s shelter. 

Tosha is a “shelter resistant” woman who is camping beside the Jordan River.

The strongest aspect of the “homeless campus” facility is that unlike the shelters, it could segregate the “homeless community” between violent and non-violent, and mentally fit and mentally ill. The mentally ill homeless who commit physical violence against the other tenants and those residing on the streets is a major problem. Utah Stories has interviewed more than a dozen women who complain about the unsafe living conditions at the Gerald E. King shelter. 

Shumway then went into legislative priorities and what he wants to see Utah lawmakers tackle in the next session.

The Promise to “Solve Homelessness” through Housing has Failed for Years

After Shumway spoke, Founder of TOSA, Joseph Grenny, offered his presentation. Grenny showed a clip of California Governor Gavin Newsome from 2008. In the clip, Newsome explained his vision for serving the homeless population by building thousands upon thousands of housing units that could offer apartments for all of the homeless who were either unable or incapable of working. Since 2019, California has spent $24 billion on homelessness but the homeless population has exponentially grown.The result of this, more than a decade later, is that California’s homeless population continues to grow and the deterioration of neighborhoods in California has resulted in many people leaving the state. The Housing First model has failed in improving the situation for the homeless. 

California Governor Gavin Newsome said in 2008, “We are well on our way to solving chronic homelessness … We need to get out of the shelter business and get into the housing business.”

Another clip shows a woman who offered free housing for the homeless. This resulted in her building and the neighborhood quickly deteriorating, saying, “If this project helped just one person change their life, then it’s worth it.” But Grenny disagrees. “Housing expectations should not remain so low and dismal,” making the point that homelessness is never simply an “asset problem.” 

“The Non-Profit System is Broken because too few Non-Profits Die”

In our minds we come up with an implicit and cosmetic solution. Is it a housing problem? Is it a mental health problem? Is it a vocational skills problem?

“The non-profit system is broken,” says Grenny. It’s a structural problem. He points out that nonprofits are initially started by ideas, then we need donors and we need clients. Then the structural problem presents itself right away. “We have donors on the left and clients on the right and we need to figure out who we are going to serve. And guess which ones we defer to? We tend to [serve the donors]. As long as we serve up a series of stories that are tear-jerking and humane, as long as we can say, as long as we serve one person, we are humane. Look at a system or structure that tends to work. Markets tend to work because of the structure. You have a company that offers a product or service, and then you have a customer. And if customers don’t like it then they change or they die.”

Grenny continues, “Too few non-profits die. They should die. They should consolidate, they should. There ought to be immediate feedback, but it doesn’t happen that way, so here is how markets work. If you come out with a movie called Harry Potter, and if people watch it, they will provide more Harry Potter movies.” He then pointed out how Cats was a massive box-office flop, so nobody wanted to see Cats II or Cats III. Not so with non-profits.

Grenny reiterates how TOSA has succeeded to such a degree by measuring and focusing on outcomes. TOSA’s mission is to focus on a simple outcome; “drug-free, crime-free and employed.” Grenny added, “And we have statistics, even if they are embarrassing. We need to face those statistics. Most non-profits insult you with activity measures instead of outcome measures. The mission was getting out of poverty; there are 47,000 women we have served. Shame on us for writing checks for anyone writing checks like that.” 

Kensington, Philadelphia, just two miles from where the Declaration of Independence was signed.

A Human Problem — Not an Asset Problem

“Our human services are failing due to bad framing. When we drive past this place in Kensington, you can frame it one way and ask, ‘Do they have an asset problem?’ A second class of problems we will call human problems,” Granny explains. 

When you try to solve a human problem by transferring an asset, you tend to make the human problem even worse. Grenny’s example is giving someone a car because they have totalled their own car. That might seem to solve the person’s immediate needs and help them, but if the reason they totaled their car was due to a DUI, and you just enabled the person to keep drinking and getting behind the wheel, then the underlying problem hasn’t been solved, only worsened. What we have got to create are solutions that encircle individuals that help them improve. That helps them achieve the human dignity that is in each of them.

State Homeless Coordinator Wayne Niederhauser was in attendance, and we sought his comments on the plans, especially regarding our ongoing coverage of the death rate at the Road Home operated Magnolia Apartments. He only asked us if we had visited since the “New wrap-around mental health services were put in place.” 

As of two months ago, the Magnolia is still a den of sex trafficking and drug activity — free apartments for the chronically homeless, many of whom use drugs on a daily basis, and is not being addressed.

What Does Utah’s State Homeless Coordinator Have to Say?

Utah Stories has attempted for the past two weeks to get a few questions answered by the State Homeless Coordinator Wayne Niederhauser. 
We would like to ask a few questions regarding the homeless campus, possible sites being considered.  Further, we would like to find out what measures his office has taken to fulfill Utah Governor Spencer Cox’s mandate in the spring of 2024, to hold the institutions providing homeless services more accountable for the taxpayer dollars that are provided to them. Niederhauser doesn’t wish to speak to Utah Stories nor answer the question regarding institutional accountability, Instead we were referred to the DWS website for his office.