CNBC recently profiled Salt Lake City for being an incredible hotbed for growth and opportunity. Money and investments are pouring into our city!
Every spring I take a bike ride from Murray to downtown, and I document what I see along the way.
I absolutely love the Jordan River Parkway Trail in the spring. Mountain views; the herons, Sandhill cranes, beavers; green grass; cattails—it gets prettier every year.
If one wants to only enjoy beauty, just proceed along the Jordan River Trail and skip the offshoots around downtown. Authorities have now mostly eliminated homeless encampments along the Jordan River.
I always like visiting the areas where drug dealers and homeless day campers frequently stay so I can see both sides of the city: the rapidly rising monied parts as well as the seedy, soft, white underbelly.
While our law enforcement is doing a better job at separating the parts—confining the homeless to Saint Vincent Dining Hall and around Rio Grande—it’s worthwhile taking stock of what is actually happening, rather than only acknowledging the window dressing of the media portrayals.
There is clearly still a serious drug epidemic ravaging the streets of Salt Lake City. I witnessed several open-air drug markets and scenes—people shooting up in broad daylight.
Numerous people were passed out in the middle of sidewalks, medians, and roads (as shown in the video and photos).
While I have compassion for the homeless—their sufferings, their trauma—we can no longer call it compassionate to allow people to use drugs in our parks and streets until they die from overdoses. This is not compassionate. These folks’ family members certainly don’t want to see them die (as over 100,000 of them did last year). They want recovery. But there is a right way and a wrong way to offer recovery.
Addicts who have burned all bridges with family members, who are out to commit slow suicide on our streets, do not need free, fully furnished apartments—they need detox and something like jail/rehab.
They need low-level, cheap housing, peer-to-peer community support groups, to gain low-level employment. They need to be doing productive things to keep them occupied. The Other Side Academy’s model for homeless/criminal/addict recovery works. Our permanent supportive housing model, operated by the VOA and the Road Home, is an abject failure.
Waiting for my TRAX train to arrive for my journey back home, I eavesdropped on two men who were somewhat functional drug addicts. One older man was telling a much younger man how he qualified for SSDI because his ex-wife told him he was incapable of working due to his drug addiction. The older man, with bulging eyes and a battle-hardened chin, said, “I applied, they denied me the first time, as they always do. I appealed and I won. That was back in 2009.” Later he added, “But I keep my drug use in check.”
“If you want to do [drugs], you should never go three days in a row, otherwise you’ll end up chasing it,” the older expert advised the young amateur.
We need to stop allowing people to be professional drug addicts.
We need SLC to return to common-sense law enforcement and policing. Our policymakers need to start inviting the formerly homeless, drug addicts, and criminals to the table to drive improvements.
This is still not happening. Instead, the “experts” who have public administration degrees, accounting degrees, political science degrees operate these failing programs.
In conclusion: Salt Lake is still a fantastic city. It’s still almost magical in the springtime, it’s almost a gem—just don’t look at the bad places and you may never even notice them. Don’t venture off the gilded pathways and you might not ever notice our soft, white underbelly.
