Homeless Are People Too
We say it. We nod along. But then we walk past a homeless tent and try not to look. In Salt Lake City, the line between housed and unhoused is thinner than most of us want to believe, especially for seniors whose Social Security checks no longer stretch far enough to cover rent. Their stories aren’t statistics; they are lived realities. And they remind us that homelessness is not a moral failure. It’s often the result of a single event such a pandemic layoff, a rent hike, a medical bill that tips a life into freefall.
Petey knows this too well. A stagehand with Local 99, she was one of the first workers laid off when COVID-19 shut everything down, and one of the last to return to work. When unemployment checks were delayed and rent was due, her landlord told her to leave. “It’s like I was okay one day and the next day it was over,” she said. She moved from motel rooms to a small trailer, then onto the streets. “All of a sudden, out of nowhere, you got 48 hours to move,” she recalled. “If you’re not moved, they bulldoze your stuff and dumpster it.”
The weight of that constant displacement broke her down. “I finally just let the trailer go because I didn’t want to deal with the stress from day to day, wondering if I’m even going to have a place to lay my head,” she said. “They had already taken everything else from me. That was the last that I had.”
Petey camped near Second South and Seventh West, sometimes for months at a time until the next abatement order arrived. “There’s no consideration that you’re a senior,” she said. “Everybody’s treated like the same homeless population.” Through a bitter winter, she lived in a truck. “When we woke up in the morning, there was literally a sheet of ice on the inside of the windshield.”
Her story shifted when a community advocate, former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, connected her to Carol Holloway from Switchpoint, a nonprofit that pairs housing with dignity and responsibility. When red tape delayed her move-in, Carol paid for two weeks in a motel so she wouldn’t return to the cold. Once there, Petey helped build a garden and cooked meals for other residents. “I can cook meals for the homeless,” she said. “That makes me feel good because I feel like I can do my part.”
Cowboy’s journey tells another side of the same crisis. After paying $600 a month for a small room, he was evicted without warning when the landlord raised the rent. “I’ve been dealing with the homeless since 1983,” he said, having worked at Travelers Aid shelters for 15 years. “But what burns me is the greed that’s out here in Salt Lake. The apartment rents keep getting higher and higher and outpricing the senior citizens who are handicapped and disabled. And they’re literally put out into the streets.”
The result, Cowboy said, is a population struggling to survive. And city policy often makes it worse. “Then you have the mayor who passed it that it’s illegal to be homeless. And there’s nowhere to go,” he said. “The shelters are full. The police are harassing people. And they don’t know where to go.”
Cowboy doesn’t sugarcoat the reality that some people on the street want to stay there and keep using drugs. But he insists that many do not. “There needs to be more places like Switchpoint,” he said. “We’re all human beings, and we all deserve to live.”
At Switchpoint Fair Park, Cowboy pays a rent tied to his income — about $95 a month — and lives with dignity. “I’ve never been treated with more respect on this planet than I have with the staff,” he said. “If you need something, they’ll help you. There’s no reason for anybody to starve. Anybody who says they’re starving in Utah is either a liar or they’re lazy, because there’s more food out here than God.”
The key, says Switchpoint manager Cody, is deceptively simple. “We live by the golden rule,” he explained. “Treat people how you’d like to be treated, regardless of their situation.” That philosophy, paired with immediate case management and access to services, changes outcomes. “At first, when people come to us, there’s a lot of apprehensiveness because they’re scared,” he said. “We have to break down that barrier by being authentic.”
Kenneth, another Switchpoint resident, spent years cycling in and out of homelessness due to alcoholism. At Switchpoint, he found something different: support that replaced destructive habits with healthy ones. “They try to hook you up to replace whatever you’re struggling with,” he said. “They give you tickets to things to do, take you to ball games, car shows, even the ballet. I’m grateful.”
Salt Lake City has working models — Switchpoint, The Other Side Academy, and The Other Side Village — that combine housing, accountability, and human dignity. They succeed where others fail because they refuse to treat homelessness as a monolith. They meet people where they are and expect them to contribute. They offer freedom without abandoning structure. And they do it without bulldozing tents or discarding people’s belongings.
Yet these solutions remain the exception, not the rule. “What they call affordable housing is absolutely unaffordable,” Cowboy said. “To get an apartment here, you have to make a minimum of $125,000 a year. That’s not affordable.” When seniors on fixed incomes are forced out of their homes and into the streets, the system is not just broken — it’s cruel.
Homelessness will not disappear with another sweep, another ordinance, or another press conference. It will only change when we stop treating people like problems and start treating them like neighbors. Petey, Cowboy, and Kenneth are not statistics. They are our fellow Utahns. They are people. And they deserve better than a 48-hour notice and a bulldozer.
