A Utah proposal to move 1,300 homeless people to a campus on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, many to face forced treatment for addiction or mental illness, has been set aside amid fears about costs, civil liberties and inadequate planning for a site that critics called a detention camp.
On the surface the plan’s demise is a setback for the Republican governor, Spencer Cox, as well as for President Trump, who campaigned on a similar plan and exhorted states to follow his lead.
But even as the state’s Republican-led legislature adjourned this spring without giving the plan a vote, lawmakers gave Mr. Cox significant new money and discretion to provide the services he wanted at the campus, including programs that emphasize or compel treatment.
The closely watched effort advances the conservative goal of promoting treatment over housing aid, and the campus could yet re-emerge.
“We’re still moving in the same direction to make sure we’re providing appropriate treatment,” said Tyler Clancy, the state’s new homelessness coordinator. He added that “the governor has always said it’s not compassionate to leave people on the street to die.”
The zigzagging story of the Utah campus shows the uncertainty in homelessness policy as Republicans assail the status quo but struggle to design and pay for a system to replace it.
Conservatives criticize the predominant approach, enshrined in federal law and regulation, which emphasizes long-term housing and makes behavioral care voluntary. They say that approach, called Housing First, fails to address root causes. Led by Mr. Trump, Republicans would sharply cut housing aid and require more people to accept treatment for mental illness and addiction.
But behavioral care is scarce, expensive and uncertain to work. Absent housing subsidies, even people who recover after treatment may remain homeless. With a court blocking Mr. Trump’s effort to shift about $4 billion from Housing First programs to short-term efforts that promote or demand treatment, Utah provides a showcase of his ideas.
Utah began considering a centralized site several years ago, amid a surge in unsheltered homelessness. But the work accelerated — and its emphasis shifted to mandatory treatment — after Mr. Trump issued an executive order last summer denouncing “vagrancy” and “disorderly behavior.”
As a candidate, Mr. Trump had pledged to forcibly move homeless people to distant “tent cities” for treatment or placement in mental hospitals. His executive order championed camping bans, cuts in long-term housing, and expanded use of civil commitment — court-ordered mental health care. With the order suggesting money for states that complied, Mr. Cox asked state planners for “a strategy that aligns” with Mr. Trump’s.
Utah soon announced it would build a campus on 16 undeveloped acres on the edge of Salt Lake City. The chairman of the state’s Homeless Services Board, Randy Shumway, proposed that it include an “accountability center” where hundreds of people would face compulsory treatment for mental illness and addiction.
“An accountability center is not voluntary, OK — you’re not coming in and out,” he said in an interview last year.
While confining homeless people was bound to draw scrutiny, the state seemed unprepared for the pushback. Neighbors said the complex would import crime and lower property values. The Democratic leader of the Utah House called it an “internment camp.”
Mr. Shumway said the services could offer a “pathway to human thriving,” but the state could not answer questions as basic as whether the people moved to the site would sleep in buildings or tents.
While officials said the site would cost $75 million to build and $34 million a year to run, skeptics warned the price would be higher (construction costs could be nearly twice as high, a new report found) and faulted the lack of clinical planning.
“What do we mean by mandatory treatment?” said Heather Hogue, co-chair of the Utah Homeless Network, an organization of advocates and service groups. “Mandatory for whom? Who makes the determination?”
Conservative priorities collided, as tax cuts championed by Mr. Trump cost the state $300 million and Medicaid cuts loomed. By the time the State Legislature convened in January, the campus was all but dead.
“If in one of the reddest states in the nation it falls completely flat, there’s a lesson there,” said Jen Plumb, a Democrat in the State Senate. “You can’t just throw out a lot of rhetoric—‘put ’em in camps” and think you’re going to solve homelessness.”
With the campus shelved, the Cox administration instead sought funding for a group the campus would have served — “high utilizers” of services, like jails and emergency rooms, who often wind up on the streets.
Lawmakers approved about $45 million to serve people in that group, increase shelter and housing capacity, and expand mental health care. The move, aided by a tobacco tax, could raise state spending by 50 percent, but only if localities agree to match state aid.
“It’s not a campus-based approach, but it’s in a similar vein,” said Devon Kurtz of the Cicero Institute, a Texas group that advises the Trump administration and celebrates Utah’s action as a break with Housing First.
“What matters most is that we’ve centered treatment in this conversation,” rather than unconditional housing aid, he said. “That to me feels like a success.”
With the details of Utah’s plans yet to emerge, it is not clear how forcefully the state will move to coax or compel treatment, with options running a spectrum from intensified casework to court orders.
Two scenarios seem plausible. One is that with the campus on hold and money to spend, left-right divisions will ease.
That is the outcome Mr. Clancy foresees. He notes the elected leaders of Salt Lake City and surrounding Salt Lake County, both Democrats, share the concerns about “high utilizers.” Both have initiatives to get them into treatment.
The city program, Project Connect, identified the 50 people most frequently arrested (on average 18 times in the previous year, mostly for misdemeanors) and assigned social workers to help them find services, including housing and care for mental illness and addiction. Compliance is voluntary, but intense casework promotes it, and the state calls the effort a potential model.
Salt Lake County hired a former Miami judge, Steven Leifman, to help adapt a jail diversion program he designed there. His recommendations include the expanded capacity for civil commitment — inpatient and outpatient — for people unsuited to voluntary care.
Mr. Clancy sees these efforts to coax or push troubled people into treatment as evidence that the issue is less polarized than it seems.
“For too long this debate has been housing versus casework versus mental health care,” he said. “We’re trying to say yes, yes, and yes — it’s all of the above.”
With many people under civil commitment facing long waits for treatment, he said, the new money is more likely to expand the capacity to serve people already in the system than to expand the courts’ reach.
A second scenario for Utah is that the programs Mr. Clancy designs, which must be approved by a legislative committee, accelerates the shift toward treatment mandates and what critics call the criminalization of homelessness.
Before leaving the State Legislature this year, Mr. Clancy sponsored a law that makes it easier to place homeless people with five or more misdemeanors under the watch of state probation officers. The goal, he said, is to give them access to a state system that is richer in services than local probation. But critics fear the move pushes people with petty offenses deeper into criminal justice supervision.
Likewise, a Utah Department of Corrections plan, the ARCH program, will move as many as 200 homeless “high utilizers” to halfway houses, to face “supportive accountability,” such as compliance with drug treatment and mental health plans.
Mr. Clancy said the effort does not criminalize homelessness because it serves people already convicted of crimes and provides a prison alternative. But critics see the main features — confinement and treatment — as a backdoor version of the campus plan.
Will the state try again to build the campus?
“If the opportunity comes up and we can identify the funding, great,” Mr. Clancy said. “But we don’t want to wait around to address the crisis.”
