Trail of neglect: Homelessness, drug activity are changing how west-siders use the Jordan River and its trail

Editor’s note • This is the first installment of a three-part series on the challenges and triumphs of the Jordan River Trail, produced in partnership with City Cast Salt Lake. To access the full series, including each accompanying podcast, click here.

Part 1.

From Utah’s earliest days, the Jordan River was a place for waste.

As Mormon pioneers trudged into the Salt Lake Valley, the river that connects freshwater Utah Lake to the vast Great Salt Lake became a repository for untreated runoff and raw sewage.

Now, it’s where people whom society deems disposable live when they have nowhere else to go, preventing others from embracing it as an enviable refuge for recreation.

This place has the makings of a community asset worth celebrating and, to some, it is. The 45-mile path was one of the earliest paved multiuse urban thoroughfares in the country. Its asphalt winds through parks, nature preserves, wetlands, golf courses, even a sculpture garden dedicated to world peace.

Many of those parks are dilapidated, however, plagued by defaced property and broken playgrounds. The preserves are marred by tents, needles, trash and campfire scars. That sculpture garden has been targeted by thieves and vandals.

The historic and persistent pattern of neglect for the waterway’s banks and byways has limited Salt Lake City residents’ use of the deeply flawed but still-beloved Jordan River Trail. Its backers want to raise the river’s profile and transform the corridor from eyesore to attraction.

For now, Salt Lake City Council Chair Victoria Petro, a Rose Park resident, won’t let her kids walk its paths out of fear of exposing them to drug use. For now, the trail is a place where homeless Utahns go for basic hygiene. For now, the frustration simmers.

“Not only is it a frustration that we can’t use our green space,” she said, “it’s an exacerbation of historic trends that we are the ones who can’t enjoy that while other places are exempted from the crisis.”

West-side neighborhoods adjacent to the river are choked by elevated air pollution levels, lack a dense tree canopy and face higher rates of asthma than the rest of Salt Lake County, making the meandering urban thread all the more important as a place for residents to decompress and get outside.

Major projects are promised along its banks, and Salt Lake City’s wider road map for revitalization aims to reintroduce the river to residents from east to west.

The plans that allowed for that type of investment were drawn up decades ago.

Taming the Jordan River

Pia Okwai, the name for the Jordan River in the Shoshoni language, translates to “big flow,” recalling its pre-Mormon state. The watercourse included vast wetlands that swelled with spring runoff from the Wasatch Mountains.

That reality of a slow-flowing river twisting and turning through the Salt Lake Valley is largely a foreign concept now. Those swelling wetlands prevented initial settlement along the waterway’s banks and the river became the dumping grounds for a growing Salt Lake City.

By the 1870s, industry began to develop along the river, most notably with two of the valley’s most toxic sites: the Murray Smelter and the Midvale slag properties. In a process that continues to this day, development, industrial or otherwise, started along the river and the once-full wetlands were reduced to mere slivers.

The loss of the Jordan River’s wetlands meant that floods soon hindered development. To create the river as we know it, the federal Jordan River Project of the late 1950s straightened and channelized much of the waterway to control its flows.

In the 1970s, and as a part of additional flood control measures after the large-scale channelization effort, the Jordan River Trail and a string of parks along it were conceived as a way to beautify the waterway and open it up to recreational use.

But the river and its trail have never shed their reputation as the city’s back-of-house. Little development, especially in Utah’s capital, actually faces and embraces the river. The corridor still struggles with poor water quality, backlogged maintenance and cracked pavement.

One of Utah’s weightiest issues, meanwhile, continues to cast a shadow on this part of town.

How the homelessness crisis boiled over

Utah House Minority Leader Angela Romero, D-Salt Lake City, and freelance photographer Kim Raff often walk the trail together on early mornings. They said they’ve seen more camping, more drug use and more mental health crises along the waterway since 2017’s Operation Rio Grande and the COVID-19 pandemic that magnified social struggles. The two Glendale residents have shortened their west-side walks because they sometimes feel unsafe.

“It’s hard to start your day and have to confront people having mental health crises or seeing people shoot up,” Raff said. “For me, it’s my mindfulness time.”

Operation Rio Grande, a multiagency effort mostly funded and driven by the state, aimed to reduce crime and ease homelessness downtown around the former emergency shelter near the Rio Grande Depot, leading to the dispersal of homeless services. While officials said they aimed to arrest high-level offenders, 70% of arrests associated with the campaign were for misdemeanors, leaving many with a criminal record that could be a barrier to finding places to work and live.

West-siders say the operation pushed unsheltered homelessness west toward the Jordan River, with large camps forming in underused parks along the corridor, like Bend in the River, the Jordan River Peace Labyrinth and 9th South River Park, leading some residents and service providers to decry the effort as “Operation Leaf Blower.”

In the end, the state-sponsored policing campaign only intensified homelessness along the waterway.

“The river has always been a destination for a lot of folks because of a coolness in the summertime and isolation from a lot of neighbors,” said Andrew Johnston, Salt Lake City’s director of homeless policy. “Privacy is a big thing for a lot of folks experiencing homelessness.”

Although some unsheltered individuals have always existed along the river, Johnston and others pinpoint rising housing costs in the mid-2010s as a turning point for Utah. When Operation Rio Grande swept through the city, it pushed an already swelling problem to the river.

Cascade of consequences

Petro, the council chair, said the trail has since become a gauge for how Utah is handling homelessness.

“Those who find themselves marginalized, either by virtue of socioeconomic or other issues, end up here in one way or another,” she said. “And, so for me, it’s a barometer of the amount of work needing to be done to make our society a little healthier and more whole.”

Johnston said while it may not seem like it, that barometer is pointing in the right direction. The city is hosting fewer large camps and has seen an overall decrease in people camping this year, he said. The dispersal of campers, however, may touch more parts of the trail.

Soren Simonsen, executive director of the Jordan River Commission, estimated “a couple hundred” people are living by the river on any given day, most of whom reside in the city. And the effects of camping along the river are clear.

“Homelessness is a big risk on the Jordan River. It’s affecting quality of recreation,” he said. “… And it’s really affecting the river. E. coli levels are spiking, dissolved oxygen and other things, the amount of litter and debris in the river.”

West-siders who use the trail often share stories of people displaying erratic behavior, making it uncomfortable to use the trail for recreation. Couple that with rampant drug activity and human feces, and it’s easy to find reasons to stay home.

Crime and drugs shut down the trail

Mike Christensen is one of seemingly few west-siders who has insisted on biking through the most troubled stretch of the trail, between North Temple and the Northwest Recreation Center on 300 North, over the past year.

“The problems that we’ve seen along the Jordan River, immediately next to the state Fairpark, started right after last year’s state fair wrapped up, and it basically ended up becoming an open-air drug market,” the city planning commissioner said. “So, I’ve seen pretty much everything, from almost every day seeing drug deals take place and seeing people using drugs. I’ve been offered drugs many times. I’ve even had people try to buy drugs from me.”

West-sider Forest Kingfisher started detouring around that section of the trail during his bike rides north to the Legacy Parkway in July.

“I’ve had some run-ins with some folks there that were hostile,” Kingfisher said. “Even somebody threw something at me and hit me, and I didn’t see them, right? And I turned around, there’s like a dozen people there. I don’t know who it was, but, yes, it’s sketchy.”

Christensen blamed Operation Rio Grande for pushing the illicit activity onto the trail and theorized the stretch had become popular because the Fairpark is often idle, creating an unused space largely hidden from view along the river. He also noted that directly after the operation, drug activity spiked along North Temple around 800 West and 900 West, then was pushed out onto the Folsom Trail and, finally, onto this section of the Jordan River Trail.

Salt Lake City Police Department spokesperson Brent Weisberg said the agency has made 400 arrests in the Fairpark area this year — many of them for drug possession with or without intent to distribute — and seized “thousands” of fentanyl pills along the river. He rejected residents’ criticism that the department isn’t providing enough of a police presence on the trail, saying officers are in the area every day and have tallied almost 4,000 hours of patrol this year.

The arrests, patrol hours and more than 20 large-scale, one-day operations along the trail haven’t been able to extricate the illicit trade from the path, though. Right before the opening of this year’s Utah State Fair, city and fair officials decided to close the path to everyone temporarily.

Christensen and Johnston said few, if any, people camp along that stretch of the river, and distinguished the drug activity from homelessness along the corridor, noting that different people show up there each day. It’s unfair, Johnston said, to associate the crime near the Fairpark with all who experience homelessness.

Still, the drug activity in the area forces many to avoid that stretch of the trail entirely.

Connective corridor

For all its problems, the Jordan River Trail remains a place of connection for west-siders.

“You see the same people. You say hi, you talk, it’s part of your routine,” Romero, the House minority leader, said. “That’s the sense of community. So even though there might be all these things going [on] around us, it doesn’t take away [the] community ... And the parkway is that spine.”

Raff, meanwhile, said she has become friends with some of the other people she meets during her walks.

Christensen, the planning commissioner, said he has seen more people biking along the path since the final section, the Archuleta Bridge, was completed in 2017. Both state and local transportation officials see the trail, despite its windiness, as the backbone of a growing bike network in the valley. Many commute to work along the path now.

A growing percentage of the city’s portion of parkland along the Jordan River includes natural areas. While those areas, like the Fife Wetland Preserve, face significant effects from human activity, they also host wildlife and native plants. The wetland, for example, is a home for snakes, a spawning area for fish and a hunting ground for cormorants.

The river and its trail have the power to connect Salt Lake City residents and visitors to nature, get them to work and allow them to breathe fresh air underneath a rare, full tree canopy. But for now, many don’t feel safe along the neglected path.

That doesn’t mean a brighter future is out of reach. Some inspiration is already in motion a few miles south.

More on that in Part 2.