With winter settling in, a plan to refashion a former Motel 6 in South Salt Lake into a long-planned shelter for up to 85 families moved forward after the suburb’s City Council signed off on zoning rules for the facility.
Council members voted unanimously this week — with embattled representative Paul Sanchez absent — to approve the opening of the new shelter at 315 W. 3300 South.
“We’ve spent a lot of hours working with the applicant and their staff … making sure all the details are dialed in,” said Jonathan Weidenhamer, South Salt Lake’s community and economic development director. “We understand exactly how this will operate, how it will function. We are very comfortable at this time bringing this rezone to you tonight.”
The council moved quickly to OK the facility at Wednesday night’s meeting. No council members commented on the plan before the vote. Homelessness leaders have been trying to open a new family facility since 2022, the first year in nearly a quarter century that parents with kids were turned away from shelter due to capacity. Right now, the waiting list at Salt Lake County’s one homeless resource center dedicated to families includes 80 to 100 groups. With council’s nod in hand, project leaders plan to open the shelter in March or April 2025.
Texts show shelter was stalled
The shelter approved Wednesday could have gotten a faster start on opening its doors, but South Salt Lake officials slowed the facility’s advance since September due to fears of potentially having to host a new 1,200-bed homeless campus at the site of the county-owned Oxbow Jail.
Project leaders from The Road Home and Shelter the Homeless, which bought the former motel in 2023, hoped to open the shelter late this year.
The suburb of 26,000 residents currently hosts two jails and a men’s homeless shelter.
Text messages obtained through a public records request show South Salt Lake officials planned to discuss the family shelter proposal at a Sept. 25 council meeting but postponed the hearing as state officials eyed Oxbow.
“[South Salt Lake] is placing family shelter on pause,” Nick Coleman, assistant director of the Office of Homeless Services, wrote in a text to Michael Parker, executive director the of Utah Impact Partnership, a group of influential philanthropists, on the day the meeting was scheduled, “and Mayor [Cherie Wood] is planning to publicly oppose Oxbow.”
Before the session was scrapped, the project seemed to be on the right track — the city’s planning commission had already forwarded a positive recommendation to the council.
“Our discussions with state representatives about a potential campus have centered on better understanding the likelihood of a third shelter in our city,” Wood said last month. “Like any other city in our position, we would like to adequately address the needs of the family shelter without the enormous pressure of considering another 1,200 homeless individuals in our city at the same time.”
State Homeless Services Board chair Randy Shumway, who also sits on the board of Utah Impact Partnership, did not reply to a question about whether the Oxbow site was officially no longer an option to host the new campus. County residents voted down a bond measure in November that would have cleared a path for county officials to shut down the jail there and sell the land.
Capacity issues in the shelter system
There’s only one other family shelter in the Salt Lake Valley: the Connie Crosby Family Resource Center in Midvale.
In West Jordan, South Valley Services runs an emergency space for adults and their children, and elsewhere across the county, Family Promise helps those experiencing homelessness temporarily stay at churches.
As a part of an omnibus homelessness bill this year, Utah lawmakers required that 85% of family shelter occupants be eligible for federal poverty assistance, making it harder for those without permanent legal status in the United States to access emergency services.
The Road Home’s Midvale shelter can host up to 300 individuals, but from August 2023 to August 2024, it had to turn away 3,107 people — two-thirds of them children — because of a lack of space, according to an Aug. 21 presentation to a joint meeting of the South Salt Lake City Council and planning commission.
Service providers have said finding shelter for families has been tough the past two years.
“We’ve had waiting lists and people being turned away, families sleeping in cars,” said Bill Tibbitts, deputy executive director of Crossroads Urban Center. “So, it’s really important that we’re finding a way to get those families indoors.“
(Trent Nelson|The Salt Lake Tribune) The former Motel 6 at 315 W. 3300 South in South Salt Lake on Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024. It is poised to become a family shelter.
The new shelter will have four two-story buildings with private rooms for each family. It will have additional common areas and on-site laundries. Project leaders plan to have 24-hour staff and security at the shelter and serve twice-daily meals provided by Catholic Community Services.
Gov. Spencer Cox’s proposed fiscal 2026 budget provides $5.8 million in ongoing funds to operate the new shelter.
Now that the suburb’s council is on board, the South Salt Lake planning commission will work out additional permitting requirements with project leaders next month.
