The state office tasked with tackling Utah’s homelessness crisis insists the process for setting up a new 1,200-bed shelter will happen in public but only after the board that steers homelessness policy decides where it wants to put the sprawling new facility.
The Utah Homeless Services Board voted in October to move away from a scattered-site model of sheltering homeless Utahns in smaller resource centers spread across Salt Lake City and South Salt Lake.
After the board approved a return to a large, centralized shelter model, officials have tried to keep the process of deciding where it goes confidential, citing sensitivity around potential real estate transactions.
The Beehive State’s Office of Homeless Services had until Dec. 15 to submit three viable shelter location options to the homelessness policy board. Asked after the deadline what locations were submitted, Office of Homeless Services spokesperson Sarah Nielson did not reveal any potential sites.
“Utah’s Office of Homeless Services presented several location options to the Utah Homeless Services Board and will continue working with them to evaluate all viable options,” Nielson wrote in a text message. “The board will meet again in January, but this is part of a longer process that includes extensive research and due diligence related to potential real property acquisitions. After a final site has been selected, there will be a public engagement process.”
The office also denied a public records request seeking information about potential shelter locations, citing ongoing deliberations.
In October, Utah leaders, including state homelessness coordinator Wayne Niederhauser and board Chair Randy Shumway, said the current dispersed shelter system is inadequate to deal with rising homelessness rates because there aren’t enough beds, funding for additional services at the smaller homeless resource centers has been lacking, and it’s hard for those experiencing homelessness to get from the buildings to other places they need to go.
Shumway and others on the board hope a new campus will make getting help easier by having shelter and services in one place.
In September — before the board voted to return to the centralized shelter model — the Office of Homeless Services had drawn up a list of five sites for consideration: A warehouse just north of Interstate 80, west of Salt Lake City International Airport; Salt Lake County’s Oxbow Jail, along the Jordan River Trail in South Salt Lake; an empty plot along the Bacchus Highway in West Valley City; a cluster of properties along Beck Street in Salt Lake City; and the state-owned Lee Kay Conservation Center along 2100 South on the western edge of the Salt Lake Valley.
That list is no longer up to date, according to Homeless Services Board member Jim Behunin, who told attendees of a Nov. 7 Ballpark Community Council meeting that his panel had stopped looking at “almost all” of the sites from the September memo and had begun considering two additional locations. While state officials at the time scoured the Wasatch Front for a shelter spot, Behunin said the facility would “probably be in Salt Lake County.”
Shumway has said the Oxbow Jail site would likely not be the final location for the shelter. Salt Lake County voters dealt a blow to that idea by rejecting the county’s public safety bond measure that would’ve opened the door to a potential sale of the parcel.
The South Salt Lake City Council, which had halted a proposal to open a new family shelter while Oxbow was under consideration, ultimately approved the family facility this month. South Salt Lake Mayor Cherie Wood has been a vocal opponent of opening a shelter at the jail site.
Finding places for new shelters has been a headache this year along the Wasatch Front amid fierce public backlash from communities opposing the facilities. In Weber and Davis counties, plans for emergency winter shelters have fallen through multiple times. Weber County still doesn’t have a concrete plan to get homeless Utahns inside this winter.
The Homeless Services Board is set to meet again Jan. 15 — the deadline the panel set for the Office of Homeless Services to present a strategy for managing a 1,200-bed facility. Board members set an October 2025 deadline for opening the shelter.
