Robert Gehrke: We know how to curb homelessness — we just need the political will to do it

We probably didn’t need a 194-page report stuffed with graphs and charts to confirm what we see every day — the number of homeless Utahns is on the rise.

According to the annual report from the Department of Workforce Services, 3,687 people were homeless last year, an increase of 131 from the year prior and up by nearly 900 since 2019. That’s roughly a third.

I need to offer a slight caveat here: The way the latest survey was conducted changed some from past years, with more volunteers fanning out to conduct the count and a tweak to who is counted and who is not.

That said, the needle is still moving in the wrong direction, despite a concerted effort at the state and local level and hundreds of millions of dollars in pandemic relief money designed to provide something of a safety net that is now being taken away.

The forces driving the trend are multi-faceted, to be sure, but the biggest factor is our tight rental market and general lack of affordable and deeply affordable housing. A report by the University of Utah’s Kem Gardner Policy Institute earlier this year said that, while wages have increased by about 19% over the past five years, the average rental price has grown at nearly double that rate.

For families hanging on by their fingernails, even a small disruption — a sick kid or a broken-down car — can have severe consequences, especially since Utah laws are some of the most hostile in the country toward tenant rights.

I wrote back in May that evictions in Utah had reached a seven-year high, even as some renters were having to cope with the expiration of Covid-era rental assistance programs.

Chronic homelessness is also on the rise, with more than 1,000 people — 27% of the total homeless population — having been homeless at least one year out of the past three. The number has nearly doubled since 2019.

And, according to the new data, more than 40% of Utah’s homeless population suffers from mental illness; 26% of homeless individuals have a substance abuse disorder. These also are, statistically, the most likely to be unsheltered — meaning the people you see camped out in parks and parking strips.

But it’s not all bad news.

In Salt Lake County, the rate at which people return to homelessness within two years fell significantly since 2018 (although it stayed relatively level statewide).

Part of the reason for the progress is that over a five-year span, 93% of individuals who get into permanent supportive housing either keep that roof over their heads or move into another stable living situation.

It’s a program that we know works — and it works, in part, because people don’t just get an apartment. They get a caseworker who can help them navigate the resources available to help them get mental health or substance abuse treatment or find job opportunities.

Earlier this year, I wrote about an expanded state tax credit that, for a relatively small $10 million investment per year, is expected to incentivize the construction of up to 700 deeply affordable apartments per year for families making about $30,000 per year.

In 2022, the Legislature allocated $55 million aimed at building more than 1,100 income-restricting housing units. They steered another $50 million to the program this year, but it’s well short of what Gov. Spencer Cox had requested.

Thanks in part to the Huntsman Mental Health Institute, we’re seeing more resources put towards alleviating mental illness than we ever have before.

These are good starts, but we need more: More housing, more case workers, more mental health resources, more substance abuse treatment, more rental assistance, more job skills training.

No, it won’t be cheap. But we have the ability to bend our homelessness curve, not simply so the graphs look better when the next homelessness report drops, but because the lines on those charts represent real Utahns, and turning our back on them when we have the resources and knowledge to help them would be a moral failing for our community.