Having spent years as a child homeless in Salt Lake City, I cannot feel the summer sun against my skin without my mind flashing back a decade. Not a June passes where I don’t relive being driven from the old Road Home shelter soon after sunrise. Woken up by staff and told to pack our belongings, I joined hundreds of other homeless residents in going from our beds to stained restrooms and being dumped like yesterday’s garbage on the curb so the shelter could spend the day cleaning.
It was not the 5-degree winter nights spent huddled in a sleeping bag that terrified me as a homeless child, it was those 104-degree summer days. In the dead of winter, what little money one suffering from lack of shelter can scrounge up can buy a jacket, what little connection they may hold to stability can be accessed through the inevitable emergency shelters and crates of donated hand-me-downs.
But donation baskets don’t have air conditioners.
Left with nowhere to escape, heat is the greatest threat to the unsheltered. To one whose few scraps of personhood lie on their back, their last possessions are a personal oven they cannot lose. It hits me only now how utterly different life unsheltered is from the average person’s existence, in summer most of all. It is a life without cool air at the flick of a switch or cold water on tap. There is little to no water for drinking — or for dealing with the issue of body odor, an uncontrollable factor that rises in the peak of summer and ravages what little self respect one can carry unsheltered.
Down memory lane, I still feel the childhood pangs of isolation and shame felt from when I was unsheltered and interacting with the rest of the world. Feelings such as these are tragically twisted in a million more horrific directions for the 41% of Utah’s homeless residents who suffer from mental illness or the 26% suffering from drug addiction. They’re also heightened in the heat, raising dangers for all residents — something I witnessed firsthand at local shelters. I can recall a younger version of me curled up in the corner praying for my own safety.
At its core, homelessness is a problem of contradiction. This isn’t a new observation, in 1879 an economist named Henry George published “Progress and Poverty,” observing that the wealthy nations at the peak of the industrial revolution were experiencing the worst of poverty.
Data from the United States today upholds George’s thesis: Our nation’s own capital, Washington, D.C., has the highest homelessness rate in America with 73.3 people homeless for every 10,000, yet D.C. may also boast the highest median income in the country, at over $100,000 per household. In contrast, Mississippi has the lowest median income in the country, a full 47% lower, yet reports a homelessness rate at only 3.3 per 10,000. Utah, for reference, has a median household income of $89,000 and a homelessness rate of 11 per 10,000, albeit one heavily concentrated in Salt Lake City and rising at 10% annually.
Homelessness is not an issue with easy solutions, I have seen firsthand the extent of the shattering of a human life it takes to bring one, and their loved ones, to the streets. But I plead with all to extend the compassion of humanity to our unsheltered.
UTA has recently started offering free cold water bottles at stops such as Central Pointe, and, while recognizing the concerns in offering aid to those under the influence of drugs or suffering from mental illness, a little bit of water can go a long way for one in dire need.
The homelessness crisis is a burden to be shared, but there is no panacea for it but love.
Shivom Parihar
Shiv Parihar is a writer and activist who spent two years homeless as a child.
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