The triumvirate of Utah’s top state officials — governor, Senate president and House speaker — are threatening to move in and solve the most obvious part of Salt Lake City’s homelessness problem if Mayor Erin Mendenhall doesn’t provide a satisfactory plan for tackling the matter by Jan. 17.
The threat implies that Gov. Spencer Cox, Speaker Mike Schultz and President Stuart Adams know what needs to be done and are just upset that Mendenhall hasn’t done it yet.
But if the trinity of Cox, Schultz and Adams know what needs to be done, why don’t they just do it already? Or make it an offer instead of a threat?
Are they preparing for an ongoing failure of all future plans to tackle homelessness and street crime? Seeding the ground for efforts to blame the city, rather than accept their share of the responsibility?
Is our state’s partisan patriarchy keen to hang the blame on a female politician? One recently re-elected by the most liberal enclave in a conservative state?
Mendenhall should, indeed, be showing more leadership in this area. She owes these worthies — and her constituents — a serious and detailed response. If part of is that response is that solving this problem is beyond the means of any one city, this would be a perfect opportunity for her to forcefully say so.
The people of Salt Lake City — the housed and the homeless — have had enough finger-pointing and blame-shifting. It’s time for everyone with some responsibility for this problem to get their heads together and make progress.
We also need to make a deal with ourselves.
Any city or community tapped to house any facilities to shelter or assist the homeless ought to be willing to do so, if they want the problem solved and not just moved down the road. Too often, that hasn’t happened.
But governments also have a responsibility to do a lot more to decouple homelessness from lawlessness, by policing the affected areas and effectively banning pop-up, often crime-addled, camps from rising near the shelters and treatment facilities.
This widespread and not unreasonable fear of overflow is the reason why the state’s new plan to build a much-needed 1,200-bed central campus for homeless services is going forward under a shroud — not telling us where the facility will be built until the decision is made.
Despite many millions of dollars spent and new structures and programs launched by government and non-profit organizations, the sight of chronically homeless people on the streets of Salt Lake City just doesn’t seem to go away.
City officials cite statistics to show that crime overall is down in the capital city. But what people see on the street, in the parks and along riverbanks feels like more and more property crime, trespassing, open drug dealing, all of which threaten to turn violent at any moment. That’s what the state leaders, and many SLC residents, rightly want the city to better deal with.
The city and, particularly, its police department are routinely criticized for doing too little about the problem, such as not arresting criminals even when caught red-handed.
Or for doing too much, as when it sweeps out homeless encampments and deprives the already destitute of what little they have — warm clothing, legitimate medications, necessary legal documents such as birth certificates — making it even more difficult for the homeless to escape their plight.
We already know what city officials are likely to say in response to criticism that they aren’t arresting enough criminals: Even when they do, there is no room for them in the county’s chronically overcrowded jail. All but those accused of the most violent crimes are too often back on the streets within hours.
Salt Lake County officials recently tried to take a big step toward solving that problem. They placed before the voters a $507 million bond issue that would have paid for not only an expansion of the county jail but also for a facility to help the homeless and those with drug or mental health problems make their way back into society as law-abiding, self-sufficient people.
But county voters narrowly rejected that idea.
State officials have long shown a preference for a law-enforcement approach to homelessness — witness 2017′s heavy-handed Operation Rio Grande. But, necessary as better law enforcement is, crime is the part of the problem that bothers the non-homeless, and the politicians who hear them.
Law enforcement may be the tooth, but the body and tail is a large, and expensive, suite of solutions that include better-paying jobs that don’t require a college degree, many thousands more affordable housing units, more urban density, better mass transit, child care, counseling and case workers, substance abuse and mental health care.
Don’t say we can’t afford it. A community that can pop for billions of dollars for a downtown sports pleasure dome and a Major League Baseball-centered development has the money, if not the will.
Homelessness, and the crime that accompanies it, is not a Salt Lake City, or even Salt Lake County, problem. It is a West Valley City, Millcreek, Herriman, Murray, West Jordan, Davis County and Utah County problem. It is a Utah problem.
However Mayor Mendenhall answers the state’s challenge — and she has much to answer for — she would be well within her rights to say so.
