Utah to Build New, 1,200-Bed Shelter Campus

The Utah Homeless Services Board plans to build a new “transformative, centralized” shelter for unhoused residents, acknowledging that a prior plan to redistribute shelter beds across three facilities led to high costs and a shortage of available beds.

As Katie McKellar explains in Utah News Dispatch, “In 2019, the Road Home’s old downtown homeless shelter that some nights sheltered more than 1,000 people shut down after years of heartburn over its impact to the Rio Grande area and painstaking political wrangling to site three new homeless resource centers meant to replace it with a “scattered sites” model, meant to break up populations into smaller facilities.”

Now, the state wants to take a “more holistic and permanent approach” to reducing homelessness and providing services. The Board directed the Office of Homeless Services to identify three potential sites appropriate for a 30-acre campus and submit a master plan including “programmatic and structural schematics, costs, best practices from other similar institutions, and definitions of the success outcomes that will be measured and evaluated” by January 15, 2025.

The Board called for the campus to be built by October 1, 2025 with beds that are “low barrier” and easily accessible year-round. While details on the campus are still fuzzy, state homeless coordinator Wayne Niederhauser says it will include case management, healthcare, and other wraparound services, serving as an intake hub.