SALT LAKE CITY — Utah leaders have slim expectations for how much funding the state Legislature will appropriate in 2025 to address homelessness.
After years of record state spending on resource centers and “deeply affordable” housing, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox requested just $18.8 million from lawmakers earlier this month for “homelessness alleviation efforts” — a fraction of the $186 million he proposed for homelessness initiatives a year ago.
State Homeless Coordinator Wayne Niederhauser, who was appointed by Cox in 2021, said the diminished dollar amount might be attributed to delays in finding a location for a new, large “low-barrier” shelter that serves as the backbone of the state’s latest attempt to reimagine homelessness policy.
“Until we have some definition on what the future is going to be, as far as another facility, it’s best to wait for budget requests,” Niederhauser told the Deseret News. “And we’re going to get more traction with the Legislature on that basis.”
Where will the new shelter be?
During the 2024 legislative session, lawmakers dedicated $25 million in one-time funds for an ambitious 30-acre “central campus” somewhere along the Wasatch Front.
Depending on the site, the massive centralized shelter could include anywhere from 600 to 1,200 beds, with the goal of providing wraparound services, like addiction recovery programs and trauma treatment plans, all in one place to help individuals exit homelessness for good.
That is if they can find a place to build it.
Over the last few months, Niederhauser has scoured Salt Lake County in search of sites he can present before the newly assembled Utah Homeless Services Board. Niederhauser’s Office of Homeless Services presented several location options to the board at a private meeting on Dec. 15, with another meeting scheduled in January to narrow down the options.
“This is part of a longer process that includes extensive research and due diligence related to potential real property acquisitions,” Niederhauser said in a statement. “After a final site has been selected, there will be a public engagement process.”
Along with the state’s one-time appropriation, lawmakers also set a deadline of Oct. 1, 2025, for the completion of the new shelter. This date is still the “goal,” Niederhauser said, but with real estate prices so high and with land sometimes requiring lengthy remediation processes, “it may take a little bit longer” to find a suitable location.
If the eventual site for the campus is a wetlands area, for example, it could take up to a year to prepare the property for construction, Niederhauser said. Taking this into account, as well as the cost of land, the $25 million appropriated to build a new facility might not stretch far beyond buying the dirt beneath the building.
“I could probably spend our whole appropriation on land, and then we need money to actually create facilities on the land,” Niederhauser said.
Up against budget barriers
Another obstacle to funding the construction of a central campus after land is purchased is a lack of available cash.
The state revenue estimates presented to Utah legislative leaders earlier this month showed a $2.3 million deficit for fiscal year 2024 and nearly $24.5 million less in the general fund than anticipated in the current budget year that ends June 30, 2025.
The shortfall, driven by disappointing sales and income tax collections, was coupled with cautious projections for the upcoming fiscal year. The consensus budget figures leave legislators with zero extra revenues for any additional spending, whether it be one-time or ongoing appropriations.
This means if lawmakers want any funding to complete the construction and staffing of the homelessness campus, they would need to reallocate money from other programs, which Rep. Steve Eliason, R-Sandy, said would be “an extremely heavy lift” because “there’s going to be lots of requests.”
The Utah House Republican majority has indicated that its focus for homelessness in 2025 will be on making enforcement of public safety measures more consistent across municipalities and heightening penalties to make shelters safer.
But to make the vision of Niederhauser and the state Homeless Services Board a reality, the central campus will someday require $20 million to $30 million a year in ongoing funds to operate, including an initial $5 million to begin building a team of caseworkers, according to Jim Behunin, the House-appointed member to the board, who authored multiple legislative audit reports over the last five years recommending changes to how Utah addresses homelessness.
These estimated costs are based on multiple trips Niederhauser and other state leaders have made in recent years to the Haven For Hope homelessness campus in San Antonio, Texas, and the homelessness centers in Miami-Dade County, Florida, Niederhauser said.
Both programs cost between $30 million to $40 million a year when Niederhauser last visited them, he said. The Texas campus was funded by a combination of city, county, federal and philanthropic dollars, while the Florida facilities relied on a dedicated funding stream from the state Legislature, Niederhauser said.
Utah homelessness funding over time
This year, Cox is asking the Legislature to find $18.8 million, including $3.8 million in ongoing money (in addition to $2 million in federal support) to fund the operations of a second family shelter in Salt Lake County that is under consideration, and $11 million to maintain the statewide emergency shelter system.
“We’re in a position where I feel like we’re functioning pretty well,” Niederhauser said.
But Cox’s proposal for next session is an entirely different kind of request from the one he made last year. In 2023, Cox called for a $120 million investment to maintain and expand the emergency shelter system, $30 million for “deeply affordable housing” for families making under $31,000 a year and several million to pay for additional behavioral health care workers and home health care programs.
Legislators in the 2024 session ultimately gave state agencies the $25 million to expand the shelter system, another $11.8 million to support existing homeless services and $2.5 million to mitigate impacts on shelter communities, for a total of roughly $40 million in state funds that was matched by $15 million from philanthropists at the Utah Impact Partnership.
But this sum was a steep decline from the investments made in previous years by the state.
A decade ago, Utah leaders declared a brief victory over chronic homelessness, crediting the state’s groundbreaking statewide implementation of a “housing first” model, which poured resources into state-funded housing units and the Road Home emergency shelter just north of the Rio Grande Depot in downtown Salt Lake City.
Within a few years, a series of legislative audits found that the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent every year on addressing homelessness in the state were having uncertain results or failing to help people exit homelessness permanently.
The Road Home shelters were eventually shuttered, and smaller “resource centers” were constructed with the aim of creating a more intentional environment to deliver services to individuals who are experiencing homelessness. However, critics say these services were never fully funded by lawmakers.
Between 2016 and 2021, state spending on homelessness more than tripled. A record $50 million appropriated by state lawmakers in 2021 grew to $70 million in 2022 to help house those experiencing homelessness — still far short of the $128 million Cox recommended in his budget.
Over the last decade, the state has seen cases of chronic homelessness double from 14% to 27% of the homeless population, with a 96% increase in chronic homelessness since 2019.
While Utah’s homelessness rate is nearly half of the national average, and less than most of its western neighbors, the number of homeless Utahns who stayed in an emergency shelter increased from 10,414 in 2021 to 12,401 in 2023.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
