The West is changing its approach to homelessness. Utah is leading the way.

Yahoo

21-02-2025

On the second floor of the Midnight Mission homeless shelter in Skid Row, Los Angeles, is the room that helped save Jared Klickstein's life.
Looking out over soiled sidewalks, the room housed a recovery program that separated Klickstein from meth and heroin, and pulled him off the streets away from one of the largest stable homeless populations in the country.
'It was probably the greatest program I've ever seen or been a part of,' said Klickstein, who recently published a memoir, 'Crooked Smile.' 'I saw it change hundreds of lives.'
But within a year of Klickstein's life-changing six-month stay at Midnight Mission, California legislators passed a law that codified federal 'housing first' principles and conditioned state funding on shelters abandoning requirements for residents to stay drug-free.
Programs like the one Klickstein credited with ending his decade of chronic homelessness lost funding, removed their sobriety requirements or 'ceased to exist,' while the number of free, permanent supportive housing units grew rapidly.
As did the number of people who became homeless, stayed homeless and died homeless, mostly from drug overdose. Since the policy change, chronic homelessness in California has increased by 123%, according to the federal government's Continuum of Care count.
The pattern of ineffective homeless policy may seem familiar to Utahns.
In 2015, Utah leaders declared a brief victory over chronic homelessness after a decade of implementing a groundbreaking statewide housing-first model that poured resources into low-barrier housing units.
Over the subsequent decade, chronic homelessness in Utah — defined as those who have been on the streets for at least a year with mental illness or drug addiction — has nearly quadrupled.
'It's clear what we've been doing isn't working the way we had hoped it would,' Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, said on Thursday.
Similar outcomes in Utah, California, Washington, Oregon and Colorado point to a failed experiment with a housing-first-turned-housing-only approach in the West, according to some national experts and those with firsthand experience like Klickstein.
That is why this legislative session, Utah lawmakers are looking to show other states 'a new way forward' by putting into statute a mirror-opposite set of expectations for homeless shelters compared to the ones promoted by California's nine-year-old law.
'It's a course correction,' state Rep. Tyler Clancy, R-Provo, said. 'We're missing this piece, so let's make sure we can address the whole person as they try to heal.'
Clancy, who works as an investigator at the Provo Police Department, is running a trio of bills this year aimed at cracking down on illicit drug use, while increasing coordination between homeless services to encourage treatment options and signaling a hard break with the country's formal policy on chronic homelessness.
Utah's legislators appear ready for the change.
Clancy's HB199 — which would allow first responders to connect overdose survivors to county resources while prohibiting syringe exchange programs in certain areas — and Clancy's HCR6 — which would pressure federal agencies to rescind housing-first restrictions on homelessness funding — both passed the state House unanimously this month.
The Senate is also on board, passing HCR6 in a near-unanimous vote on Thursday.
'It isn't humane to leave people in the difficult position they've chosen to be in,' Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, said. 'Somehow we need to encourage them to make changes.'
On Tuesday, Clancy's HB329 — which would take California's approach to low-barrier housing and flip it on its head — received a unanimous recommendation from the House Health and Human Services Committee and will now appear before the House for a floor vote.
If passed in its current form, HB329, Homeless Services Amendments, would:
Require homeless shelters to maintain a zero-tolerance policy for drug possession by conducting regular searches and facilitating law enforcement access.
Eliminate state funding to shelters if they fail to comply with a signed homeless shelter agreement that details drug-free requirements.
Increase criminal consequences for drug distribution in, or around, homeless shelters by one degree more than the current maximum penalty.
Allow for the expansion of the Know-by-Name pilot program which shares the state's Homeless Management Information System with personalized case workers.
Encourage shelters to focus housing programs on a 'pathway to thriving' model that measures progress in mental health, drug addiction, education and relationships.
Banning drugs in homeless shelters is a prerequisite to addressing the underlying causes of homelessness, said Robert Marbut, the former homelessness czar under President Donald Trump.
Clancy's bill represents 'best practices' that are beginning to be pursued across the country, according to Marbut, who said he was 'shocked' that the state hadn't previously outlined a drug-free policy for shelters.
On Tuesday, Clancy told committee members that almost all homeless shelters in the state already prohibit individuals from entering their facility with drugs. But as new winter response locations are established, it is important to make the state's expectation explicit, Clancy said.
The Road Home, one of the largest networks of homeless shelters in the state, has a private security force that conducts bag checks of residents when they enter the facility, said the program's executive director, Michelle Flynn.
Flynn supports Clancy's bill but reiterated the important role low-barrier shelters play within the state to provide an option to get off the streets for those who are not ready to engage in mental health treatment or sobriety programs.
'But a key component of running a low-barrier shelter is safety,' Flynn said. 'We want to ensure that we have a place where people feel like they're going to be safe, where they're welcomed in, and they want to be there because that's the best way to get them connected with support services.'
In addition to banning drug possession and orienting shelters toward recovery, Clancy's bill would also create a new advisory board composed of shelter counties, free up funds to transport homeless individuals to relatives out of the state, and require agencies to gather data on the extent to which homelessness has become rare, brief and nonrecurring.
Utah is uniquely positioned to spearhead the West's flip on homeless policy because of the attention the topic receives from the governor and Legislature and the willingness of state leaders to stray from housing-first dogma, according to Devon Kurtz, the public safety policy director at Cicero Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Texas.
'Utah is leading the way in diversifying its approach,' Kurtz said. 'It's not so much ending housing first as an intervention, it's ending housing first as the only intervention.'
Tom Wolf has seen what happens when homeless shelters and drugs mix.
Following an oxycodone prescription from his doctor, Wolf experienced a rapid descension from his life as a married father of two, living in the suburbs, to a hopeless heroin addict on the streets of San Francisco's Tenderloin district.
Wolf remembers stints in local shelters where the predominant feeling was a total lack of safety, with individuals overdosing in the bathroom and engaging in theft and assault in the congregate living area.
The low-barrier, 'harm reduction' environment promoted by state lawmakers had created what Wolf called a 'a-free-for-all.'
'This low-barrier approach has actually perpetuated not only the harm but the death,' Wolf said. 'And you can even make the argument that it perpetuates homelessness in that it doesn't require anyone to do anything.'
But the political tides may be starting to turn.
Last year, California assembly members, including one representative from San Francisco, introduced two bills that would allow a portion of state funds to be used for shelters with sobriety requirements.
Both bills passed unanimously in the state Assembly but never came up for a vote in the Senate.
However, even if Utah and California decide to take homelessness policy in a different direction, states will still be limited by federal housing-first requirements, according to Michele Steeb, a senior fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation who previously ran a shelter for women and children in Sacramento County.
In the late 2000's, the federal government adopted a housing first approach for chronic homelessness that had been developed in New York City a decade earlier. By 2013, it had become the official policy of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
This meant federal funding — which makes up the majority of homeless services funding in many counties — became conditional on housing first methods, Steeb said. Programs like hers, which helped around a 900 women and children a year move toward financial independence, lost federal support, quickly followed by state and county support which also adopted housing first.
'Our program funding went away. It had nothing to do with our outcomes. It was because we didn't fit the low-barrier model,' Steeb said. 'Government loves one-size-fits-all because that makes their job easier.'
Measuring the right outcomes might be the most important piece of Clancy's Utah legislation and the most pressing change needed at the federal level, according to Caitlyn McKenney, a program coordinator for Discovery Institute's Center on Wealth & Poverty based in Seattle.
'How many keys are we handing out to a fully subsidized housing unit with no strings attached is the wrong metric,' McKenney said.
To many in the West, it's clear that the consensus approach has failed. Over the last five years, the state of California has spent over $24 billion on homeless services, even as the homeless population increased by 30,000.
Elizabeth Funk, the CEO of Dignity Moves, which builds modular home communities for homeless programs in California, agrees that housing first has encouraged a focus on the number of units, instead of the number of people in shelter and on their way to recovery.
'Unsheltered homelessness, specifically, is absolutely solvable; we just aren't looking at it right and aren't prioritizing it,' Funk said.
But as Utah and other states move away from housing first, Funk said policymakers must remember that law enforcement alone will be just as ineffective as trying to tackle homelessness with housing only.
'We are disillusioning ourselves that people are being resistant and we just need to crack down,' Funk said. 'There's no way around it other than building places for people to go.'