Will Utah’s unhoused find a home in the successes of history or the ashes of the past?

A conceptual rendering depicts what state leaders envision for a new “transformative campus” meant to house and rehabilitate people experiencing homelessness. (Courtesy of the Utah Office of Homeless Services)

Utah’s Gov. Spencer Cox is defending a plan hatched in conjunction with legislative leaders and the Utah Homeless Services Board and recently pitched to the Health and Human Services Interim Committee of the legislature. The plan provides both voluntary and involuntary housing for Salt Lake’s homeless in a 1,300-bed facility in “rural” northwest Salt Lake City. The proposal is early in the planning stages, and currently lacking funding.

Funding could ultimately prove to be prohibitive, since the project in effect amounts to a second state mental hospital, a large new substance treatment facility, and a vast new temporary shelter for the homeless folks with an affordable housing problem.

The State of Utah is trying to take up President Donald Trump’s advice to clean up criminal homelessness by removing folks from the streets, where they are doing drugs, committing crime, and engaging in “urban camping and loitering, and urban squatting.” The president’s executive order on the subject mentions “shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment,” but then refers to those placed there as “detainees,” using the nomenclature assigned to south-of-the-border arrestees currently being prepared for deportation out of our cities.

Is the president’s shining new program just a localized deportation program where due process and actual evidence of crime or mental illness may also be lacking? Maybe, maybe not. The president and the governor want “accountability,” but as with brown-skinned arrivals in America, they may want to make criminal judgments before due process is actually rendered.

Is the governor right in saying Utah has failed its duty to homeless citizens? Manifestly, yes. Is Utah right to go back to the days when the nation used involuntary commitment to inpatient mental health facilities to house aimless, mentally ill and unemployed people? Possibly so. Is the federal government approach a return to “one size fits all” national programming that leaves states without funding for programs that don’t present the right-sized shoe? It seems so. It is hard to miss the fact that the White House is driving this reform effort, rather than the people, professionals, and representatives of the state of Utah.

Homelessness is produced when a nation slides into slow-moving or quick-moving socio-economic decline. A number of social forces led to mental health deinstitutionalization beginning in the 1950s that kicked off the homelessness problem, including criticisms of public mental hospitals and a desire to give the mentally ill more connection with the mentally healthy community. Soon enough, America’s liberalized divorce laws scattered family members to the four winds, as did excesses in alcohol, tobacco, legal and illegal drugs, sports, porn and gambling, steeply declining standardized test scores in the school system, and our obsessive spending of money we have not yet earned.

America is not the first modern nation to experience rapid decline, however. World War I, the Russian Revolution, a famine, and a civil war combined within a space of five years to produce some seven million Russian homeless youths, who hastened the demise of the already deeply flawed new communist system there. India’s “untouchable” homeless class resulted from that ancient civilization’s hard turn away from democracy to unfeeling, unthinking oligarchy and aristocracy.

We did things differently in this country, at least in the beginning. Once our own founders secured their freedom, the first thing they did was mandate public education in law and classical political history, so citizens could understand the responsibilities attached to the wonderful rights of speech, press, voting, and religious freedom they had just won. Today, the lack of civics education even for the upper class has gotten the luxury-housed into the violent political mess we are in today. Maybe civics education could be a rehabilitating force for the homeless as well as the upper crust.

In spite of our sparkling new public education system, in the early decades of our country, shaky immigrant families often fractured in places like New York City, where they got off the boat. The governments, churches, and stable families of the nation noticed the problem and provided a solution by placing disorderly and orphaned children into farming families in far-away Ohio, who raised them as one of their own. Something similar happened when criminals were shipped off to the colonies by England during the 200 years before the Revolution. Communities took them in, taught them, and showed them how democracy was done. They integrated them into local communities where they had rights and responsibilities from the get-go.

Does America any longer have citizens willing to open the front door to the unhoused, undisciplined, unhealthy, and unenfranchised untouchables of our own society? Today we are furiously converting our population over to assigned places in either the lower- and middle-class commoner realm or the ornate, holier-than-thou, centi-millionaire and billionaire class. How are we going to fix that great impediment to republican progress?

Are we going to build a homeless encampment where folks can commune with each other on their own base level, stay removed from our hearts and minds, and be as far away from the East Bench, existing professional resources, and the newly secured Downtown Revitalization Zone as possible? Are we going to betray our promise to rehabilitate the unfortunate refuse of our insensate civilization? Money alone will not solve the problem, folks.