As Salt Lake City faces record cold temperatures and homeless advocates raise concerns about space constraints within the Salt Lake City area’s three new homeless resource centers, an emergency meeting of local and state leaders Wednesday ended with no new overflow options.
Instead, partners involved in the transition are calling on landlords to help get people into housing over the next four weeks to free up space in the overcrowded shelters. After that point, civic leaders promised to reconvene to see where things stand.
And though Lt. Gov Spencer Cox said during a meeting last week that the question of keeping The Road Home’s downtown emergency shelter open through the winter was still on the table, he told reporters after the closed-door meeting Wednesday that “keeping the downtown shelter open would be a step backward" and that leaders want the focus to shift to a new, housing-first model.
While the downtown emergency shelter was originally scheduled to close this summer, delays have pushed that date into November — meaning that the new service model will be tested during the most frigid months, when finding shelter could be a life-or-death matter.
The three new resource centers will collectively have space for 700 people, about 400 fewer than could fit in The Road Home’s downtown shelter. Service providers have reported that the new female-only resource center and the facility for men and women are already filled to capacity, and they have been using St. Vincent de Paul Dining Hall as an overflow space for women. Other women are receiving vouchers to stay in hotels or motels if there is no room for them in the resource centers.
And the final resource center in South Salt Lake, an all-male facility with about 300 beds, is not big enough to handle the roughly 400 men who have been sleeping at The Road Home’s downtown shelter in recent nights.
Cox said Wednesday that The Road Home has now received a temporary occupancy permit to begin operating the South Salt Lake shelter and that staff can begin moving in tomorrow. Residents are expected to move in in the middle of November.
The Salt Lake Tribune will update this story.
from The Salt Lake Tribune https://ift.tt/2PIoNKH
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