Homelessness, dignity, and public safety

Housing and homelessness are the same pipeline viewed at different points in time. Housing affordability is the upstream pressure. Homelessness is what happens when that pressure finally breaks for people with the least margin for error— seniors on fixed incomes, disabled residents, veterans, families crushed by medical debt, young people priced out of a first apartment, and people fleeing domestic violence with nowhere safe to land.

My position starts with two simple premises.

Homelessness is not a crime. You do not solve it through punishment.

I reject containment models that warehouse people out of sight and call it compassion. I reject the idea that we can sweep human suffering behind a fence, force people into detention because they are poor, or criminalize the condition of being unhoused and pretend that is public policy. It isn’t. It is our moral failure as a civilized socity.

Look at what criminalizing car camping actually does. Ban someone from sleeping in their car and you have not housed them— you have moved them. They do not disappear. They go to the foothills, where there is no water, no sanitation, no oversight, and where a fire built to survive a cold night becomes the spark that burns a hillside. They get pushed off the Jordan River corridor, then further out, then further again, until the people we are supposed to be helping are sleeping somewhere with no shelter bed nearby, no caseworker, no clinic, no bus line— nothing but distance between them and every service we built to help them. That is not a homelessness policy. That is a relocation policy, and it makes the problem harder to solve every single time we run it.

We have built a strategy that does not eliminate unhoused people. It hides them. And hiding a problem is not the same as solving it— it is choosing to pay the cost later, at a higher price, when fire crews show up instead of caseworkers, or worse, when the coroner comes to claim another life lost to the elements and another family loses someone forever.

Unhoused people exist. Pretending otherwise, or legislating as if pushing them out of sight makes them stop existing, is not policy. It is denial.

This is not a hypothetical. The state is already building it— a thirteen hundred bed centralized shelter campus on Salt Lake City’s west side, sited in the same wetlands as the new state prison, with reported plans to fold in elements of involuntary detention dressed up as civil commitment. Estimates put construction at seventy five million dollars and operations at over thirty million a year, and Salt Lake’s own mayor has already warned the money to run it does not exist. Advocates, residents, quoted in the New York Times have started calling it what it looks like— a detention camp, a concentration camp. The governor calls that comparison crazy. I call it the predictable end point of a government that decided concentrating people is cheaper than housing them.

I want to be precise here, because precision is what keeps an argument honest. I am not saying Utah is Nazi Germany. I am saying that any time a government decides the answer to a population it finds inconvenient is to corral them onto one parcel of land, behind a fence, away from the rest of us, with release contingent on proving compliance to whoever runs the facility— that government has crossed a line every person who believes in due process should recognize, regardless of who is standing inside the fence. It does not matter if the population is homeless Utahns or migrants in a detention facility. Concentration is concentration. The morality does not change because the people inside do.

I grew up on stories that warned us about exactly this. There is a Star Trek episode— Past Tense— where the crew accidently land in past in 2024 where the unhoused and unemployed are swept off the street and held in fenced Sanctuary Districts simply because they lack identification, out of sight of a society that found that easier than fixing what put them there. It is fiction. It is also a warning, and a warning only does its job if you listen to it instead of filing it under entertainment once the credits roll. I am a Star Trek Liberal because that franchise spent sixty years arguing that you measure a society by how it treats the people it has the least incentive to help. That standard does not stop applying just because we are in West Jordan, Sandy and Salt Lake City in 2026 instead of on a starship.

Utah does not need a campus that concentrates people. It needs shelter beds and treatment distributed through the communities people already live in, with an exit that does not run through a fence.

I believe we have a moral obligation to care for the least of these among us— to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the vulnerable, and remember that human dignity does not disappear just because someone has lost housing. That is not only a religious value. It is a civic one. A decent society does not measure people’s worth by how comfortable they make everyone else feel. It measures itself by whether it builds systems that catch people before they are broken beyond repair.

Poverty in a wealthy society is not an inevitability. Hunger is not inevitable. Mass homelessness is not inevitable. These are the downstream consequences of policy choices— what we fail to build, what we refuse to fund, and what we decide to tolerate. If we are serious about public safety, then we need to be serious about stability. Stability is what lowers disorder. Stability is what reduces crisis. Stability is what gives people a path back.

That means prevention first— rental assistance, eviction prevention, domestic violence support, mental health care, addiction treatment, and targeted help for people before they lose everything.

Part of getting serious about addiction treatment means getting serious about harm reduction— needle exchange programs, fentanyl test strips, naloxone access, and a path into medical care without a moral lecture attached to it. Fifty years of the war on drugs taught us to call people who use drugs junkies, addicts, criminals— anything other than what most of them actually are: people in pain, managing a condition nobody is treating. Strip away the stigma and look at the pharmacology. Many of the substances people are using on the street sit in the same chemical family as drugs a doctor would prescribe for the same pain, the same anxiety, the same trauma. The difference is whether you have insurance and a doctor willing to write that prescription, or whether you have neither and a corner instead. Self-medication is still medication. It is just medication without a dose chart and without anyone making sure it does not kill you.

Harm reduction is not surrender. It is the opposite of surrender. It is the decision to keep someone alive long enough to get them into treatment, instead of letting prohibition kill them before they ever get the chance. Needle exchanges do not increase drug use— they reduce disease, overdoses, and deaths, while building the only relationship many unhoused people have with anyone in the medical system. That relationship is the doorway into detox, into mental health care, into recovery. Take it away and you have not made anyone sober. You have just made it more likely they die before they get the chance to try.

The state needs to fund this like the public health intervention it is, not treat it like a moral concession— needle exchange programs with real state support, expanded naloxone access, mobile medical care that meets people where they sleep instead of waiting for them to walk into a building they cannot afford and do not trust, and addiction treatment funded at the scale of the crisis it answers. Prohibition did not end drug use. It just decided which Utahns get treated like patients and which ones get treated like criminals, and that line has always run straight through who has insurance and who does not.

It means housing-first approaches that get people into stable shelter and pair that housing with the services they need. And it means rejecting all plans that rely on involuntary detention simply because someone is unhoused.

Public spaces should be safe. Businesses should be able to function. Families should have parks, sidewalks, and neighborhoods that feel secure and usable.

Those are real needs. But the question is how we achieve them. We do not get there by multiplying trauma, deepening instability, and turning poverty into a quasi-criminal status. We get there by building exits instead of traps. Exits look like a car that doesn’t get someone arrested, a needle exchange that doesn’t get someone shamed, and a shelter system built into the communities people already live in instead of fenced off from them.

A society that truly believes infinite diversity in infinite combinations is our strength does not discard people when they become inconvenient. It recognizes that every person is still a person, every neighbor is still a neighbor, and every community is stronger when it chooses restoration over abandonment.

That is the kind of public safety I believe in— one rooted in dignity, evidence, prevention, and the hard work of making sure fewer people fall through the cracks in the first place.