SALT LAKE CITY — Estimates have put direct and indirect costs of Utah’s homeless system at over $100 million a year — and while big changes are finally taking shape this year as three new homeless resource centers get up and running, the state’s work on homelessness doesn’t really show many big changes on paper.

For another year in a row, Utah’s annual homelessness report released last week shows no major leaps to reduce Utah homelessness. In fact, the overall number of Utahns experiencing homelessness has “largely remained stable,” the report states.

The state’s annual overnight Point in Time count — a survey of people staying in shelters and on the streets statewide on a single night, this year on Jan. 23 — found 2,798 homeless people across the state, 78 fewer than were recorded last year, according to the report. That’s about a 2.7% decrease.

Statewide, 14,289 unduplicated people were recorded into the state’s Homeless Management Information System as sheltered between Oct. 1, 2017, and Sept. 30, 2018. That’s slightly up from 14,245 people recorded in the same time period between 2016 and 2017, according to the report.

Overall, homelessness in Utah is not trending up or down — it’s mostly stagnant.

“We have a slight increase in annual counts, but we’re staying really right around the same area,” Joseph Jensen, system administrator of the state’s Homeless Management Information System, told the state’s Homeless Coordinating Committee last week while summing up the report.

“We’re staying stable,” he said.

Homelessness has been on a slow rise nationwide as housing prices continue to creep up. In the U.S., homelessness increased slightly, by about 0.3%, or 1,834 people, between 2017 and 2018, according to the 2019 report from the National Alliance to End Homelessness. More than 552,000 people were experiencing homelessness in the U.S. on a single night in 2018 during the national Point in Time count, according to the report.

States including New York, Hawaii, Oregon and California top the list of states with the highest homeless rates, as well as areas with the highest housing costs in the country.

Numbers: Good and bad

For Utah, state officials see the mostly stagnant homeless population numbers as both good and bad.

Though Utah, like other states, has been seeing rising housing costs, that so far hasn’t led to a dramatic homeless population increase. Yet at the same time, Utah has poured millions into efforts to reduce homelessness, so it’s also discouraging not to see any significant decreases in the state’s overall homeless population.

“If you zoom out nationwide, really what you’re seeing are lots of increases in different communities with their Point in Time counts, so we feel that the fact we’re staying stable highlights some success we’re having,” Jensen said. “But at the same time that means we have not progressed dramatically toward that goal of eliminating homelessness.”

Jon Hardy, director of the Housing and Community Development Division at the Department of Workforce Services, said the flat numbers can be considered a positive given state population growth and national trends — but he also noted big changes to the state’s homeless system are just now becoming reality as the three new homeless resource centers near opening, so changes won’t reflect in the numbers just yet.

“With the new model, we expect it to show in future years,” Hardy said. “All we’ve done is a lot of capital investment, so we expect to see improvement.”

Last week, women began moving into the Geraldine E. King Women’s Resource Center, the first of the three homeless centers in Salt Lake City and South Salt Lake scheduled to open this fall. Utah’s new homeless centers, meant to eventually replace the downtown shelter, have been pegged as facilities that will bring new focus to diverting people from homeless shelters to other programs or facilities whenever possible.

First time homeless

Utah’s 2019 report, however, did spotlight a significant data point. Of the people in the state’s homeless database, 59 percent were experiencing homelessness for the first time.

“Seeing a percentage like that is kind of a mixed bag,” Jensen said. “Having a large number of people experiencing homelessness for the first time means that, obviously, we have a lot of forces that are driving people into homelessness that we need to start really looking at. ... On the other hand, we’re also glad that we don’t have a majority of these people having experienced homelessness multiple times.”

Hardy said factors influencing that number could relate back to the availability of affordable housing and rising housing costs.

“That’s certainly an issue we’re looking at,” Hardy said.

One other area within the report where there was a significant change in the 2019 Point in Time count compared to 2018 numbers was the number of chronically homeless individuals, which rose by 306 to 512 — but the report attributes that change to a difference in methodology.

The change stems from an effort to better align methodology for determining whether or not someone is chronically homeless using the definition of chronic homelessness provided by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The department defines someone as chronically homeless if they have a qualifying disabling condition and have been continually homeless for 12 months or more or have been homeless four or more times in the last three years.

Operation Rio Grande

Last week also marked the two-year anniversary of Operation Rio Grande, the multi-agency state effort to clean up the crime-riddled Rio Grande neighborhood around the downtown homeless shelter, which had become a hotbed for drug dealing and crime.

Since then, Part 1 offenses (or serious, violent crimes) are continuing to track at lower rates, according to Operation Rio Grande’s website. Part 1 offenses are down from a three-year average of 234 offenses between 2014 and 2015 to 149 offenses in 2019, according to the operation’s current progress report.

At the same time, there appears to be indications that Operation Rio Grande’s momentum to prevent and minimize homelessness has slowed slightly. For example, the average number of days people stayed in shelter went from 43.5 days last year (down from 48.5 days in 2017) to 46.2 days this year, according to the report. Additionally, the number of times someone successfully exited the shelter into housing went from 274 in 2018 (up from 233 in 2017) down to 263 this year.

Perhaps the operation’s “momentum” has “slowed down,” said Nate McDonald, spokesman for the Utah Department of Workforce Services — but only because “the priority has shifted to focus more on the transition” of the new homeless resource centers.

Once the new homeless resource centers are up and working, the hope is Utah’s statistics when it comes to diverting people from homelessness will get significantly better in coming years, McDonald said.

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