Heading west on Interstate 80 you descend from the Rockies Wasatch Range into Salt Lake City, and as you snake through traffic you can catch a glimpse of the capital of the Mormon Church before you’re in the Western suburbs where the land irons out and before you stretches only salt flats, desert, and a handful of casino-lit villages for 518 miles (835 km) until you roll into Reno.
It’s at the beginning of this long lonely road that Utah plans to construct what’s being billed as a “homeless campus”—which I guess focus groups preferred to homeless gulag. It is intended to serve as a model for the Trump administration’s new way forward on the exceptional American crisis that is its homelessness.
The proposed location of Utah’s homeless “campus.”
Let’s first quickly recap what the Trump plan is before turning to the particular’s of Utah’s vision.
We covered Trump’s executive order on homelessness back in July and that can be read here. The summarized version:
- Trump’s order frames the country’s homelessness crisis as the product solely of mental illness and drug addiction.
- With that false starting point, the Trump plan pushes civil commitment, i.e., forced mental health and substance abuse treatment.
- While the executive order ignores the main drivers of homelessness (high rents, low wages, lack of social safety net), many actions the administration is taking is simultaneously worsening them.
How does Utah’s “campus” fit in? The Utah Homeless Services Board recently wrote in a letter that it would “coordinate with the White House” to explore “becoming a pilot for the rest of the country on how to deploy an exhaustive treatment-focused intervention that is dignified, humane, and efficacious.”
The result is a plan for a massive 1,300-bed facility on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, which happens to have no public transportation. The center, expected to open in 2027, would include more than 300 beds for court-ordered civil commitment, hundreds more for treatment “as an alternative to jail,” and other sections for what the plan describes as “work-conditioned housing.”
To Be Fair, this is not just a Trump thing or an Utah thing. If there are an any areas in our discordant politics where agreement isn’t hard to find, it’s kicking the poor and gearing up for war. The homeless issue has mostly been ignored by Democrats, but now in the wake of last year’s Supreme Court decision that localities could ban camping even in places that lacked shelter space, policies in blue states and cities are mostly indistinguishable from Trump’s stance.
San Diego is being sued for herding the homeless with the threat of arrest into tent sites filled with mold and rats. San Francisco is working on a plan that mirrors Trump’s. New Orleans rounded up more than 100 homeless and threw them in a warehouse so they’d be out of sight for the Super Bowl earlier this year.
Utah’s plan takes it a step further in that it’s some combination of a forced shelter, psychiatric hospital, and sobriety center.
Seeing as the US is unwilling—and is in fact pursuing even more harm to its citizens— to do anything about low wages, high rents, housing supply, lack of a public safety net, healthcare rapaciousness, etc., spaces to house the homeless like the Utah campus are in need.
In theory it could be helpful. And it could provide necessary assistance to some who need it. If there are people who are unwilling or unable to leave the streets when presented with an opportunity to do so because of mental illness or substance addiction, it’s hard to argue with the necessity of something like a homeless campus to get them the help they need.
But turning to such a measure as the final solution without housing assistance, without rent caps and wage laws, while simultaneously slashing the social safety net and blessing rental housing price fixing, well, it’s a recipe for disaster.
It risks that many people who are simply victims of American capitalism are going to get swept up into the civil commitment dragnet. As Bill Tibbitts, deputy executive director of Crossroads Urban Center, a low-income advocacy nonprofit based in Utah, puts it:
“A senior citizen who had their rent increased beyond what they could afford is not going to want to go to a quasi-correctional facility to get help finding a place to live that they can afford.”
There’s also the issue of the rapidly increasing number of homeless children. Will they too be labeled mentally ill or addicts?
Planners say the “campus” will hold hundreds of people under court-ordered civil commitment, and there will also be an “accountability center” for those with addictions.
“An accountability center is involuntary, OK — you’re not coming in and out,” Randy Shumway, chairman of the state Homeless Services Board, told the New York Times. He added that the campus will guide homeless people “towards human thriving.”
That’s one potential outcome. Another is that it becomes an exploitative hellhole if it is ever built.
Red Flags Galore
The Price Tag. Utah’s proposed $30.7 billion budget includes $25 million for 1,300-bed homeless campus on the west side of Salt Lake City. The governor is also requesting $20 million in ongoing funds to provide services, but the full cost of the project (estimated to be at least $75 million to build and north of $34 million a year to operate) wouldn’t be covered by the state alone. The plan is that the Trump administration and private investors will come in with more money to see the project through.
Despite the uncertain money, the plan is to have it up and running in 2027, which leads to obvious doubts about the quality of the campus and is drawing comparisons to the hastily-built “Alligator Alcatraz.”
Tibbitts, the deputy executive director of Crossroads Urban Center, says that if the facility wants to adequately treat so many people, the cost “will be much higher than $75 million”—the key word being adequately.
Private investor involvement. How are they going to see a return on their investment? The best-case scenario is the usual price-gouging of the government for providing healthcare and other services at the campus. One can imagine a range of worse possibilities, however. Last year, Utah revamped its homelessness planning board; out went the nonprofits and in came the businesspeople. The board is now led by the management consultant Shumway who is championing a “management consulting approach” and says that “success is not permanent housing — success is human dignity. We are in the business of lives, of humans, of souls.”
Shumway is also in the business of making money. His firm is pushing data collection software, called Know-by-Name, used in homeless case management, and the state homeless board now headed by Shumway wants it to be used statewide.
Coerced treatment.
The backers of the campus call it a “secure residential placement facility” where people who are “sanctioned” to go there would not be able to leave voluntarily. Even if Utah—and the US— have the capacity to forcibly treat people (there is little indication they do), studies show that coerced treatment is not effective. A recent study, “Use of Coercive Measures during Involuntary Psychiatric Admission and Treatment Outcomes: Data from a Prospective Study across 10 European Countries,” found that “all coercive measures were associated with patients staying longer in the hospital.”
The promise of high-quality medical care doesn’t match current trends. Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” that took a wrecking ball to Medicaid, the number one payer for addiction and mental health services. Wait times to access services are already excruciatingly long and are now expected to get longer. From the Vera Institute:
In the United States, people must wait an average of 48 days to access mental health or substance use services, and many struggle to afford needed services that are inaccessible without insurance.
This is rarely discussed in bipartisan plans to “treat” the homeless. They want to blame mental health and addiction, but don’t want to spend the amounts of money that would be required to adequately provide services. They’re effectively bypassing the simpler, cheaper, and more humane solutions of affordable housing and accessible voluntary care to the most expensive and most invasive—without providing the funding for it.
In Oregon, for example, it costs about $321,000 to commit one person at the state hospital for six months. You can do the math from there.
It can, however, be lucrative for investors looking to cut corners and break the law. The Trump administration and states turn to forced institutionalization happens to coincide with private equity spreading its tentacle through the mental health care industry, which is largely driven by Affordable Care Act provisions requiring coverage of such care for as long as patients need it. From a recent ProPublica investigation:
More than 40% of inpatient mental health beds were operated by for-profit entities as of 2021, according to unpublished data from Morgan Shields, an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies quality in behavioral health care. That’s up from about 13% in 2010.
And with that trend comes the usual degradation of services. ProPublica found that more than 90 psychiatric hospitals violated the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act in the past 15 years. Roughly 80% of them are owned by for-profit corporations, and only a few have faced even meaningless fines. In most cases the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services simply ignore the law breaking.
Chief among the violations are efforts to increase profits by denying care to patients without insurance or with lower-paying forms of insurance and turning away more complicated patients who might require more staffing and other costs.
As it stands now, the Los Angeles County jail system is the largest “mental health care provider” in the country. Private equity plays a major role in the private prison healthcare industry, which was estimated to be a $9.3bn business in 2022.
The Guardian recently looked into two of the largest behemoths in the prison health industry – Wellpath and Corizon – which are both backed by private equity investors. What they found wasn’t pretty but expected when you combine private equity with captive customers. It’s like healthcare horror stories from across the country, but on steroids inside prison walls, including staff shortages, delays in care, severe negligence, and preventable deaths.
What exactly is “work-conditioned housing” that the campus is supposed to feature? It’s not exactly clear from the plan, but it’s not difficult to imagine.
Eric Tars of the National Homelessness Law Center says it “means forced labor.” He adds that is part of a trend, noting that in Louisiana a bill punishing outdoor camping introduced earlier this year proposes requiring those convicted to serve up to two years of “hard labor.” Another West Virginia bill wants those arrested for camping to take part in “facility upkeep.”
What’s the goal? In none of the news pieces, interviews, or literature on the campus have I been able to find anything about what happens to people once they leave the “campus.” Even if their souls are saved, what of their economic condition?
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Backers of the Utah campus and Trump’s nationwide vision say there’s no alternative as everything else that’s been tried hasn’t worked.
The US has in fact tried very little—and in reality has actively made the problem worse over recent decades through a wide range of policies that have increased the economic precarity of the working class. As many people on the front lines repeat, the number one thing the US could do would be to stop more people from becoming unhoused. That’s because at the current rate for every individual who gets back into housing, two, three, or more take their place.
Instead of addressing that fact, there is an effort underway to shift the blame from the systemic to the personal and blame mental health and drug use.
And so we see criminalization and what little funding is available to address homelessness is being redirected toward confinement.
In Utah, for example, there have long been funding shortage for affordable housing, substance use treatment, mental health treatment. According to Evan Done, advocacy and public policy director of Utah Recovers, the state is already short about 1,000 shelter beds compared to the number of people who need them.
Rather than address these shortages, state officials are proposing redirecting about $17 million in federal homelessness grants now overseen by community groups and largely used for housing towards the campus.
Turning Away from Effective—Yet Underfunded—Solutions
In a move that reflects larger trends across the country, Utah is moving away from “Housing First” policies, which officials say “lack accountability.” What they mean is that it housing first doesn’t feature moral means testing.
It says that housing is a fundamental right and that housing programs should identify and address the needs of the people it serves from the people’s perspective. From that starting point, it prioritizes getting a homeless individual into housing and then assists with access to health care and other support like addiction treatment. Studies show it is effective in keeping people housed, but it is expensive and slow—and unable to keep up with the number of people becoming unhoused in today’s America.
Trump’s executive order sought to demolish this tactic. From the order:
The Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development shall take appropriate actions to increase accountability in their provision of, and grants awarded for, homelessness assistance and transitional living programs. These actions shall include, to the extent permitted by law, ending support for “housing first” policies that deprioritize accountability and fail to promote treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency; increasing competition among grantees through broadening the applicant pool; and holding grantees to higher standards of effectiveness in reducing homelessness and increasing public safety.
And so states and localities are turning to a “treatment first” model that demands sobriety and mental health in exchange for any help.
Still, even if an individual emerges from isolated “accountability” centers like the campus as reformed and worthy, it’s unclear what aid will be forthcoming. There’s no mention of any job program or housing assistance. So what are we doing here?
Maybe that’s best summed up by Evan Done, public policy director of Utah Recovers:
“What the state is trying to do here is shift the blame from the system to the individual and say that these people do not want help, or they they’re not ready for help, when, in fact, the real issue is that we don’t have services and systems and supports in place that are the right for the people that are struggling.”
