In Utah, Trump’s Vision for Homelessness Begins to Take Shape

To glimpse the future of homelessness policy in the age of President Trump, consider 16 acres of scrubby pasture on the outskirts of Salt Lake City where the state plans to place as many as 1,300 homeless people in what supporters call a services campus and critics deem a detention camp.

State planners say the site, announced last month after a secretive search, will treat addiction and mental illness and provide a humane alternative to the streets, where afflictions often go untreated and people die at alarming rates.

They also vow stern measures to move homeless people to the remote site and force many of them to undergo treatment, reflecting a nationwide push by some conservatives for a new approach to homelessness, one embraced and promoted by Mr. Trump.

With outdoor sleeping banned, removal to the edge of town may become the only way some homeless Utahns can avoid jail. Planners say the facility will also hold hundreds of mentally ill homeless people under court-ordered civil commitment and the effort will include an “accountability center” for those with addictions.

While the Utah effort began before Mr. Trump’s return to office, it mirrors his pledge to move the homeless from urban cores to “tent cities” with services. And it accelerated after Mr. Trump issued an executive order in July, calling for strict camping bans and expanded power to involuntarily treat homeless people.

Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, quickly praised Mr. Trump’s order and told Utah planners to follow it.

Critics of the new plan say that confining people to a site on the city’s outskirts threatens civil liberties and warn that the promised services may not materialize. The efforts coincide with deep cuts to Medicaid, which could thwart the project’s financing.

“I’m super anxious about it,” said Jen Plumb, a physician and Democratic state senator who calls the promise of high-quality medical care “pie in the sky.”

Utah already has a severe shortage of psychiatric beds, she noted. The legislature is unlikely to fund hundreds of new beds, she said, and even if it did, there is no work force to staff them.

Without enormous new spending, she said, the center could function less as a treatment facility than “a prison or a warehouse.”

Accusing homeless people of turning great cities into “unsanitary nightmares,” he pledged “to use every tool, lever and authority to get the homeless off our streets.” He said the administration would “open up large parcels of inexpensive land” where “dangerously deranged” people “can be relocated and their problems identified.”

Much about Utah’s plans remain unclear, including the details of involuntary treatment, what a proposal calls “work-conditioned housing” and whether the residents will sleep in buildings or tents. But supporters call it a model.

“Utah is a harbinger of the future,” said Devon Kurtz of the Cicero Institute, a conservative policy group that has pushed for the changes in Utah and at the federal level.

Contain and treat

As tent clusters and open-air drug use rose, so did calls for encampment bans. The move for stricter measures gained momentum last year after the Supreme Court ruled that authorities could ban camping even in places that lacked shelter space.

Although Utah seems the clearest example of what Mr. Trump has in mind, other communities have used threats of arrest to move homeless people to designated areas.

As New Orleans prepared for this year’s Super Bowl, state police moved more than 120 people from downtown to a distant warehouse hastily converted for three months into a shelter.

San Diego enforces a camping ban punishable by arrest while designating two tent sites with a total of 800 beds as an alternative to the street. But a recent lawsuit faults the sites for “inhumane” conditions, including rats, mold, and risks of fires and floods.

In Las Vegas, a $200 million homeless campus is under construction, with half of the money coming from the casino industry amid concerns that homelessness depresses tourism. It promises 900 beds across 26 acres with intensive services, and coincides with new prohibitions on sleeping in public, punishable by up to 10 days in jail.

And moving marginalized people to government camps, they say, is an idea with a long and shameful history.

“It’s what they did in World War II in Japanese detention camps,” said Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center, a Washington advocacy group. “This reads similar to rounding up Jews or other people the Nazis didn’t like.”

Asked in the confirmation process if he supported “relocation camps” for homeless people, Scott Turner, the housing secretary, did not reject the idea. “Our current approach to addressing homelessness is badly broken,” he wrote.

Utah’s pivot is especially radical. It was once a leader in Housing First, an approach to homelessness that prioritizes permanent housing and offers treatment on a voluntary basis.

Housing First has been the standard approach nationally for more than a decade, with studies showing it is effective in keeping people housed. But it is expensive and slow, and there is less evidence that it improves health outcomes.

The Utah plan returns to an earlier “treatment first” model that conditions aid on sobriety or compliance with psychiatric treatment. Celebrated by conservatives, such programs offer the hope of healing, but risk excluding people who cannot or will not comply.

‘The business of souls’

In an interview at his Salt Lake City office, Mr. Shumway, 53, toggled between the language of the boardroom and the pulpit. He said a “management consulting approach” would make homeless services more efficient (“we nerd out on things like Six Sigma and lean process re-engineering”), measuring individual progress through a system of behavioral targets he calls “the pathway to human thriving.”

“Allowing people to remain on the streets originates from the purest of intentions and may be the most inhumane thing we could possibly do,” he said.

As Mr. Shumway describes it, nearly two-thirds of the 1,300 homeless people potentially sent to the site could be there for involuntary treatment. About 400 beds would be set aside for psychiatric treatment. Another 400 beds would provide substance abuse treatment “as an alternative to jail,” he said, with entry and exit “not voluntary.”

Asked how people would enter the facility, he said law enforcement “rescue teams” would identify homeless people in the city and offer them a choice. “So we can take you to court, and you can go to jail,” he said. “We don’t want to do that. We have a resource-rich alternative.”

The plan shifts the state’s focus away from housing and toward rehabilitation and moral development. “Success is not permanent housing — success is human dignity,” Mr. Shumway said. “We are in the business of lives, of humans, of souls.”

“We can’t brick-and-mortar our way out of this,” he said.

Mr. Shumway’s vision would require expanding civil commitment, the process by which a person can be forced to accept mental health treatment. Under Utah’s current law, a judge must find that an individual is dangerous or gravely disabled, and patients have the right to an attorney and to cross-examine witnesses.

Lowering the standard for civil commitment, as Mr. Trump called for in his executive order, would require state legislative action. No such action has been initiated in Utah, though Mr. Shumway said “the mechanics are being researched.”

Mr. Shumway allowed that planning was at an early stage, and many questions remained: What would happen to people who did not comply with the campus’s sobriety or treatment mandates? Would people who wished to leave be free to do so? Could sobriety requirements result in people losing subsidized housing and returning to homelessness?

“You’re looking for granularity in a blue-sky conversation,” Mr. Shumway said. He said he had presented the plans to federal officials and “got very positive signals.”

Kasey Lovett, a spokeswoman for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said officials were aware of the Utah plan and were “encouraged” by its direction. Mr. Cox did not respond to an interview request.

But many Salt Lake City service providers expressed anxiety about the plan. The proposed site is near the airport, in a remote spot where pasture is gradually giving way to industrial warehouses. The nearest public bus stop is about two miles away, an hour’s walk over stretches of road that have no sidewalks.

“What makes you think anybody’s going to stay there?” said Dr. Plumb, the Democratic state senator. “Oh, excuse me — they don’t have the right to leave. That’s what is going to make them stay there.”

Among the biggest outstanding questions about the project is how to pay for it. Mr. Shumway has estimated $75 million in construction costs, followed by yearly operating costs of $34 million. Some of the costs might be trimmed by offering mental health care on an outpatient basis, through a federal clinic Mr. Shumway hopes to locate there.

He has also proposed redirecting about $17 million in federal homelessness grants now overseen by community groups and largely used for housing.

“If you start fiddling with that money, you’re going to be pulling people out of housing into homelessness,” Josh Romney, son of the Republican former Senator Mitt Romney and the chair of Shelter the Homeless, a nonprofit organization that owns the city’s existing shelters, warned the services board last month.

Some critics also see a conflict of interest in Mr. Shumway’s role as a government adviser and his firm’s promotion of software used in data collection and case management for homeless people. The services board has recommended that the software, called Know-by-Name, be adopted statewide.

Bill Tibbitts, who helps run a Utah food pantry called the Crossroads Urban Center, sent a letter to the governor and legislators this month highlighting the issue. “When he advocates for this use of taxpayer dollars, he is not a disinterested party,” the letter said.

Mr. Shumway called accusations of a conflict of interest “wholly inaccurate.” He said his firm had “a thriving homeless services consulting practice” that contracts with many cities and states. But the Know-By-Name system “is owned by a not-for-profit, is 100 percent funded by philanthropic donations, and has been developed solely for the state’s benefit.” No private entity is profiting, he said.

Nichole Solt, 46, owns three acres on the edge of the site, with four show horses and fields of hay and alfalfa. Recalling how she fell in love with the wild spot where her sons ride bikes and fish, Ms. Solt began to cry.

“They tell me there’s going to be all this security, but the reality is they’re going to be in my backyard,” she said.

Few of the homeless people who were recently gathered in Salt Lake City’s Liberty Park had heard of the planned campus. Some said they saw an advantage to removing services from downtown neighborhoods where drug markets proliferate.

“How do you stay clean when you’re surrounded by people you’ve been dirty with?” said Randy Zumwalt, 63.

Elizabeth Lowe, 36, had spread out a picnic blanket and was paging through a book about tarot readings. She said she had been living outside, on and off, for 15 years, and that friction with city dwellers had never been worse.

She was as weary of being stared at as they were weary of seeing her, she said. She said she wouldn’t mind living outside the city.

But when shown a rendering of the site, she was skeptical. “OK, so straight up, this reminds me of a concentration camp,” she said. “Trying to get all the homeless in one area by the airport. I mean — would we be able to leave of our own free will?”

Certainly, the plan has captured the imagination of the governor.

At a homeless services conference in Salt Lake City this month, Mr. Cox singled out the planned campus as “one of the most significant steps forward in decades here in our state.” He called on his audience — a roomful of case managers and social workers — to “lean in and meet this moment with us.”

“This is more than a facility,” he said. “It is a statement of who we are as a state.”