Utah has reduced its rate of chronic homelessness by 74 percent over the past eight years, moving 2000 people off the street and putting the state on track to eradicate homelessness altogether by 2015. How’d they do it?
The state is giving away apartments, no strings attached. In 2005, Utah calculated the annual cost of E.R. visits and jail stays for an average homeless person was $16,670, while the cost of providing an apartment and social worker would be $11,000. Each participant works with a caseworker to become self-sufficient, but if they fail, they still get to keep their apartment.
MORE: How much food could be rescued if college dining halls saved their leftovers?
Other states are eager to emulate Utah’s results. Wyoming has seen its homeless population more than double in the past three years, and it only provides shelter for 26 percent of them, the lowest rate in the country. City officials in Casper, Wyoming, now plan to launch a pilot program using the methods of Utah’s Housing First program. There’s no telling how far the idea might go.
For NationSwell’s in-depth look at Housing First, click here.
AND: If you want to hire someone to help the homeless, why not the formerly homeless?
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Utah had reduced its rate of homelessness by 78 percent. It’s been reduced by 74 percent.
Tag: American West
A Colorado Prison Transformed
In Las Animas, Colorado, a former prison now provides shelter for homeless people in the first state-funded facility of its kind. The 500-acre Fort Lyon Correctional Facility in southern Colorado was repurposed and opened three months ago as a place to help homeless from fifteen Colorado counties permanently leave the streets. Residents must abstain from drugs and alcohol, take classes at a nearby Otero Junior College, and work on such jobs as fixing up the facility or raising chickens. Once residents finish a one or two-year program, they are guaranteed a voucher for housing. James Ginsburg, the program director for the Colorado Commission for the Homeless, says that not only will the facility help homeless turn their lives around, it should save taxpayers money, too—it costs $17,000 per person a year, versus the average $36,000 each homeless person costs taxpayers a year.
Can Ancient Native American Traditions Heal Today’s Vets?
For centuries, many Native American tribes held traditional rituals when their young men returned from battle to help reintegrate them into society. Today, some are performing these ceremonies to help veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Utah filmmaker Taki Telonidis of the Western Folklife Center in Salt Lake City is shooting a documentary about these traditions and their effects on returning vets, many of whom come home with “invisible drama,” he told the Elko Free Daily Press. Telonidis is documenting the traditions of warriors among the Blackfeet tribe and the work of one Shosone-Paiute medicine man who conducts sweat lodges for all interested veterans at the George Wallen Veteran Affairs Center in Salt Lake.