On the afternoon of July 4, 2017, Shutney Lee Kyzer drove to the Rio Grande neighborhood of Salt Lake City — so named for the magnificent Denver Rio Grande and Western Railroad station built in 1910 — to buy drugs. Rio Grande, in particular the area around an enormous homeless shelter called The Road Home, had over the years become an open-air drug market, and its location near freeway on- and off-ramps made it an easy place to swing in, get your fix, and speed off. On this day, Kyzer purchased spice, a synthetic cannabinoid, and began smoking it as she drove away, she later told a detective. Kyzer passed out behind the wheel and jumped the curb. The vehicle smashed into six pedestrians sitting outside the shelter; one, 27-year-old Kendra Griffis, was killed. Just days before, a man carrying a tire iron and a sock full of rocks in the same neighborhood attacked a minor-league baseball player in town to play against the Salt Lake Bees. The player, Logan Taylor, had his head sliced open, suffered a concussion, and missed the game.
When news of the attack and then the crash reached Greg Hughes, he was incensed. Hughes was Utah’s House speaker at the time, and fixing up the situation around Rio Grande had become one of his legislative priorities. After the crash, he established an office near The Road Home and began conducting business there throughout the month of July. “If you wanted to talk about public education or transportation, you had to go through that area,” he said. “We’d look out that storefront window, and we’d see people twisting spice joints as fast as they could and selling them to people who are rolling up in nice cars or bicycles, and people are flipping us off … you could just watch it!”
There, Hughes held meetings with various state and local leaders about the situation in Rio Grande. Hughes kept pushing for the state to get involved, and near the end of July, Governor Gary Herbert convened a meeting. The next day, July 27, Herbert announced that a collection of the state’s most powerful politicians — Hughes, state Senate President Wayne Niederhauser, Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox, and Salt Lake County and City mayors Ben McAdams and Jackie Biskupski — would oversee Operation Rio Grande, a fast-acting, top-down assault on the Rio Grande drug trade in the name of helping out the vulnerable homeless population.
The initiative began August 14, 2017, and in the two years since, Salt Lake has attempted to address homelessness in a fashion unparalleled by any city or state. By the end of this year, The Road Home will be replaced by three new “resource centers” — emergency shelters with in-house caseworkers to connect homeless individuals with treatment and work. Operation Rio Grande will formally come to an end this year after the fiscally conservative state spent $67 million to fund 275 new treatment beds and help nearly 250 homeless individuals find work. But the operation also resulted in more than 7,000 arrests, the vast majority of which for misdemeanor offenses and outstanding warrants.
Those who spoke with Bitterroot said that the two-year barrage has galvanized attention around homelessness in a way unseen in the past, and that the resource centers will be safer than The Road Home was. It’s unquestioned that Operation Rio Grande cleaned up the drug trade. But a major challenge remains unaddressed. Homelessness is different for every individual, but ultimately, a person is homeless until they’re housed, and Operation Rio Grande did little to address housing. Meanwhile, all indications suggest the availability and affordability of homes will only get worse in the Salt Lake area, which, like most Western metros, is rapidly growing in population and affluence.
“You gotta build places that people can afford to live in to resolve the issue,” said Kathy Bray, executive director of Volunteers of America, Utah, which is operating one of the new resource centers.
Since August 13, about 100 women have been admitted to the Geraldine E. King Resource Center in Salt Lake City, the first of the three to open and the one run by VOA. Inside the concrete-heavy, industrial chic shelter, meals are provided on-site; a mobile health-care unit comes by once a week. Only women are allowed in this shelter, and the most that will ever be in here on a given night is 200. Case managers work in the building to help connect women to jobs and housing. Showers occur in private stalls, and each guest has two bins in a locked storage room where she can put personal belongings.
“We’re excited about having an engagement-based model,” Bray said. Providing addiction and mental health treatment on-site means staff is thinking: “How can we stabilize people so that they can reenter the community?”
The scene is a far cry from The Road Home. That shelter has a capacity for 1,100 people — it’s among the biggest in the country — with far more spartan accommodations. Theft and drug use take place inside, and not everybody gets a bed. “The lobby will be full tonight,” Matthew Minkevitch, The Road Home’s executive director, told me when I visited in August. In winter, he said, the board room is usually filled with bedrolls; the night staff has standing authorization to use Minkevitch’s office for overflow. The shelter is co-ed, and until 2017, families went there, too.
The Road Home was supposed to be closed by now. When Salt Lake’s resource center plan was finalized in 2017, The Road Home was supposed to be replaced by a 200-bed shelter for women, a co-ed 200-bed shelter, and a 300-bed men’s facility by July 31. Despite the net loss of 400 shelter beds, leaders argued the in-house resource workers would minimize the time people needed to stay in the shelter. But delays have occurred, and The Road Home remains open for now. The other two shelters are expected to open in the coming weeks.
Representative Ben McAdams is very familiar with The Road Home. In 2017, the then-mayor of Salt Lake County left work on a spring Friday, put on a black hoodie and jeans, and spent the weekend as a homeless person might — one night on the street, and one night in the shelter.
“The situation, as I found it, was horrific. And we had to take action,” McAdams said. “I came back to my staff and said, ‘We’ve got to get families out of Rio Grande.’ I saw kids in the middle of drug deals and violence.”
City and county leaders had decided in 2015 that smaller, population-specific shelters would be safer, but finding locations for the new shelters took two years, and it wasn’t a simple process. Originally, Salt Lake City was going to host four, 150-bed shelters on sites chosen behind closed doors. Virulent community opposition led to two of those options going by the wayside, even after purchase agreements were finalized.
McAdams didn’t have better luck when the county decided to host one of the shelters. Troy Walker, the mayor of Draper, an affluent suburb of Salt Lake City, offered up his city as a site. Just a day later, a crowd of about 1,000 filled an auditorium to express their displeasure with the idea of the resource center, which would have housed single women and children at the former site of the state penitentiary. The Salt Lake Tribune wrote that Walker and McAdams received a “verbal lashing.”
Lawrence Horman, the only homeless person who spoke, sympathized with the residents, earning applause when he said that the idea for the shelter materialized too quickly. But when he began to explain that the entire valley has a role to play in addressing homelessness, the mood turned.
“I know it’s not easy, and it won’t be easy on any community,” he said. “But if we don’t let the homeless people be spread into appropriate and functional shelters which are monitored, so the tax burden and the police burden can be spread out, then it will never change.”
The crowd had heard enough, and Horman was booed offstage. A shelter was never built in Draper; two Salt Lake City sites and one in South Salt Lake, a suburb, were chosen for the new resource centers.
I watched a video of the meeting that was recorded by Daniel Powell, a community outreach manager for Utah’s branch of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. The meeting, Powell told me, was acidic. Having spent decades fighting addiction and having experienced homelessness himself, Powell was hurt by the community’s response to Horman.
“That was one of the most hateful experiences that I’ve ever had in my life. I stood in the back and had tears running down my face,” Powell told me. “I’m 13 years out of homelessness, but I still remember how it felt. And to know there are whole communities that are that hateful, that view people experiencing such a difficult situation as less than human, it was hard to hear.”
Rio Grande and nearby Pioneer Park are the locus of Salt Lake City’s homelessness services, and thus its homeless population, but the opioid epidemic solidified the area’s status as the valley’s go-to drug market. Salt Lake City Police Chief Mike Brown estimated that, by 2017, 1,200 to 2,000 people were living on the streets around the shelter during the summer, and the primary economy was drugs ferried along the nearby freeway on- and off-ramps. Honduran immigrants were hired by the Sinaloa cartel to sell; if one was deported, the cartel would just recruit another. The drugrunners disguised themselves as homeless individuals, and dragged those actually experiencing homelessness into their shadow economy. So few county jail beds were available, Brown said, that arresting individuals meant they would be back in Rio Grande within hours.
“We effectively legalized everything, because nobody could go to jail,” Brown said.
A quasi-city emerged, and it was a dangerous one.
“This had become very sophisticated, very dangerous, and at a time when more and more people are moving downtown,” said Matthew Minkevitch, The Road Home’s executive director. “So there’s gentrification going on, apartments are going up, new people are moving into the neighborhood, and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh — what is going on around here?’”
Matthew Melville, homeless services director for Catholic Community Services, said he’d get offered drugs two or three times a day when he went to work at the day center and cafeteria CCS operates next to The Road Home. Bray instructed her outreach workers to stay away from the area in fear for their safety. When McAdams stayed there for a weekend, his assessment was blunt: “I did not feel safe.”
Accordingly, Operation Rio Grande’s first phase emphasized law enforcement. Serious crimes — homicides, sexual assault, robberies and the like — are down 36 percent compared with pre-Operation Rio Grande averages, and 7,272 arrests have been made over the two years of the program, according to state data. Leaders said the law enforcement operation would be “surgical” in nature, targeting only the high-level drugrunners and cartels. But just one in five arrests were under felony charges.
Critics jumped on the offensive, calling Operation Rio Grande little more than a bid to criminalize homelessness and scatter drug traffic away from downtown. The American Civil Liberties Union of Utah issued a scathing report in 2018, criticizing the volume of arrests compared with placement in treatment beds. “Continuous police contact, targeting of homeless individuals, and the collateral consequences of a conviction … result in the Rio Grande neighborhood — the space itself — being criminalized,” the report stated.
Richard Mauro, director of the Salt Lake Legal Defender Association, said that, in addition to drug charges, his clients were getting arrested for violations that advocates argue criminalize homelessness: camping, littering, minor theft. And those arrested faced consequences that followed them after their release.
“There’s a whole plethora of collateral consequences,” Mauro said. “People losing their driver’s licenses. People losing professional licenses. Having the stigma of a criminal conviction that prevents them from getting jobs and from getting housing. I would say the people who thought of this process didn’t think of the unintended consequences.”
Those who oversaw the operation disagree. “We identified the populations, and we provided them the adequate services that they needed,” Brown said. “If you’re a drug dealer, your service was that you got to go to jail. If you were suffering from mental health … we tried to assess those and get those individuals to help.”
Indeed, other measures were put in place, but their volume of use wasn’t nearly as robust. A drug court was established to give people an option to enter treatment in lieu of jail. As of August 13, 150 people have taken that path. And the law enforcement presence around The Road Home, Brown said, has sent some homeless individuals to other areas of Salt Lake, or as far away as Ogden, a suburb 30 miles north.
Now, two years removed from the initial law enforcement push, nearly everyone I spoke to for this story said at least some action was necessary; the drug market around Rio Grande was too much to be tolerated. But the dispersal of homelessness around the valley and the relatively meager utilization of treatment options left many feeling that Operation Rio Grande’s end is just the beginning of the state’s quest to remake its homelessness services.
According to state data, about 14,800 people in Utah accessed homelessness services — checked into a shelter, enrolled in a housing program, etc. — in the last year. In the Salt Lake area, the annual count of individuals experiencing homelessness tallied 1,844 people — a marginal increase from the year prior — on a January night. The average low temperature in Salt Lake City during that time of year is 27 degrees Fahrenheit.
In many respects, Salt Lake is in a better position than other cities throughout the West. Aside from this year’s slight rise, homelessness here, as measured by the point-in-time counts, is lower than it was during the great recession, when more than 2,296 people were counted. Contrast that with Seattle, home of the nation’s third-largest homeless population: 8,501 people were counted in 2008, but that total grew to 12,112 a decade later. It might seem Salt Lake is moving in the right direction, but cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are experiencing a form of homelessness that could soon spread. In these cities, housing hasn’t kept pace with the influx of new residents lured by high-paying jobs. Affluence, perversely, is breeding homelessness.
Left unchecked, affordability in Utah is destined to get worse. According to a 2018 analysis by the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah, over 125,000 households spend more than half their income on housing costs. Prices are rising at an annual rate of 3.3 percent in Utah, compared with incomes that are climbing at just 0.36 percent. Continue that trend to 2044, the authors wrote, and the affordability crisis in Utah will look like what is currently found in San Francisco.
Hughes, who left office in December 2018 (he’s mulling a run for governor), acknowledges that housing is an issue, but it’s often a political nonstarter. For one, affordable housing isn’t a quick-rewards game — it takes years for a housing project to reach completion, and Operation Rio Grande was designed to achieve measurable goals in a brief span.
Just this year, a bill that would’ve allocated $24 million to affordable housing was stripped of its fiscal note. “That was a dagger to all of our hearts,” Melville said.
Affordable housing was often brought up during community meetings Hughes attended as the resource center siting took place, and those interactions usually played out in a similar fashion, he said. Hughes would espouse the value of more housing. “I would say, ‘So how about if we do it here? We could do mixed-use, do some transitional with some studios, we could do market rate, we can do it here.’ And without exception, I would watch that room physically recoil from my comments.
“They rationally understand the concept,” he continued. “But not one person wants to see that type of housing near where they live.”
Powell, the NAMI outreach worker, could’ve used that type of housing at one point. He grew up in a violent household, and drank or used drugs from the time he was 12 until he was 36. His addiction, though, never derailed his life in a visible fashion.
“I lived a really duplicitous life. It shames me to say it, but I kept it hidden for a long time. I held positions of leadership in the LDS church. I used before I would conduct meetings,” he said. “I had the good job, the home, the family. And then I was chasing dope on the side. Chasing and slinging.”
Eventually, Powell lost his job and burned bridges with his family, and decided to stop using. In 2006, he checked himself into a Motel 6 in downtown Salt Lake and quit cold turkey.
Powell was clean, but had nowhere to live. He spent time bouncing between the streets and shelters. He said he’s glad he was sober before dipping into homelessnesss; the everyday trauma and anxiety, he feels, makes it nearly impossible to quit drugs while living on the street.
Much of the rhetoric around homelessness is misinformed, he said. “The vast majority of people on the street didn’t become homeless because it sounded like an attractive thing,” Powell said. “That’s not the way it works. It happens because people run out of resources — a job loss, medical bills, whatever. Those are all things we can help with.”
And housing can be a springboard for those types of services, Rob Wesemann said. Wesemann is NAMI Utah’s executive director and co-chair of the Salt Lake Valley Coalition to End Homelessness, an amorphous organization formed in the wake of Operation Rio Grande that aims to keep engaging the community and lawmakers about the issue. To Wesemann, affordable and permanent supportive housing needs to be the priority going forward.
Operation Rio Grande and the resource centers approached the issue in a traditional way: If somebody can get a job, get their mental health under control, or manage their addiction, then housing will follow, the thinking goes. But many researchers and service providers are coalescing around the idea that the system works best the other way around. In models known as housing-first, somebody is given shelter, which makes it easier for them to address the other needs.
“We have to acknowledge, though, that we’re a bootstrap state,” Wesemann said. “‘Just get over it. Suck it up, buttercup, and do your thing.’ Problem is, we know better in terms of severe mental illness, developmental trauma, substance abuse disorder — you don’t just do that. It’s like saying, ‘Hey cancer, just stop being cancer.’”
Housing, he said, was absent from Operation Rio Grande because no housing, homelessness, and mental illness experts were present during the formation of the plan. (The State Homeless Coordinating Committee, chaired by the lieutenant governor, was not formally involved in ORG.) Indeed, during my conversations, every service provider expressed concern that the lack of housing in Salt Lake — both permanent supportive housing for those with special needs, and general, low-cost units — could jeopardize the success of the resource centers.
“The key thing is that we don’t have affordable housing,” said CCS’s Melville, who will oversee one of the new resource centers. “Build as many nice shelters as you want, but we have a lot of people with vouchers who have nowhere to go. Without that affordable housing aspect, it absolutely won’t work. You can hire 30 more case managers to give people vouchers. If they have no place to go, then what are we doing?”
As it turns out, a group focused on building houses laid the groundwork for Operation Rio Grande. The Pioneer Park Coalition, a collection of developers and residents around the downtown park, lobbied early for an increased police presence and a decentralization of homeless shelters in Salt Lake City (Hughes, a developer, is on its board of directors).
I asked Dave Kelly, the group’s vice-chair, what role developers like those in the Pioneer Park Coalition play in combating homelessness. “It’s not a role of developers. It’s a role of cities,” he said. “Somebody who’s looking to build apartments on a piece of ground, they want to build as many apartments as they can. But when zoning and height restrictions and densities don’t allow you to maximize that, it’s a problem.”
It’s here that a bridge over the turbid waters of housing instability seems to be possible. Both housing developers and homelessness service providers I spoke with said similar things — albeit from different frames of reference — about affordable housing: governments should be incentivizing or mandating the construction of affordable units.
Kelly spelled it out this way: If a city allows him, as a developer, to build an extra 20 units in a project, but designate 10 of them as affordable housing, that’s something he’d consider. It pencils out for the developer, and it facilitates mixed-income living folks like Wesemann say is necessary.
Wesemann and Kelly both cited a common foe, one that reared its head in the Draper meeting: community opposition. “Our laws don’t really allow for that flexibility, and then we have communities fighting it,” Wesemann said. He called for a mandate on affordable housing such as Seattle’s, which requires developers to include affordable units or pay a fee. Removing restrictions, though, could also solve the problem. Perhaps no legislative body did more to address affordability than the Oregon statehouse this year, which eliminated nearly all single-family zoning.
There’s reason to believe that affordable housing, as an ethos, could catch on. Dan Lofgren is the principal of Cowboy Partners, a development agency that, he said, manages more than 40 percent of its units for affordable housing. Lofgren’s tool of choice is federal tax credits for low-income rentals, but some of his projects will have five or six external sources of funding.
The reason is simple. “A 2-by-4 is agnostic,” he said. “It doesn’t care whether I’m building an affordable unit or a luxury unit — it costs me the same.” Anywhere government entities can decrease that cost for developers, Lofgren said, incentivizes those units. Despite the added work that goes into it, his company has been committed to affordable housing for decades.
“This has got some pretty meaningful psychic income,” he said. “And that sense of how cool it is to be part of the solution infuses the company in ways that are just wonderfully rewarding.”
There are projects in the works around Salt Lake: more than 200 units of designated affordable housing, including dorm-style single-room occupancy housing, are under construction or fully funded, according to the Housing Authority of Salt Lake City. But those alone don’t meet demand.
The Road Home organization will operate the largest of the new resource centers, a 300-bed men’s facility. Minkevitch, its director, said the role of a shelter, regardless of the number of resources inside, is inherently temporary. “Housing — deeply affordable housing — now we’re talking about a solution, now we’re talking about a cure to the persistent issue of homelessness, whether it’s on Rio Grande Street, or Pike Street, or in the Mission, or Skid Row,” he said. “Now, should all of the money of Operation Rio Grande have been spent on housing? To me, there was a law enforcement issue — by all means, take care of that. But let’s keep our eye on housing. … I don’t know the pot of money, I don’t know what the unnecessary expenditure is. But I do know the necessary expenditure. It’s over here in housing.”
Lee McCashland, 52, slept at The Road Home shelter from 2012 to 2017. He had watched the proliferation of drug use, particularly heroin, turn the streets around the Road Home into the issue that forced Utah’s political leaders to take action. McCashland was eventually swept up into the marketplace, and his job was pretty simple: He monitored backpacks that belonged to drugrunners. Around any homeless shelter, folks enlist friends to watch their stuff — theft of personal goods is rampant when survival is at stake. Drugrunners blending in with the homeless population sought out folks like McCashland to keep an eye on their bags, which, of course, were filled not with personal belongings but cocaine, heroin, and spice.
McCashland told me his entry into the industry was innocuous. One of his friends who was working for the cartel was deported, so he started watching over his belongings. “And then I watched different stuff for different people who worked for the cartel, and then they ended up hiring me on to help. And I worked for drugs and money.”
So on July 4, 2017, while the rest of the city was barbecuing and prepping for fireworks displays, McCashland was monitoring drugs. All he remembers from that day was waking up beneath Kyzer’s car, his femur broken. (Kyzer was sentenced to five years in prison.)
While laying in a medical bed at The Road Home, McCashland was approached by an outreach worker who pointed him toward First Step House, an inpatient treatment center. He received a bed that, in all likelihood, was open because Operation Rio Grande money funded those extra 275 treatment beds in the city.
“I’m sober today, and I’m working on getting into transitional housing,” McCashland said. The next stop is a sober living home, he hopes, and then back to work; he has been a janitor much of his life. “I’m thrilled with it. I love to clean … and when you find something you love doing, it makes it all easier.”
He said Operation Rio Grande was necessary — the drugs and violence called for extreme measures, and the treatment resources have helped him. A six-month wait was common for treatment beds before Operation Rio Grande; today, if somebody wants a spot in treatment, they can be there in a week.
At the Weigand Homeless Resource Center, the day center operated by Catholic Community Services in the Rio Grande area, most people I spoke to were happy with the safer neighborhood. During Operation Rio Grande, the state took over Rio Grande Street, which separates the Weigand center and The Road Home, and established a safe zone accessible only to people with identification cards made onsite. “Before the safe zone, there were a lot of drugs … a lot of fights,” said Jacob Milligan.
Another person there, Shirley Hertig, said she’d been approached by resource workers at Weigand, and was eager to check out the new women’s resource center operated by VOA.
But the experience of others highlight the complicated future. One man whom I’ll call Damien had been sleeping at The Road Home for two months after losing a job at the University of Utah. Unable to find work, he lost his apartment and rented rooms at a hostel until his savings dried up. He had nowhere to stay; his family was in Mississippi, he had moved to Salt Lake just a couple years prior.
The constant police presence in the area bothered him. He understood they were there to maintain order, but “it’s scary and sad seeing them arrest people all the time. It’s heartbreaking.” And, though the open-air market is gone, drug use is still prevalent.
Damien, who has a master’s degree and ran student housing programs, was experiencing homelessness for the first time. “It’s a total, excuse my language, mental mind fuck,” he said. “It knocks you down a lot of pegs. It makes you feel worthless.” He’s ashamed to put The Road Home’s address on job applications, and told me he’d probably leave Salt Lake City.
Joanne, also a pseudonym, is one person who has found housing and a job, but it was far from easy. She lost her home and job in April following a domestic violence incident. Joanne was left with severe facial bruises and scars after her partner attacked her. She and her employer, a high-end retailer, parted ways mutually; she didn’t feel she could show her face in the store, and she wanted time to recover.
Joanne was able to find shelter through the YWCA of Salt Lake City, and employees of the state Department of Workforce Services worked to help her find a job and housing. The former came relatively easily; Joanne had a makeup artist hide her bruises before interviews, and she was able to land a marketing director position at a local nonprofit. But it took her about a month after getting the job to find housing.
“It was not from a lack of caring [from caseworkers] but I was left to my own devices,” Joanne said. Since she didn’t require any treatment services, she was competing with the general population for an apartment, so all her caseworker could do was show her ads on local classifieds sites. Joanne estimates she applied for more than 100 apartments. Her income history and credit were shot because of her homelessness, and many landlords would withhold applications when they discovered she was living at the YWCA. This practice is illegal, as is denying low-income rental vouchers, but is commonplace nonetheless in competitive rental markets. It wasn’t until she broke down to an apartment manager who had also survived domestic violence that Joanne was able to land a place to live. “I begged — make no mistake about it,” she said.
Joanne’s experience highlights the struggle ahead for Salt Lake and other Western metros in addressing homelessness. She had a job, and access to capable and helpful caseworkers. “You have miracle workers who are on the ground, but you also have reality,” she said — the reality of not enough housing for growing populations that’s increasingly expensive. What would help, she said, is a bed for everyone — a place to lay your head, secure your belongings, and figure out how to rebuild a life.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to better reflect the number of people who accessed homelessness services over the previous year.
