Utah Solves Homelessness
It’s doing it in the most simple way: giving people homes.
“We call it housing first, employment second,” Lloyd Pendleton, director of Utah’s Homeless Task Force, told NBC News.
At first, Pendleton wasn’t sold on the idea. “I said: ‘You guys must be smoking something. This is totally unrealistic.’”
In 2005, 1,932 people in Utah were chronically homeless, meaning they’d been living on the streets for over a year, or on four separate occasions within three years, and had a debilitating condition.
As of April 2015, there were 178.
“It’s a philosophical shift in how we go about it,” Pendleton said. “You put them in housing first … and then help them begin to deal with the issues that caused them to be homeless.”
The new program is also more cost-effective. According to the Homeless Task Force, it costs the state an avergae of $19,208 per year to care for each chronically homeless person, while housing and providing a case worker costs about $7,800.
Copyright 2015 Liberaland
6 responses to Utah Solves Homelessness
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Kick Frenzy May 5th, 2015 at 09:32
Excellent!
Now if we can just propagate that model across all cities in the entire country!
Jimmy Smith May 5th, 2015 at 10:00
Come on, Texas also has a plan for housing the homeless.
They send these nice, young, heavily armed (for the protection of the homeless person, of course) men and women to pick up the homeless person from the streets and then give them in a place in a secure establishment where they have food, activities and endless opportunities to interact with others
illinoisboy1977 May 5th, 2015 at 13:15
We should have our own states look into doing this. We owe it to our fellow citizens, to help them on the path to self-sufficiency. In my own state of Illinois, the cost savings alone should be incentive enough for our elected officials. That’s more “leftover” money they can pocket!
Dwendt44 May 5th, 2015 at 20:12
Making sense means the right wing will reject it out of hand. The homeless need to be punish and be suffering. That’ll teach them.
illinoisboy1977 May 5th, 2015 at 20:35
I don’t think it’s malicious intent, toward the homeless. It looks to me, more like gross indifference. Like they can’t be bothered to address the problem.
David Ish May 8th, 2015 at 06:00
Why can’t this goes on everywhere else?