Will Trump’s order on homelessness treatment make Utah streets safer?

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah leaders celebrated a new executive order from President Donald Trump, which seeks to make it easier to move people from homeless encampments into treatment facilities and prioritize federal funds to states and cities that ban camping and require sobriety and treatment programs.

However, several homeless resource experts — including at least one locally — say they’re skeptical of what it outlines.

The order, issued Thursday, directs several cabinet secretaries to steer federal funds toward programs that ensure that individuals camping on streets and causing public disorder and that are suffering from serious mental illness or addiction are moved into treatment centers, assisted outpatient treatment or other facilities, per the White House.

“Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe,” the order states.

The order seeks to shift funding from housing-first programs, and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said he appreciates the move.

“We’re glad to see the White House take a commonsense approach to homelessness,” he posted on the social platform X. “Real compassion means helping people get the treatment and care they need, not just offering housing without support. Utah has been pushing for this shift, and it’s good to see it taking shape across the country.”

State Rep. Tyler Clancy, a Republican from Provo who has sponsored several significant bills on housing and homelessness, was similarly enthused, calling Trump’s order “a necessary pivot from failure to common sense.”

“The truth is simple: The streets are a death sentence for our mentally ill and drug addicted brothers and sisters,” he said on X. “Tents are not treatment. Public parks are not detox centers. And uncheck lawlessness is not compassion.”

“Critics will say this lacks compassion,” he added. “They’re wrong. True compassion is getting people off the streets: Not letting them die in public. In Utah — the #1 cause of death for homeless Utahns is a fatal drug overdose. We don’t have to choose between compassion and order. We choose both. Lives depend on it. Thank you President Trump!”

The order won’t change how Utah handles homelessness issues, Clancy told KSL.com, but the shift in funding priorities could bring more resources into the state.

“This is just going to build on the momentum,” he said. “It doesn’t necessarily change what we’re doing, but I do think it moves Utah up the ladder for prioritization for federal funding.”

The approach will likely necessitate more bed space for homeless individuals needing treatment and Clancy said making progress on getting people off the streets will bring people around to investing more on treatment facilities.

“I think the more that we do to hold ourselves accountable when it comes to taxpayer resources, the more we do to clean up the streets, the more people will be incentivized that ‘yeah, we do need to invest in the expanded capacity,'” he said. “So, I see it all as part of the same push. I don’t see it as contrary to one another.”

The order could have the largest impact on Salt Lake City among Utah communities, especially after homelessness and public safety were a focus during the last legislative session following a wide-scale effort nearly a decade ago.

A handful of new bills targeting those issues were also signed by the heart of Operation Rio Grande earlier this year. The state-led Operation Rio Grande sought to crack down on the issue eight years ago with a plan to provide services and resources for people battling addiction.

It led to some successes, but city leaders said more recent challenges in other parts of the city — such as the Jordan River Parkway — highlighted aspects that fell short.

It was a “decent idea” but failed to “finish building out the system,” Salt Lake City Councilwoman Victoria Petro said earlier this year, referring to resources to battle the root causes of homelessness. Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall also called on resources in a public safety plan she unveiled in January, at the request of state leaders, who questioned how the city handled the issue.

Sending someone experiencing homelessness to jail may work when someone is committing a crime, but it doesn’t address their challenges once that person is released from custody, city officials noted at the time. Resources for mental health challenges, drug addiction and human trafficking were some of the examples they pointed to.

“I’m so fed up with the brokenness of this system, and our officers are so fed up with taking people to jail or not being able to take them to services because they’re not available — having people right back on the streets,” Mendenhall said.

Salt Lake officials were still reviewing Trump’s executive order and any potential impacts, a city spokesperson told KSL.com on Friday.

Several homeless resource advocates have already raised concerns about the order, though. The National Homelessness Law Center called it “misguided,” and the leader of the National Low Income Housing Coalition called it “a step backward,” citing issues with sending people to treatment involuntarily or that it doesn’t address housing costs, another major factor in homelessness.

It could also be expensive, and there is no clear source of funding, said Bill Tibbitts, executive director of the Crossroads Urban Center, a Salt Lake City-based nonprofit that offers services to low-income people. He points out that it comes on the heels of some Medicaid funding cuts, which could hinder some of the expenses needed to carry out the directive.

Many communities have tried a “housing-first” approach to homelessness, a model that provides permanent housing solutions to people experiencing homelessness, because it’s generally cheaper than incarceration or institutionalization, he explains. The problem he’s seen in over two decades in homelessness policy is that governments have failed to fund either approach.

There could also be some constitutional challenges, and it’s also unclear where unhoused people would go, he adds. He says the state doesn’t have the capacity to handle both the short- and long-term needs, which is something that would need to be sorted out.

“Unfortunately, there’s not going to be an easy solution; there’s not going to be a cheap solution,” he told KSL.com. “(The order) is unlikely going to make things better. It might make things worse, and it might have no impact at all because a lot of it is just trying to talk about an old problem in a new way without new money, so I don’t know if it’s really a plan.”

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