As a member of the Salt Lake Valley Coalition to End Homelessness, I was encouraged to see the results of a new Salt Lake Tribune poll indicating that Utahns understand that closing the Road Home and opening three new homeless resource centers in Salt Lake County won’t solve the problem of homelessness in the state. No one single solution to homelessness exists, but if all of us are willing to work together to address the root causes, we can use best practices to render the condition rare, brief and non-recurring.
For a number of individuals, the root cause of homelessness is low wages followed by a catastrophic event — job loss, expensive health issue, necessary but unexpected expense that puts the household over the edge of a financial cliff.