More than a home: How a 'human first' approach could reinvent Utah homeless policy

SALT LAKE CITY — It happened beneath the old viaduct on 4th West and North Temple: the first time Tiffany Holdaway took meth.

She was 11 years old.

Memories from the next few years, as she trailed her homeless mother, are ingrained deep in her mind — train hopping to Arizona, eating out of dumpsters, begging at the back door of fast food joints. How could she forget?

But there is one moment Holdaway remembers clearer than all the rest. The moment she realized her life could be different.

That moment didn't come as she was having children or landing in jail. It came as she sat across from a woman who shared a similar background, who had left it behind, and who loved her enough to tell her the truth.

"What I needed was community," Holdaway said. "I needed those people that have lived experience, that were going to call me on my stuff, that weren't going to just continue to allow me to be who I've been."

This combination of empathy and expectation, coming from a peer, was enough to give her hope.

In 2018, Holdaway graduated from the Other Side Academy's two-year program. She honored the sobriety requirements and completed vocational training. She said the rigid structure and unrelenting accountability pushed her to develop the stamina and confidence to reenter society.

Now, Holdaway is a coach at the Other Side Village facility in Murray, where she helps Utah's chronically homeless — those who have been on the streets for at least a year with mental illness or drug addiction — to break habits and develop behaviors that will allow them to change, heal and become someone new.

"It's not about just feeding somebody, giving them housing," Holdaway said in an interview with Deseret News. "You need to teach them and give them opportunities to learn how to be a decent person."

This is the lesson Holdaway and the team at the Other Side Village believe state lawmakers immersed in homeless policy this legislative session need to take to heart: Housing first doesn't work. "Human first" does.

What are lawmakers doing to address homelessness in 2025?

But before state lawmakers' fulfill their vision of creating a "transformative" central campus, patterned after Other Side Village's model of peer mentorship, they need to cut themselves off from the unsuccessful approaches of the past, according to Rep. Tyler Clancy, R-Provo.

"The campus is important, but we need to be deliberate. We need to learn from our mistakes," Clancy said. "A campus has to be different than a shelter, and it has to be managed as such."

As the lawmaker spearheading homeless policy for the House majority, Clancy has outlined a focus on consistent enforcement of local anti-camping ordinances and a determination to make a hard break with the state's lingering housing-first approach to homelessness.

On Friday, Clancy unveiled his comprehensive homelessness bill for the session, HB329, Homeless Services Amendments.

The bill would:

• Require homeless shelters to maintain a zero-tolerance policy for drug use, possession or distribution.
• Enhance penalties for drug offenses in homeless shelters.
• Ensure that licenses for homeless shelters prioritize the public safety of surrounding areas.
• Require shelter cities to prohibit unsanctioned camping in line with state code.
• Integrate the Know-by-Name caseworker program into the state's Homeless Management Information System.
• Codify the pathway to human thriving unanimously adopted by the Utah Homeless Services Board earlier this year.
• Provide clearer definitions for state government to measure their success in addressing chronic homelessness.

Other proposals expected this session would ban syringe exchange programs, enhance penalties for repeat offenders of hard drug possession, and ensure that first responders to overdoses are able to offer treatment resources right away.

To solve homelessness, instead of incentivizing it, Clancy believes lawmakers must change their perspective from the city on up to the federal government.

Clancy has introduced a resolution calling on federal agencies overseeing homelessness to rescind their housing-first policy mandates and to give states more flexibility to administer housing assistance programs with a focus on sobriety and mental health needs.

All these steps are precursors to what Utah's top experts on homeless policy describe as the backbone of the state's reimagined approach to chronic homelessness: a sprawling 30 acre, 1,200-bed campus, with different residence tiers, ranging from low-barrier entry shelters to high-demand programs, with access to mental health resources, drug treatment and life coaching.

What will the new campus shelter look like?

The substance of what goes on at the shelter, will matter much more than size or location, said James Behunin, the House appointee to the Utah Homeless Services Board.

"We are not in the business of just building stuff," Behunin said. "We are going to stop warehousing these folks; we are going to be more focused on transforming lives."

To be successful, the campus would need buy-in from local leaders, the philanthropic community and outside organizations, like the Other Side Village, which would ideally have a presence on site, Behunin said.

But first it needs somewhere to go.

Over the last few months, State Homeless Coordinator Wayne Niederhauser has scoured Salt Lake County, Davis County and Utah County in search of sites he can present before the newly assembled board.

The board has run into dozens of dead ends, Behunin said, whether it be from the proposals being too far away, too controversial or too expensive.

Niederhauser and Behunin expect the $25 million legislators appropriated last year for the campus will be mostly spent on just buying the dirt under the foundation.

Lawmakers continue to put pressure on the board to have at least an emergency shelter ready by the fall, Behunin said. But that would be a tough ask even if a property was secured immediately.

The board recently received positive responses from the owners of two adjacent agricultural properties that together would fall into the 20-30 acre range that board members are aiming for, Behunin said.

Until a location is identified, Niederhauser and Behunin have said they will hold off on big funding requests to the Legislature. But eventually, if the campus is to look like successful models in San Antonio, Texas, and Reno, Nevada, then it will require roughly $25 million in ongoing funds, Behunin said.

On Tuesday, Senate Budget Chairman Jerry Stevenson, R-Layton, said, "We don't build campuses in one year. That's a process."

As the Legislature prepares to spend more money on homelessness programs in coming years, Holdaway, and her fellow Other Side Village Coaches, Marci Slaugh and Rob Myrick, cautioned lawmakers to remember: It's not the comfort of a home that puts an end to homelessness.

By 15, Myrick was addicted to heroin and engaged in street crime. One night he would sleep on a friend's couch, the next in a car, the next on a sidewalk. But it wasn't the promise of shelter that pulled him up and out of his circumstances, Myrick said. It was community — a community that demanded everything from him and gave him role models in return.

"I never heard a story of somebody who got their life together when I was on the streets. You never saw somebody come back to your same neighborhood who was clean and sober and reinvented themselves," Myrick said. "So, you walk in here, and see that, and all of a sudden there's possibility."

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