Utah is currently on the verge of reviving a particularly sordid chapter of U.S. history. Last September, the state, led by Republican Governor Spencer Cox, made a surprise announcement that it planned to build a massive 1,300-bed facility on the outskirts of Salt Lake City intended for people experiencing homelessness. If approved, the facility would open in 2027.
Immediately, the plan raised several red flags for local and national advocates: The facility has been referred to by Randy Shumway, chair of the Utah Homeless Services Board, as an “accountability center,” and would reserve 25 percent of its total beds for civil commitment patients, who would be unable to leave the center voluntarily.
The facility would be one of the largest of its kind in the country. In Utah, no shelter currently has more than 300 beds, and Salt Lake City ordinance prohibits shelters from hosting more than 200 people per night. The proposed location for the facility is a sixteen-acre parcel of land about eight miles from the urban core of Salt Lake City, which, due to its remote nature, offers few nearby employment and transportation options. Locals have also voiced concerns about mosquito infestations in the area and the risks they may pose to those who may eventually be housed at the facility.
Utah Office of Homeless Services
A conceptual rendering of Utah’s proposed ‘homeless campus.’
But while the official paperwork and contracts necessary to develop the facility have yet to be signed, the plan is swinging into motion. Its funding scheme is particularly alarming: Cox has proposed using more than $25 million to pay for the approximately $75 million campus, leaving cause for concern among some service providers that the state is seeking to reduce funding for existing services to direct funds for imprisoning and institutionalizing people experiencing homelessness.
“I just don’t share the belief that incarceration is the secret pathway out of homelessness,” Bill Tibbitts, deputy executive director of Crossroads Urban Center in Salt Lake City, tells The Progressive. “If it were, we would not see so many people being released from jails and prisons to shelters.”
The facility plan has come at a time when homelessness is rising across Utah, and the country as a whole. According to the latest snapshot data, more than 4,500 people in Utah experienced unsheltered homelessness last year, an 18 percent increase from 2024. The number of chronically homeless jumped 36 percent over the same period, from 906 to more than 1,200. Meanwhile, home prices and rents in Utah have skyrocketed since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in up to 47 percent of renters in Utah being “cost burdened,” meaning they pay more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities. Amid the rising cost of living, members of cost-burdened households are at the greatest risk of becoming unhoused.
As rates of homelessness surge across Utah, Cox and other state officials have taken a new approach to homelessness policy. In October, Cox appointed state Representative Tyler Clancy, who is also a police detective in Provo, as state homeless coordinator following the retirement of the previous coordinator, former Utah Senate President Wayne Niederhauser. Nick Coleman, assistant state homeless coordinator, was the interim coordinator while Clancy served out his term in the state legislature. The two men, who are both in their late twenties, have signaled an intention to shift away from Housing First policies, which prioritize securing permanent housing for unhoused individuals, to Treatment First options. “Compassion without accountability doesn’t last,” Coleman told Deseret News in February.
Utah’s turn has alarmed experts, advocates, lawmakers, and community members alike. “The solution to homelessness is not punishing people for being poor in a country that has no affordable housing,” Jesse Rabinowitz, campaign and communications director for the National Homelessness Law Center, tells The Progressive. “It’s making sure that everybody has a safe place to live. But Utah is not interested in that. Utah is only interested in enacting this Trumpian vision of the world, where people are put into detention camps and removed from society when they aren’t able to pay rent.”
Institutionalizing and jailing people experiencing homelessness is not a new concept in the United States. It was once common to use civil commitment to send unhoused people to mental institutions, where abuse and mistreatment were rampant. In the 1970s, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the practice was a “massive curtailment of liberty.” After that, law enforcement became the primary tool for addressing homelessness—a practice that has only accelerated with the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which overturned a precedent requiring cities to prove they have adequate shelter space for people who are homeless before police act punitively against people sleeping outside. Since the ruling, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reports, more than 300 bills have been introduced to create new laws criminalizing homelessness.
The idea of institutionalizing unhoused people has regained favor, thanks in part to the efforts of the Trump Administration and rightwing influencers. In July 2025, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order directing cities to treat homelessness like a mental health and law enforcement issue rather than a housing problem.
That order not only served as the impetus for the proposed Utah homeless campus, but has also helped usher in a burgeoning “accountability era” for housing assistance and social services models. Between 2005 and 2015, Utah cut its chronic homeless population by roughly 91 percent using a housing-first model, but the state has more recently turned away from that model, arguing that housing alone is insufficient to address homelessness. The Trump Administration is now encouraging a sharp pivot away from these types of programs in favor of approaches that, per Trump’s Executive Order, focus on “treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency.”
“Accountability” has similarly become a buzzword used by the Trump Administration to bully its political opponents for their support of Housing First and other compassionate solutions to homelessness. Officials, including the President himself, have railed against alleged social services fraud in Democratic states such as California and Minnesota, and plan to create an anti-fraud task force led by Vice President JD Vance to target California. This messaging is being amplified by popular rightwing influencers like Nick Shirley, who posted a now-viral YouTube video in December alleging that he’d discovered more than $110 million in social services fraud in one afternoon while walking around Minneapolis, Minnesota—a claim that was swiftly debunked by state investigators.
Simultaneously, the Trump Administration has proposed significant policy changes to homeless services funding. In November, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) attempted to eliminate funding for Housing First programs designed to get unhoused people treatment and permanent housing, significantly reduce local expenditures on permanent supportive housing, and increase work and substance abuse treatment programs. Though a federal judge in Rhode Island temporarily halted the changes in December, HUD has signaled that it will continue trying to push these changes through.
Meanwhile, homelessness continues to grow across the country. Between 2023 and 2024, the unhoused population spiked by 18 percent, to a total of more than 771,000 nationwide. Experts at the National Alliance to End Homelessness expect that total to continue increasing as the rising cost of living, and particularly of housing, pushes many low-income households to the brink.
Some Democrats in Congress have taken steps to prevent federal funding from going to the “accountability center” in Utah, which has a proposed total state budget of $30.8 billion. In late January, Democratic Representatives Maxwell Frost of Florida, Delia Ramirez of Illinois, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Pramila Jayapal of Washington, and Yassamin Ansari of Arizona sent a letter to HUD demanding that the agency withhold funding to support Utah’s “hostile approach into forced detention.”
“This would be a hostile misuse of taxpayer funding reallocating funds meant for important health care and housing services that have proven to work,” the letter reads in part.
Simultaneously, Democrats in the Utah state legislature have introduced legislation that would require the homeless campus to undergo a comprehensive planning process before any construction can proceed. A bill sponsored by state Senator Luz Escamilla and state Representative Sandra Hollins would require state officials to create a mosquito abatement plan, clearly define the services offered at the center, and outline accountability measures for actions at the center, all of which are currently absent from the proposed legislation.
“You would think if they are going to be opening such an expensive facility, that we would have this kind of comprehensive plan in place,” Escamilla said during a hearing of the Utah Senate Economic Development and Workforce Services Committee on February 17.
A bill introduced earlier this year would require the state’s Homeless Services Board, which will oversee the construction and operation of the campus, to appoint a board member who lives within five miles of the site, and another bill would give property owners near the facility a 50 percent tax break on their property taxes.
The state’s GOP has also raised questions about the facility. The top Republican in Utah’s House of Representatives, Majority Leader Casey Snider, has introduced a bill to block the campus from being built over its potential environmental impacts on the Great Salt Lake, which is less than twenty miles away from the facility, while also repealing an eminent domain provision that allowed Salt Lake City to enter into the contract to sell the land to the state in the first place.
“We had some long-term discussions about what we were going to do permanently around the Great Salt Lake, and there were some exchanges and commitments made,” Snider told Utah News Dispatch in February. “Unfortunately, those haven’t been followed through at that level, [the] local level.”
Republican Senate Budget Chair Jerry Stevenson told Utah News Dispatch that it’s still “too early” to know whether state lawmakers have any appetite for chipping in on the estimated $35 million per year that would be required to operate the facility, should it be constructed. Some state lawmakers, he said, want to focus on sending “high utilizers” of the state’s criminal justice system to the campus. The outlet reported that 971 people in Utah were arrested an average of eleven times last year, though not everyone in that sample was unhoused.
National advocates have also launched a campaign to push back against the proposed campus. Led by the National Homelessness Law Center and the ACLU, the group includes federal lawmakers such as Frost and Ramirez, as well as local advocates from across the country who share concerns that a similar campus may someday appear in their area.
“We need to protect the Constitutional rights of all individuals, regardless of their housing status. Any plans that impact our unsheltered communities must respect their civil liberties and dignity,” Jason Groth, legal director for ACLU of Utah, said in a press release. “Internment of people facing homelessness does neither.”
Neighbors in Salt Lake City’s Northpoint community, where the proposed facility would be located, have also pushed back by circulating a petition to stop the plan.
“We recognize Utah’s urgent need for expanded homeless services and support effectively assisting individuals experiencing homelessness with dignity and compassion,” the petition reads. “However, the proposed campus would bring new safety, environmental, health, and infrastructure challenges to an area unequipped for them, placing an unfair burden on one neighborhood to absorb a statewide issue.”
To advocates like Rabinowitz at the National Homelessness Law Center, the stakes in the fight couldn’t be higher.
“The folks pushing this detention model and these anti-homeless laws say that we need a new approach, but their approach isn’t a new one. It’s actually the oldest one there is,” Rabinowitz says. “We used to have big asylums in this country; we used to do housing last and require people to jump through all of these impossible hoops. As a country, we don’t do those things anymore, because they were both immoral and just didn’t work. Their goal is not to make a housing system that works. Their goal is to use homeless people to further their hold on power.”