Salt Lake City Discovers that it can’t just Hide the Homeless

It all kicked off when the multibillion dollar real-estate corporation Vestar acquired Utah’s Gateway shopping mall in 2016. Vestar had ambitious plans for the shopping mall and the surrounding area, to include an 8-story luxury hotel. Originally costing $375 million, the mall has a better than optimal location. It’s just across the street to the west from the Vivint Smart Home arena, home of Utah’s NBA team the Jazz. Bracketed on two sides by commuter train platforms, it’s also just two blocks from Salt Lake’s largest ground transportation hub and just 10 minutes away from the airport.

Directly across the street to the south from all this was Salt Lake City’s homeless shelter. Even though crime statistics clearly showed that the Gateway was rarely impacted by the residents of the shelter, it didn’t take much of an analyst to figure out that the ground beneath their feet was becoming too valuable to countenance their continued presence.

There was money to be made, lots of it, and the homeless were in the way.

There had been talk about retiring the downtown shelter before, but after Vestar’s ambitious plans for the Gateway area began to be implemented, things moved more quickly. The first plan the public heard about was a plan to have the shelter replaced with 4 smaller facilities. This…