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The Great Salt Lake Shelter Shell Game - Part 2
As detailed in The Great Salt Lake Shelter Shell Game part 1, this all kicked off when the multibillion-dollar real estate corporation Vestar purchased Utah’s Gateway shopping mall in early 2017. The Gateway, valued at close to $400 million, has a better than optimal location, just across the street to the east is the Vivint arena, home of Utah’s NBA team, the Utah Jazz. Bracketed on two sides by commuter train platforms, the mall is two blocks from Salt Lake’s largest ground transportation hub and just 11 minutes from the airport.
Directly across the street to the south, however, was Salt Lake City’s homeless shelter. Even though crime statistics clearly showed that the gateway was in no way impacted by the denizens of the shelter, it didn’t take much of an analyst to figure out that the ground beneath their feet had become too valuable to countenance their continued presence.
They had to go.
A secret plan was hatched to expedite their removal, and somehow, the powers that be came up with a bizarre plan to replace a shelter with a capacity for 1,100 people with 3 much smaller buildings that had a combined capacity for only 700.
That’s 400 short, but hey, who’s counting? The new shelters also couldn’t be called shelters, bad PR, they were called “Resource Centers.” There was one small…