So, Utah decided to just give the homeless places to live. The results are what anyone with sense, or who has followed the topic would expect:
Utah’s Housing First program cost between $10,000 and $12,000 per person, about half of the $20,000 it cost to treat and care for homeless people on the street.
Imagine that.
This is a reprint from 2015, but I think it makes an important point worth repeating, especially for all the new readers since then.
The right thing to do is almost always cheaper and gives better results, at least if the welfare of people is your concern.
If people are poor, give them money. If people don’t have a house, get them a house. If people are sick, get them health care.
The fact is, though, that you have to want to do the right thing. People tend to get down on the Church of Latter Day Saints, but for all their issues, I’ve always had a soft spot for them because I’ve heard many stories like this:
The church donated all of this,” Bate says. “Before we opened up, volunteers from the local Mormon ward came over and assembled all the furniture. It was overwhelming. For the first several years we were open, the LDS church made weekly food deliveries—everything from meat to butter and cheese. It wasn’t just dried beans—it was good stuff.” (The Utah Food Bank now makes weekly deliveries.)
I ask him if this is why the programs work so well in Utah—because of church donations.
“If the LDS church was not into it, the money would be missed, for sure,” he says, “but it’s church leadership that’s immensely important. If the word gets out that the church is behind something, it removes a lot of barriers.”…
….
“Why do you think they do it?” I ask(my emphasis)
“Oh,” he says, “I think they believe all that stuff in the New Testament about helping the poor. That’s kind of crazy for a religion, I know, but I think they take it quite seriously.”
A major driver of the social welfare movement in the United States was the social gospel. The ending of sweatshops, the huge work programs of the 30s, the provision of Medicare and Social Security was driven in large part by Christian crusaders who believed that what they did to the poor, they did to Jesus.
You have to want to do the right thing.
This is just as true when dealing with matters like inequality. FDR and the politicians of the 50s ran marginal tax rates for high earners at 90% or so because they, and the American people, genuinely believed that no one should have that much money. They believed that it was earned by the efforts of other people: a rich person is someone who gets rich on other people’s work, with very rare exceptions, and even they get rich because of the society they are in. (For a complete explanation of that, something most people refuse to understand, read “It’s Not Your Money.”)
Ethics and mores; belief, is why people do things. It doesn’t exactly come before material circumstances (the two influence each other, with material circumstances, including technology, determining a range of possibilities), but within what is possible, belief in what we should do determines what we actually do.
In the world today we have the resources not just to feed everyone, but to give them a decent life, with education, entertainment, and housing that is warm in the winter and at least not unbearable in the summer. We can cloth everyone well. We have had the ability to do this for at least a hundred years or so, in theory, we’ve had it in practice since the recovery from World War II.
To do so, however, we must believe that we should, and we must be willing to act on that belief. There will be sacrifices (a lot fewer billionaires, a lot less McMansions), but in the end even most of those who complain would be objectively better off, because inequality is robustly associated with worse health and less happiness, even for those who are the richest. The top .01%, if they were still the top .01% but had far less money and power, would be happier and healthier in such a world.
As such, the battleground of belief; of ideology, is as important as that of technology. It is belief, mediated by power and turned into behaviour, which determines what actually happens in this world.
Dan Lynch
The original Mormon communities were essentially communist, planned economies. Not at all democratic, but communal, and directed by fiat, not by the invisible hand of the market. There is still a strong church welfare program.
I think their religion is awful and the church itself has always been corrupt, but at the same time some Mormons are very nice people, and Mormon communities tend to be “high trust” & low crime — though not welcoming to outsiders. Mormons are actually a minority in Utah, and particularly SLC, but they are a majority in many small towns in the West, and that’s where you will find the darker side of Mormon culture — very intolerant, cliquish, and often a lot of corruption behind the scenes.
StewartM
If we housed the homeless, then a ‘trickle up’ effect would be we’d also have to make housing really cheap for those who aren’t homeless, because if they were, they’d get free housing too.
Can you imagine how this effect might ripple upwards? if housing became much cheaper? What would all those private equity firms who bought up homes and condos and apartments and held them off the market do then?? Hmm? *
(For those not paying attention, a goal of capitalism has always been to take things once free or low-cost and make them expensive, hence, the capitalist can’t make profit off of them).
* What would they do? Knowing these sociopaths, they’d burn them to the ground out of spite rather than to dump them below-cost or give them away, even as a tax write-off. Just like restaurant owners throw away perfectly good leftover food rather than donate it to the Salvation Army and other charities.
As a college student, working at a sandwich shop, we employees would take any call-in orders that were made but the callers never showed up to pick up, and although we were supposed to throw these away, we’d quietly give them away.
Bob
I agree. We have the means to provide everyone with the stuff they need. But how many regular plebs even would you find who support the idea? And among the rich, who stole everything?
All of human culture and psyche needs reprogramming.
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Can you imagine how this effect might ripple upwards? if housing became much cheaper? What would all those private equity firms who bought up homes and condos and apartments and held them off the market do then?? Hmm? *
Stewart, retirees are increasingly reliant on the awesome returns generated by these awesome private equity firms. Just ask Tim Walz. He’s a big fan. Don’t rain on their parade. Renters should be paying every last dime they have to retirees as should customers of what was formerly Minnesota Power.
Quite a conundrum, isn’t it? Making retirees complicit in their destruction and everyone’s destruction by virtue of their pension.
https://www.golocalprov.com/news/walz-as-chairman-of-minnesota-pension-system-agreed-to-be-kept-in-the-dark
Minnesota was one of the first state’s to embrace private equity for investment opportunities for its citizen’s pensions after the Great Recession of 2008. Of course, there is controversy about fees and a scandal surrounding that but they still boast that private equity has afforded Minnesota pensioners a 17% return.
The CPP, Canadian Pension Plan, wants in on that action too so it has invested in Minnesota amongst many other things. Minnesotans can pay higher energy rates so Canadian pensioners can realize record returns on their pension investments.
It’s all so cannibalizing, no?
https://cubminnesota.org/blackrock-canadian-pension-plan-to-co-own-minnesota-power-is-that-a-good-thing
David
A pilot program to provide a guaranteed monthly income to youth at risk looks promising. At least some skeptics of the idea are are now surprised at this outcome. The youth (18 to 24 years of age) and homeless, are largely spending their money on such things as rent for an apartment they can now afford, to being able to pay the tuition needed to enroll in trade school or university.
https://www.thecity.nyc/2026/01/20/cash-for-care-covenant-house-city-council-homeless-youth-income-experiment/
Katrina Katrinka
@ianwelsh.net
Ian, you've gotta update your data.
#UTpol went MAGA when the GOP did, and the legislature decided to punish the poor and homeless at every opportunity instead of help them. We've flushed millions away breaking up homeless camps and traumatizing and robbing homeless people then demanding they just stop being poor.
We used to have a big homeless center downtown. Developers envied the space, so we tore it down and built 4 smaller sites with fewer total beds. People died outside in the cold and heat. Now, the legislature want to build a new big homeless jail out by the state jail, away from service providers. It's just their need to control and punish.
https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/01/22/homelessness-utah-how-service/
mago
Until I can open the link, which I can’t right now, I can only comment provisionally.
Salt Lake City built a homeless shelter on the toxic salt flats far from the city and public transportation. It’s a taxpayer funded concentration camp run by a for profit prison corporation. The incarcerated homeless inmates have to work for their stay and have no freedom of movement. To characterize this as benign is a sick and twisted joke. But again, maybe the Mother Jones article was speaking to something else.
On another note, I was born and raised in Mormon country with Mormon ancestors and that whole cultural thing. I know the history and the ideology and was aware of it from a young age. I’ll refrain from commenting on it beyond saying I know more about the pros and cons and in betweens than outsiders do. I don’t talk about it beyond what I just said, although I could write a book, which would go unread.
Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, assassinations and massacres. Omigod.
To think that there’s benign intentions regarding the homeless situation in Utah is folly. Ready to be proven wrong.
JR
Been thinking a lot lately about this Steinbeck quote.
“It has always seemed strange to me… the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
John Steinbeck