Mayor rescinds offer to place homeless shelter in Draper after push-back from residents

[accadacca]

https://www.google.com/amp/fox13now....in-draper/amp/

[Iceaxe]

Draper mayor = total dumbass

He committed political suicide.

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[rockgremlin]

Backpedal, backpedal, backpedal...

"Give us your homeless, your needy, your........er....nevermind"


Personally, I think the actions of the draper residents was shameful. At the end some homeless guy got up to plead his case and everyone booed him off the stage.

[double moo]

channel 2 actually had Axe's ugly mug on for a word...

[accadacca]

Wow...

[Iceaxe]

Take a trip to The Road Home in downtown SLC and you will know why no one wants this magnet for drugs, violence and crime in their neighborhood.

#NotInMyNeighborhood

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[tallsteve]

Take a trip to The Road Home in downtown SLC and you will know why no one wants this magnet for drugs, violence and crime in their neighborhood.

Yup. I rarely go downtown anymore. I had to attend a multi-day business conference at the Salt Palace a couple of weeks ago. I decided to ride Front Runner then Trax to get there. I was shocked at the homeless population the transit route passed on the way. I honestly had no idea. Scary looking and acting people. In the 3 days I rode the transit system I was panhandled more times than I can recall, solicited twice (the one obviously meth addicted woman got really mad when I told her I wasn't interested. So much so that I thought she was going to attack me) and saw drug paraphernalia on the floor of Trax. The temps were cold those days. Trax was full (because it's free to ride downtown) of homeless people who just hop on board and ride the circuit because it's heated and a way for them to get warm. I felt sorry for them. At the same time though, Trax was jammed with them. I made the comment to my co-worker that Trax is more of a mobile heating shack than a transit system.

[Iceaxe]

My kids have been calling Trax a rolling homeless shelter for years.

[Goat]

Just to go off of what Steve pointed at, a problem that is all too often ignored is the extreme rate of mental illness among the homeless population. These are the "scary people" on Trax that harass, threaten, and at times attack other passengers.

It's not just a rolling homeless shelter, it's the county's low-income mental hospital.

[accadacca]

South Central Salt Lake is pissed too. Bringing the ghetto the the ghetto.

http://kutv.com/news/local/mayor-mca...outside-of-slc

[hank moon]

I would not be surprised if the ATL overpass-collapse fire turns out to have been started by "the homeless".

[Scott P]

#NotInMyNeighborhood

OK, but what is the solution? Shoot all the homeless?

Personally, I think that we should bring back the CCC, but it won't entirely solve the problems.

[Brian in SLC]

OK, but what is the solution? Shoot all the homeless?

[jman]

Wow...

Paid Protestors... :P


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[DiscGo]

OK, but what is the solution? Shoot all the homeless?

I think the solution is to provide more mental health support. People who are sharp and healthy seldom remain homeless. It is usually those who struggle with something else like drug addiction or mental health. .

Example: We went and played discgolf on Thanksgiving. I walked up to a homeless man to offer him money for a nice meal and he pulled out a knife and was very threatening to me. He didn't want my money, he didn't seem capable of speech. He just wanted me gone.

[Iceaxe]

OK, but what is the solution? Shoot all the homeless?

I can guarantee you 100% the solution is not to take one huge problem (Closing The Road Home) and spreading it out to create a bunch of small problems.

Bottom line is we need to improve our mental health services. Which coincidently is the same solution the NRA advocates for fixing many of our gun violence problems.

[phatch]

Where ever you put a shelter, it becomes an attractive nuisance to whatever is around it.

Homelessness is a chronic problem because the people who are homeless aren't proactively solving their problem, they're living with it--as a generalization. Certainly some do solve it alone or with the aids in place. So for the most part, it's something we have to continue to live with no matter what solution we choose. If we want to avoid the concentration issues that our current service system creates, then distribution is the other option. But it should be a very fine grained solution. Distribute them at the family level or two or three to a location. One per apartment building maybe by code for low income housing and such.

Tons of push back because then its in everyone's backyard, not just a few. But it solves the problems that our concentrated system creates. And will create it's own problems for access to services and similar.

[uintafly]

Draper residents went nuts when a DI was slated to go in and yet the mayor thought his folks would accept a women and children shelter??? He must be out of touch or was somehow set up to make bank if the deal went through. I guess there is a small chance that he felt obligated to help his fellow man but as a politician I can't give him the benefit of the doubt. It is a tough situation, there are places around Rio Grand that are full on shanty towns. Many of which seem to be mainly 18-45 year old able bodied people and the thought of my tax dollars going to them is a tough pill to swallow and I certainly don't want a shelter down the street from my house, but what do you do about the people with legitimate mental health issues?

Quick question for LDS people on the board. Not a member myself so I went skiing during conference, but a coworker of mine said that he felt more than a few of the speeches seemed to be aimed at Draper, and the need for people to be empathetic and take care of the poor. Any truth to what he got out of things?

[devo_stevo]

Yeah, I thought it was strange that Draper even put their hat in that ring when it happened. I haven't spent a ton of time there, but it doesn't strike me as the place to welcome a bunch of homeless people in with open arms.

As for the talks in conference, I don't know. I didn't get that out of it, but we often hear what we want to hear when listening. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some talks that did in fact mean to direct their words at Draper and the current situation. There were a couple of talks at the conference last October regarding refugees that I thought were pretty directly tied to the humanitarian crisis in the middle east. So I would guess that they would certainly address homelessness in Salt Lake.

As for the problems in Salt Lake, I agree with uintafly. I see lots of able bodied people that could probably get up and get a job and pay rent and live like the rest of the adults if they wanted to, but there is also a real problem with mental illness that I'm not sure how to address. It's a tough decision to make, for sure and I don't pretend to know enough about it to tell anyone how to handle it.

[rockgremlin]

I cringe every time someone says "The homeless just need to get a job and stop leeching off society!"

I know of exactly ZERO employers that are overly excited to hire someone who lives in a cardboard box under the freeway exit ramp, who hasn't bathed in three months, can't afford deodorant or soap, and have no means of transportation.

Quit claiming they just need to get jobs. Our society is set up to ensure an almost 100% failure rate for the homeless. Saying their problem is due to lack of initiative or motivation only absolves us of responsibility, and serves to sooth a guilty conscience.

Nobody aspires to be homeless. Nobody enjoys being homeless. But they're homeless due to a variety of reasons - not just personal. It's a personal as well as societal problem - and as such, society ought to contribute to a viable solution.