February 6, 2026
Nate Crippes / Public Affairs Supervising Attorney
ncrippes@disabilitylawcenter.org
Andrew Riggle / Public Policy Advocate
ariggle@disabilitylawcenter.org
(801) 363-1347 / (800) 662-9080
disabilitylawcenter.org
The Disability Law Center (DLC) is Utah’s designated Protection and Advocacy Agency (P&A). Our mission is to enforce and advance the legal rights, opportunities, and choices of Utahns with disabilities, which includes those with mental illness and those with substance use disorder who are in recovery. In federal fiscal year 2025, 19% of the nearly 4,000 calls for help the DLC received involved possible housing discrimination. On top of this, over 17% of the total came from persons with a mental health need. Their questions ranged from housing to education to employment to access to places, services, and/or benefits to the health and safety of facilities. The agency’s individual and systemic work is also guided by the Board of Trustees and our Protection and Advocacy for Individuals with Mental Illness Advisory Council.
Given the rising cost of living, it should be no surprise Utah’s unsheltered point-in-time count jumped by 18% this year. The Disability Law Center understands the state’s desire to address the “crisis.” However, especially in a tight budget year, the projected $75 million construction and $34 million annual operational cost of a centralized campus is not the answer. Utah cannot afford to isolate and institutionalize a couple thousand of its poorest and most vulnerable residents. If it does, there will likely be little left for the safe and affordable housing or the services and supports so desperately needed to keep Utahns in their homes or communities.
We appreciate the State’s desire to help individuals who are experiencing homelessness in a caring and compassionate way. We agree that it is not a reflection of Utah’s values to allow people to linger without the help and supportive services they need to lead independents lives. We also wish to emphasize that homeless services do not always equate with services for those experiencing severe and persistent mental illness (SMI). While there may be overlaps in these populations, not all individuals with SMI in need of services are homeless and not all individuals experiencing homelessness are diagnosed with a SMI. We believe dedicating 300 beds for civil commitment in the proposed homeless campus will not help the state achieve its goals to meaningfully assist Utahns with SMI.
Over the last several years our office has spent many hours meeting individuals with SMI and learning about the services available to support them. Our focus has been on individuals living in Salt Lake County. We have found that there are major gaps in the system that, if filled, would support individuals with SMI to be more self-supporting and integrated into the community. For example, to gain access to an assertive community treatment team (ACT) people are generally required to live in a large boarding home—a large residential facility that only houses individuals with SMI. These boarding homes do not help people learn how to maintain a home, budget, or access the community. Typically, individuals have no planned activities and spend time walking the hallways or sitting outside rather than working on skill building. At most residential providers, there is no pathway for individuals with SMI to move into their own homes or return to living with family members. Moreover, providing wraparound services to people in smaller settings that would allow for greater independence is not something that is meaningfully discussed or enabled. Rather, during our discussions with county officials, it was routinely expressed that these large, expensive facilities would be a lifetime placement.
We have also heard staff at numerous residential settings and county officials assert that people with SMI cannot work. Although employment services are supposed to be part of what an ACT team provides, we have found that, in practice, ACT teams do not assist people with obtaining employment or connecting them to services such as vocational rehabilitation. This is despite the fact that our conversations with individuals often showed a strong desire to return to work. Additionally, although more information is necessary to confirm this, we are concerned vocational rehabilitation may be classifying individuals with SMI as belonging to a category that is currently closed under the agency’s new order of selection. Without help to access employment services, individuals with SMI in Salt Lake County face immense challenges to pursue their employment goals. Overall, we have observed a system in Salt Lake County that is unaware of how many people with SMI need services, a lack of leadership and coordination, and a system that relies heavily on crisis services and costly, large facilities with little in between. Smaller, scattered site settings tend to be less expensive and result in better outcomes for people with disabilities .
Without a service system that helps individuals to stabilize and move to smaller, more integrated settings, or a pathway to help individuals build employment skills that can lead to greater independence, a campus with 300 beds for civil commitments risks becoming a long-term institutional placement. While we recognize the harm experienced by individuals who are homeless, particularly those with mental health disabilities, we have also witnessed the harm caused by institutionalization. Building a large and physically segregated campus without high levels of funding, adequate staffing, frequent inspections, and a plan to transition individuals back to the community, inherently runs the risk that individuals with serious mental illness will experience additional unintended physical and emotional harms.
As the P&A, our agency has also witnessed the physical harm of institutionalization with devasting consequences. This has included physical assaults, such residents having their eyes gouged and teeth broken, sexual assaults, and in some instances death. These harms were all caused by untrained and understaffed institutional facilities that focused on maintaining profits over patient care. There are also emotional harms individuals with disabilities experience because of living in a large, segregated facility. As found by the Supreme Court in Olmstead v. L.C., 527 US 581 (1999), confinement in an institutional setting “severely diminishes everyday life…including family relations, social contacts, work options, economic independence, educational advancement, and cultural enrichment.” We have seen these impacts in our own work, with individuals expressing that they want to achieve more, return to work, and have different housing options but feeling trapped because the County has not invested sufficiently in services like peer support, employment services, and scattered site housing units. While the governor’s recommendations recognize the need to significantly increase shelter capacity once again, they also double down on previous mistakes. There is virtually no mention of housing, let alone affordable housing, and almost no talk of community services or supports.
While policymakers say they are concerned about the homeless, they really mean the chronically homeless, or the 30% or so of unhoused individuals who have a severe mental illness or substance use disorder. Despite this, an assessment outlines several serious deficits in Utah’s behavioral health system, and the state’s 2023 (most recent year available) community treatment and overall penetration rates were 6.1% below the national average. Even so, over the last few years the only answer has been crisis response and making civil commitment easier. Unfortunately, the governor’s recommendations build on this trend by putting homeless Utahns out of sight and mind by placing what could be the only non-family 1,300-bed shelter option far from housing, jobs, schools, shopping, transportation, and people. Similarly, they suggest forcing unhoused Utahns with a severe mental illness or substance use disorder into assisted outpatient treatment or civil commitment.
We want to offer a different perspective on the challenges facing people with SMI in our state, and in particular for those who are homeless. We believe people with psychiatric conditions should have the opportunities to become independent and participate fully in the community. Unfortunately, the viewpoint often taken is that the only way to address these challenges is to continue building large facilities with no way out for the people who live there. It is also possible that this reliance on large facilities and a campus that becomes a long-term placement would violate the State’s obligation under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act to serve individuals with mental health disabilities in the most integrated setting appropriate. There are better, more cost-effective ways to service people with SMI that focus on early intervention, helping people maintain a stable condition, and providing opportunities for individuals to lead self-directed lives. We understand our state is not unique in addressing a large homeless population. But we have the chance to help people with SMI in a different way to stop the cycle of individuals falling in and out of crisis and ending up in the criminal justice and homeless services systems.
We appreciate the State’s attention to this significant problem but urge that all policy solutions should be rooted in an approach that acknowledges the current gaps in the mental health service system, and that seeks to fill them in a way that best supports individuals with SMI to lead lives that are as self-directed and independent as possible. Utahans deserve solutions that lift people up—not lock them away. This campus may sound like progress, but it diverts resources from what truly works: affordable housing, community mental health, and wraparound supports that keep families stable and individuals thriving. Institutionalizing our most vulnerable neighbors will not solve homelessness—it will hide it, at a staggering cost to taxpayers and human dignity. We can choose a better path: invest in housing, expand proven services, and build a system rooted in compassion and evidence. Every Utahn needs a safe place to call home.
We appreciate your willingness to hear our perspective. Should you have any questions, also please do not hesitate to reach out to us. Thank you.