| CITYWEEKLY.NET |
| NEWS | A&E | DINING | CINEMA | MUSIC |
| CITY WEEKLY |
12 | SEPTEMBER 19, 2019
Tai Chi with the homeless at Pioneer Park. and women, opens this month. The 300-bed men’s facility at 3380 S. 1000 West in South Salt Lake is expected to open some time in October. To change with the times, some providers have been branching out. Fourth Street Clinic, a community health center located across from Pioneer Park, recently invested in a custom-built mobile clinic that can provide checkups, hepatitis C treatments and other health care services for the clinic’s homeless client base. The mobile unit is 45 feet long, with five-inch-thick walls, a checkup room and a colorful exterior paint job of the Salt Lake skyline. It’s basically the rock ’n’ roll tour bus of mobile clinics. According to Laura Michalski, Fourth Street Clinic CEO, the mobile unit will cost half a million dollars per year to operate, with the first year covered by the state. But this doesn’t mean the facility is moving out of downtown for good. The clinic has invested heavily in its downtown property, including building a four-chair dental clinic on site that opened in 2014. The clinic owns the property and about 50% of its budget comes from a branch of the U.S. Deptartment of Health and Human Services—federal backing that Michalski says will give the clinic leverage to resist any potential efforts to push it out of downtown, like what happened with The Road Home. Still, as a community health center specifically designed to serve the homeless, Michalski says they’ll be watching closely to see how they can best serve clients. “We do an annual needs assessment to look at, ‘Do we have the patient numbers that would warrant us staying here?’ We’re required by the federal government to do this,” she says. “If we see a drop in numbers, we need to be able to discuss that and explain why. What are we doing to do outreach? Is this the best location? … The reality is, we really need to look at the community that we’re serving.”
FULFILLING A NEED Down the street from Fourth Street Clinic, at the St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen, power drills wheeze and the smell of fresh paint hangs in the air as contractors hustle to finish a remodel. CCS, sponsored by the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, has a big presence among vulnerable communities in Utah: It’s one of two organizations responsible for resettling refugees into new
The future site of Catholic Community Services’ culinary arts training program.
homes around the state, and it also provides homeless services in the Rio Grande neighborhood. According to Randy Chappell, the organization’s associate director of homeless services, CCS currently serves more than 700 hot meals a day to people who stop by the dining hall for lunch and dinner. That number is about to double, with CCS now operating the Gail Miller Resource Center and gearing up to make daily deliveries of spaghetti and meatballs, cheeseburgers and other dishes to all three new service centers. Staff has spent the past four months overseeing construction to expand its kitchen, allowing them to cook the meals they’ll deliver, and also making room for the Good Samaritan program to operate out of the space. But that’s not all. CCS is also making plans to launch the St. Vincent’s Kitchen Academy, a 12-week culinary arts training program for homeless individuals to help them develop useful skills and find employment. Developed in partnership with the Catalyst Kitchen, a national program based in Seattle, CCS’ cooking school will include 10 weeks studying in the kitchen and two more weeks doing a residency at local restaurants, with a case manager following up with each student for a year. “They’ll have chef outfits,” Chappell boasts. Chappell expects to see fewer homeless folks around Rio Grande with the new service centers, but he and CCS spokesperson Danielle Stamos still see a need for a dining hall where anyone—from a man camping out on the street to a low-income family hoping to save some cash—can get a free meal, no questions asked. “I think we know our numbers will drop, but I think there will still be enough around that it’ll make it worth it,” Chappell says.
HELP YOURSELF The American Dream is a story of hard work and winning; but what about the ones who end up at the bottom? Jia Tolentino, a staff writer at The New Yorker, argues in her new book, Trick Mirror, that the parameters for economic survival in America are getting more and more extreme in this age of rapid expansion, rising prices and relentless tech reinvention. She’s just one of many critics of a system that to many seems less dreamy by the day. At the Crossroads Urban Center, Jessica Roadman sees economic instability as a slippery
slope, with the rock-bottom struggles of homelessness just one symptom of a systemic problem. “We have this narrative that’s like, ‘Pull yourself up by your bootstraps!’ We’re such an individualistic culture that we forget that there’s so much else at play,” Roadman says. “One thing that I think is hopeful—it’s sort of a dark hope—but as more and more people feel that that narrative doesn’t make sense anymore, change is going to be forced. We’re losing the middle class. There are fewer and fewer people who are in their life experiencing home ownership … There’s a point where people are getting fed up with having to work four or five jobs and barely get by.” Brian Jones, a Road Home resident who grew up in Utah, says it’s a bit nerve-wracking to think about how the system will change as he gets ready to leave the downtown shelter and move to one of the new service centers. If he can’t get in a steady-enough financial position in time to move into affordable housing, he’s expecting to relocate to the as-yet-unopened new facility in South Salt Lake. He wonders what kind of impact this will have on his day-to-day schedule: He currently works concessions part-time at the Vivint Smart Home Arena, just up the street from The Road Home. The South Salt Lake center, on the other hand, is 45 minutes away on public transportation. The closest “amenity” down there is the Salt Lake County Metro Jail, a half-mile walk from the new service center. “That’ll make it easier on the police, I guess,” Jones jokes, as he rests up on a recent afternoon at the Weigand Homeless Resource Center—a gated community space run by Catholic Community Services near The Road Home. Despite those concerns, Jones was feeling good about the services he’s been able to access locally. He looks forward to seeing some of the same staff at The Road Home working at the new centers, and he has a positive outlook, even in his tenuous position. If he were living back on the streets, everything could fall apart. But he knows that help is out there if he needs it. “It’s all about helping yourself, too. You gotta understand that they can only offer you stuff—you have to actually ask for it,” he says. “There’s people here who are willing to help you. You just need to be willing to be helped.” CW