Homeless in Utah

A little boy, desperately tugging on the pant leg of a shelter worker, asked in amazement if the man in the red suit really was Santa Claus come to visit.

Yes, he was assured.

"I didn't think he'd find us here."

The boy's family, among an estimated 4,500 Utahns without a place to call home, didn't expect to find itself at the Road Home, either.

"It takes a kid to show you that snapshot into how lonely, how afraid a child must be who is in the throes of homelessness — a fear that wouldn't even occur to us," said Matt Minkevitch, who runs the Road Home and has been on the front lines helping the homeless since the mid-1980s.

On any given night this time of year, his shelter in Salt Lake City takes in about 800 people, more than 100 of them children. One day this past week, for example, 745 people stayed overnight; 123 were children.

Most homeless will resort to shelters, but some stay on the streets, in cars or set up camps in the wooded outskirts of towns, hoping to avoid police detection.

But more often these days, the homeless are undetected by managing to double, triple- or even quadruple-up with other families.

That's what Rebecca Garcia did until she became one of the residents of the new LifeStart Village in Midvale.

People don't realize the homeless don't fit the stereotype, said Garcia, a mother of four who had been living with her brother. "I don't think people realize what really puts other people in this situation or how badly the homeless want to be out of it."

While it may be easy for some people to hold the problem of homelessness at a distance, Minkevitch said, "the reality of today's society is that more and more its homeless population reflects people who are likely to be brothers, sisters, cousins and uncles — someone we know as family or neighbors."

Stepping stones

Downward economic forces have clearly been at work the past two years, and the ripple effect is first felt by the economically marginal who are also the slowest to recover when things turn around, said Gov. Olene Walker, state government's leading homeless advocate and champion of affordable housing for the working poor through a trust fund that bears her name.

Places like LifeStart, which not only gives struggling single parents a place to stay, also gives them community, training and a real path back, Walker said at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Midvale site in late October.