Helping homeless is struggle

PROVO — Last weekend's razing of Hotel Roberts has brought renewed attention to the lack of certain resources for Utah County's homeless.

For more than 20 years, the hotel, once a grand social hall, was used to shelter homeless singles who received shelter "vouchers" from social-service agencies. The voucher could then be exchanged for a room.

When the hotel at 192 S. University Ave. fell into disrepair and closed in 2003, those organizations found a few other downtown motels to fill the gap, but one director of a social-service agency in Utah County says a more permanent solution needs to be found.

"The voucher system is really not a good process or mechanism for sheltering people for a lot of reasons," said Brent Crane, executive director of the Food and Care Coalition, a charity that assists the homeless and poor in Provo.

"It's more costly, obviously, and I think the bigger issue at play is that there is no way of extracting accountability from the clients that use those services," he said.

Crane said his group cannot effectively monitor those who use the vouchers. And they can't rely on motel managers to do so, either.

"If I put them in a hotel room, they could go in there and sleep all day, they could watch TV all day, they could bring in friends and engage in criminal activity, there's no supervision," he said. "It's a temporary stop-gap measure. We have no ability with the motel-voucher system to shelter people long-term."

Myla Dutton, executive director of Community Action Services, an organization that serves Utah County's low-income population, said the voucher system, while problematic for single men or women, can be effective for families in dire need of housing for a few days.

"It's less costly per individual if it's a family than if it's one person," Dutton said. "For us, it's still the best overall solution in terms of short-term sheltering. We're not finding that we have to have people in hotels long-term at all."

Dutton says it is usually just days before long-term shelter is found for families — but that Utah County is sorely lacking in affordable housing.

"Every year that goes by, we're a couple more thousand units short," she said. "It's somewhere between 8,000 and 9,000 affordable units short of what's needed in Utah County alone."