Housing is a hurdle for felons

PROVO — Shelly Butler beams as she scans the tiny apartment with dingy white paint. Her bedroom is also the living room and the kitchen is the size of a coat closet, but she doesn't care — it's not a motel room.

"I've been in all of them, bouncing back and forth," she says, referring to subsidized motel rooms in downtown Provo — the City Center, Amenity Inn, Executive Inn and Suites and Travelers Inn. "They're not nice."

She didn't like the fighting and the drugs. Even more than that, she said, it was a pervasive feeling of instability that got her down.

Butler, who used to be considered a transient, is working part time and looking for another job so she can get a bigger place. For all of her excitement, though, she still has to face the facts: the apartment is not really hers.

"People don't want to rent to me," the 38-year-old woman said.

Her past felony drug charges didn't just land her in jail, they've also cramped her future chances for jobs and apartments.

Her friend had to rent the apartment for the two of them.

The Deseret Morning News has talked with numerous people working to climb out of the rut of drug use, alcohol abuse and homelessness. Many attend treatment sessions, work with mentors, complete service hours, look for jobs and meet with counselors — all driven by a desire for a better life.

But it's hard when the society they want to rejoin won't accept them.

"There's a whole lot of people who are so marginalized," said Ann Iroz, who works with recovering drug addicts at the Utah County Division of Substance Abuse as a Drug Offender Reform Act therapist. "If you don't grow up with some kind of support already, you're not going to get it from the community."

Those marginalized people in the valley include 29 chronically homeless individuals, according to a fairly rough estimate from a "point-in-time" study done in January 2007 by the Continuum of Care, a group of nearly 40 agencies trying to reduce homelessness in Utah County.

But that doesn't account for the hundreds of people living in emergency shelters, transitional housing, dingy motels or the Utah County Jail with no permanent place to call home — people the community doesn't see.