Man's goal is to make the homeless visible to all

Mark Horvath, a one-man homeless outreach agency, was in Salt Lake City this weekend, recording stories of residents most Utahns never see, then putting them on the Web for the world to see — literally.

He's good at it because he's been homeless twice — and could well be there again.

He's managed to stave off that day by taking homelessness head on by driving cross-country the past 50 days, traveling 8,598 miles in a borrowed car, gathering stories of fellow downtrodden Americans and sharing them with the world by putting homeless people smack dab in the middle of digital society — on Facebook, Twitter and Whrrl.

"Homeless people are invisible, and I'm trying to make them visible," Horvath told the Deseret News after a visit to Palmer Court, a permanent apartment complex in downtown Salt Lake City that is the showpiece of a government and private "housing first" program aimed at ending homelessness in Utah by 2014. The idea is to provide a stable, one-stop shop for chronically homeless people by setting them up in a subsidized apartment, then dealing with the various life factors that made them homeless in the first place.

"I've been a housing-first guy forever, but this is the first place I've actually seen in operation," Horvath said. "It's the most amazing thing I've every seen. People are treated with respect, there is a coalition of government agencies, politicians, corporations and caseworkers, so a guy doesn't have to make 15 different stops to get plugged into the various programs. That saves the state so much money, not to mention gives people respect that many long ago learned they couldn't expect or didn't feel they deserved.

"We'll never end homelessness, but if there's a state that could if we could, it would be Utah," he said.

Utah has obviously taken things seriously, he said. "That's the rarest exception around the country. People are aware of the homeless, or they see a popular move, but they don't really see homeless people. I know the homeless are invisible because I've been there."

And because people don't tend to notice or simply dismiss a homeless person when they encounter one, "the country isn't seeing the storm — the perfect storm — that's coming of families driven into hardship and with nowhere to go."

Shelters, private housing and social-welfare agencies nationwide are seeing increases of 50 to 70 percent the past year, he said. And most of the families aren't in urban areas and cities, but in the wide and generally poor expanses in between, he said, adding that a kind of dust-bowl mentality is building — families forced to be on their way when all they want to do is stay put.