Four new members appointed to Utah Homelessness Council msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
SALT LAKE CITY Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall on Thursday unveiled an ambitious plan to start building a master-planned tiny home community to house the homeless and have some homes ready for move-in before winter sets in this year.
To pull it off, the mayor announced a new partnership with a familiar nonprofit that she lauded as having a proven track record of helping those who are homeless, battling substance abuse or who carry a criminal record to turn their lives around, all while being a positive neighbor : The Other Side Academy. This is a huge step forward in this project, Mendenhall said in a news conference outside the Salt Lake City-County building. We re moving at light speed here, given the scope and urgency of the challenge we ve had to do that. It s gone from concept to execution in less than a year. And I think that s a testament to the commitment of this capital city and to our partners to confront the reality and the complexity of the issues we face s
If you were to imagine a czar, in the traditional, Russian sense, Wayne Niederhauser’s image probably wouldn’t come to mind. Which may be why Utah’s new homeless services coordinator doesn’t like the informal title of “homeless czar.”
“That’s a negative. That’s not my style of leadership,” he told me when I asked if he was comfortable with the name.
Indeed, that’s true. The term implies an emperor; an all-powerful ruler most commonly associated with the leadership of imperial Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Niederhauser is a certified public accountant and a real estate broker, an affable and mild-mannered sort whose style is to bring people together and search for common ground.
Deseret News
Is Utah solving its homeless problem? The answer is complicated
Political leaders, advocates take stock of what’s been right, and what’s gone wrong, with the state’s new service center model
Share this story
Kristin Murphy, Deseret News
When a sudden gust of wind lapped at a tent propped up on the sidewalk, Andrew Blackburn jumped to save a bike that was leaning against it and had toppled over.
A storm was blowing in, with strong winds forecast for the Salt Lake area that night. The tents nestled on the sidewalk beneath murals representing the faces of people killed by police painted on the sides of buildings in an industrial area named the Fleet Block were about to be put to the test.
| Updated: 1:08 p.m.
Developers have unveiled their plans to build a seven-story apartment complex on the land where The Road Home’s downtown emergency shelter once stood a project long predicted by advocates who say business interests have been trying to push homeless services out of the neighborhood.
The new Salt Lake City community envisioned by the development team would be called the RIO, with a concept that calls for 210 apartments and about 4,000 square feet of commercial or retail space. It’s a project that aims to provide affordable housing “to the broadest spectrum of renters” possible, development partners dbURBAN Communities and Hamilton Partners said in a news release.