08/17/2026
They're enslaving poor people.
Utah’s answer to homelessness is a 16-acre, 1,300-person mega-camp with limited transportation access, locked sleeping quarters at night, and a $25 million price tag.
Read that again: locked bunks. Limited ability to leave. A massive, isolated facility built to warehouse human beings whom the government has decided are too poor to be visible.
They will call it “shelter.” They will call it “public safety.” They will talk about getting people “off the streets.” But if someone cannot freely leave, cannot reliably access transportation, and is confined overnight in a sprawling compound, that is not compassion. It is coercion with a press release.
Imagine what $25 million could do if Utah actually treated homelessness as a housing and health-care crisis instead of a nuisance to be swept out of sight: permanent subsidized housing, addiction treatment, mental-health care, medical services, caseworkers, job training, rental assistance, and prevention programs that keep people from losing their homes in the first place.
Instead, the priority is containment.
At a time when homeownership is increasingly out of reach for working people, rents remain punishing, and one emergency can put a family on the street, politicians are choosing to criminalize poverty. They are building the infrastructure to punish people for the policy failures that left them unhoused.
This is what happens when the powerful refuse to make housing affordable: they stop treating housing as a right and start treating unhoused people as a problem to be managed, hidden, and controlled.
These are dark times. Do not look away.
