This story appears in the March 2026 issue of Utah Business. Subscribe.
When Utah’s lawmakers and business community gathered in November 2025 for a two-day meeting, attendees walked away with a directive: the best way to address homelessness is collaboration across sectors and a multidisciplinary, scientifically backed approach.
State Rep. Steve Eliason — who spent decades working in the healthcare industry and 15 years serving in Utah’s House of Representatives — noted a culture change. The room was filled with healthcare providers, business owners, philanthropists and government workers. Even Utah’s richest woman, Gail Miller, was in attendance and making comments.
Years earlier, Eliason invited then-Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox to quietly spend a night in a homeless shelter, where they met a young man whose father with schizophrenia had disappeared. On his own, the 19-year-old had been unable to pay his rent and was evicted — and only sought a bed in the shelter after living on the banks of the Jordan River in single-digit temperatures. For Eliason, the case highlighted the myriad ways interventions could prevent such personal spirals.
“Bringing it down to a very personal, human level to see that these safety nets are not comfy couches, that they are safety nets that keep people from freezing to death, and to the extent people are motivated to get back on their feet — there’s lots of programs and people willing to help them,” Eliason says.
By 2025, after years of research and planning by various Utah governmental bodies and agencies, ideas for addressing the needs of unhoused people are beginning to change. Thanks in part to a concerted effort of Salt Lake County mayor, Jenny Wilson, to prioritize a reimagined slate of services and policies, Salt Lake City’s leadership began to see the issue of homelessness as interlinked to broader institutional problems: incarceration, access to healthcare and general crisis support.
Agencies and policymakers, as well as their partners in the private and public sectors, now examine homelessness as not isolated but as an opportunity to create an innovative model that challenges decades of standard U.S. policy and treats poverty and illness as issues that can be addressed through policing.
Even outside legal experts — including a longtime judge from Miami and co-chair of the American Bar Association Criminal Justice Mental Health Committee, Steve Leifman — have found in Salt Lake City a largely invigorated business and political climate that wants to rethink how state interventions are done, not just as a way to assist those institutionalized but also to reduce the burden on taxpayers and the cycle of violence.
The beginning of a shift
Katherine Fife, the associate deputy mayor of Salt Lake County, says the mayor’s office felt there needed to be adjustments in how public policy managed the needs of the area’s unhoused community.
“Mayor Wilson said we need to kind of look at the things a little differently, look how these different systems and issues intersect a bit better,” Fife says. “We need to see if we can look at tackling it in a different way than we have in the past.”
Wilson’s team formed a group assigned to the issue, and they’ve been researching and engaging stakeholders ever since. By the end of 2022, the group took a trip to Miami, where they met Leifman. In late 2025, after he retired, Salt Lake County contracted Leifman to come on board and consult officially.
After years of site visits, meetings, reports and sessions on key takeaways related to the problem, Salt Lake has been able to draw on what Leifman has seen working in Miami. One key element is buy-in and support from those outside the government who recognize the benefit to the overall community in providing more services.
“We realized in Utah that we in the public sector can’t solve this issue alone,” Fife says. “We play our role, but so do our private sector partners and our businesses. They have cared about this issue about the individuals they’re seeing on the streets, but also the impact on their businesses and the community as well.”
For Leifman, a focus on mental health and how it intersects with the criminal legal system — and questioning what interventions would work better — began years ago in a courtroom. His defendant was a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, Leifman explains, who was suffering from late-onset schizophrenia. This person ended up having a psychotic episode during the hearing, making Leifman aware that the law didn’t provide the tools to help.
“In the United States, we have applied a criminal justice model to an illness, and it hasn’t worked, and it will never work,” Leifman explains. “What we really needed to do, and what we’re starting to do, is to apply a disease model or a population health model to an illness, just like we would do for heart disease and cancer. And you get much better outcomes when you do that.”
Leifman notes that in the mid-twentieth century, there was a deinstitutionalization of mental health facilities as public attitudes changed about how to address mental health. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, upticks in national practices like mandatory minimum sentencing and the “War on Drugs” fueled a push to incarcerate large numbers of people. These compounded problems are facing those who are without a safety net and are at the point of living on the street.
As for historical policies and the intentions behind them, Leifman explains, “This is decades of maybe well-meaning — or not so well-meaning, sometimes — of a perfect storm that came together. And everybody has the same crisis,” Leifman says. “It doesn’t matter where you go.”
Kelly Colopy is the human services director for Salt Lake County, and her office handles services related to mental health, substance use and behavioral health. They also cover pretrial cases, indigent legal services and probation, meaning their office sits at the intersection of many of the issues facing unhoused populations.
Working in these policy meetings with Fife and Leifman, Colopy is also a strong advocate for collaborative approaches that engage different community stakeholders in addressing homelessness before people reach the worst circumstances. She explains that there are many people in Utah whose services play a role.
“Many of those are nonprofit providers,” Colopy says. “Businesses are engaged. People are hiring. There are all kinds of folks engaged across these pieces. And what we’re doing now is looking at a more comprehensive system so that it is more coordinated and connected.”
Why Utah is at an innovative crossroads
Colopy explains that the reason people end up in housing crises has primarily to do with a lack of stability or basic resources, which can exacerbate underlying mental health issues or create trauma that leads to them.
“When you look at the percentage of people falling into homelessness, the majority of people fall into homelessness due to income,” Colopy says, “not mental illness and not substance use disorders. They fall in because of income, they fall in family disruption.”
She explains that in these situations, issues like substance abuse come into play as a form of self-medication as access to healthcare becomes limited or impossible.
The practical response Colopy and others in Salt Lake County’s working groups are discussing is called a sequential intercept model, which outlines the various off-ramps that communities can build to assist someone without using force or punitive measures before they reach a full crisis. Colopy explains that the first point of intercept would be ensuring people have access to housing and healthcare before they might ever be incarcerated, and that crisis response is available for those with mental health issues.
From there, if people do become engaged with law enforcement, courts or jails, the framework provides diversion programs that can redirect people out of serving jail time and into treatment instead. These types of paths out of standard criminal legal proceedings and into resource- and treatment-focused programs make up the remaining five intercepts under the model. In order to achieve this, Colopy explains, cities, counties and states need to coordinate across institutions and industries.
“We have it piecemeal in place, but it is not as coordinated and as robust as it could be,” Colopy says, pointing out that someone on parole needs access to housing and employment to ensure they won’t end up incarcerated again. “That model has been around for a while. But bringing everybody together and understanding it in ever-shifting dynamics right within communities has been really what bringing [Leifman] in is helping us to reconvene around.”
For the judge’s part, the cycle of recidivism, the tendency for individuals to reoffend and return to the criminal justice system, is a crucial one to break and is interconnected with access to healthcare.
“People either graduate or drop out of a program and we don’t really know what happens to them,” Leifman says. “And so they fall out and they end up back in an acute system of care, which is either jail, homelessness or hospitalization, which are all extraordinarily expensive systems for them to go through for the taxpayer, for the community. And the outcomes become very, very poor.”
Leifman argues this process, without interventions, perpetuates as people have no structure to build their lives after incarceration, “costing the community a huge amount of resources.” He explains that no one wants to see others homeless and sick, living on the street.
“We’ve learned that just getting someone treatment for their mental illness may not be sufficient,” Leifman says. “So when we don’t give people what they actually need, and they don’t succeed, we have this tendency to blame them for failing when the reality has been we haven’t given them what they actually need to recover.”
But to drive the point home, he argues that attempting to address mental illness by way of the criminal legal system is “like having chest pains and going to a podiatrist.”
“There’s a lot of research and science, and Salt Lake is really committed to trying to align the proper diagnoses with the proper treatments,” Leifman says. “What is unique about Salt Lake that I particularly enjoyed working there is that there’s this great sense of collaboration and recognition of what needs to be done.”
Utah is well-positioned but still experimenting
Leifman argues that Utah is in a very good position to deal with the problems that lead people to be unhoused, but one of the hardest parts is addressing the needs of those with the most acute mental health needs who would benefit from these types of interventions.
Fife points out that collaborating across disciplines helps people see more broadly the ways issues like homelessness can be addressed by bringing in people with distinct areas of expertise.
“Utah is unique,” Fife says. “We have so many people that care in every sector, every type of person. I mean, they just care so much. People are hungry for knowledge.”
After spending much of his career focused on this issue and volunteering at shelters on Christmas Eve, Eliason is aware that some of the most important voices shaping these policies are those who are impacted themselves, who generally don’t have the logistical capacity to attend policy meetings.
“You definitely have to try to stay in touch as much as possible with the people that we’re trying to help to understand the challenges that they’re facing, and try to design policy that will help them succeed through combined efforts of programs, policies, and individual accountability and effort,” Eliason says.
But he remains positive about the shift he’s seen at meetings like the two-day convening in November about homelessness and notes that people across the state, of all classes, are eager to get involved. Eliason refers to this as the “Utah way.”
Colopy, who echoes the sentiment that Utah has a very engaged community on this issue, explains that the model will involve many people who want to step up.
“Employment opportunities for people coming out of the prison,” Colopy says, “having a sense of like connection and hope and income, that’s going to help a lot, right? Investment in healthcare, investment in creating additional support systems for people as they’re coming out. That’s going to matter along the way. And investments in housing … we can’t move people through our mental health systems fast enough because there’s no place for them to go when they leave and they go back to the streets. And so, what does that look like in terms of housing investment and our business partners investing in that housing?”
For Eliason, this is a crucial point because the steep cost of housing has made this more difficult to achieve. He noted this process can at times feel like bailing water out of a boat, but was optimistic that the changing attitudes toward “upstream” thinking could make a big difference.
Leifman, who will continue working with Salt Lake City on this issue with his team for the foreseeable future, argues that the public health framework helps convince people to make those upstream changes.
“Look, we all need to look at these issues as what they are: They’re illnesses,” Leifman says. “At the end of the day, it’s about getting data, using data, and making decisions based on the information that we have, not just setting up a program, and then making sure that the systems are well-coordinated and it’s not a siloed, fractured system.”