In northwest Salt Lake City, a 16-acre parcel near the airport is set to become the site of one of the most controversial homelessness projects in the United States. State officials have approved plans for a 1,300-bed “services campus” that they say will treat addiction and mental illness and provide what they call a humane alternative to the streets. But critics warn that the facility could amount to a detention camp that enforces President Donald Trump’s homelessness directive through confinement and forced labor.
The project stems from Trump’s executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.” The order threatens to withhold federal funds from states and cities that fail to criminalize encampments and calls for expanded use of involuntary civil commitment for people experiencing homelessness. It also directs the Department of Housing and Urban Development to end its support of “Housing First” policies that provide housing without requiring treatment or sobriety.
Less than a week after the order was issued, Utah’s Republican leadership responded in support. Governor Spencer Cox, along with the state Senate president and House speaker, wrote to the Utah Homeless Services Board to say they “do not support ‘Housing First’ policies that lack accountability.” The letter instructed the board to “accelerate progress on a transformative, services-based homeless campus that prioritizes recovery, treatment, and long-term outcomes, not just emergency shelter.”
The result is a plan for a massive facility in the Northpoint area, more than seven miles from downtown and isolated from public transportation. The center, expected to open in 2027, would include more than 300 beds for court-ordered civil commitment, hundreds more for treatment “as an alternative to jail,” and other sections for what the plan describes as “work-conditioned housing.”
Randy Shumway, chair of the Utah Homeless Services Board, explained that an “accountability center” will be part of the design. “An accountability center is involuntary, OK — you’re not coming in and out,” Shumway said. He said Utah intends to end what he called a “culture of permissiveness” and instead guide people “towards human thriving.”
Shumway also described the state’s new approach to homelessness as a blend of management efficiency and moral purpose. “We nerd out on things like Six Sigma and lean process re-engineering,” he said, adding that “success is not permanent housing — success is human dignity. We are in the business of lives, of humans, of souls.”
According to Shumway, law enforcement “rescue teams” will identify unhoused people on city streets and offer them a choice between court or treatment. “So we can take you to court, and you can go to jail,” he said. “We don’t want to do that. We have a resource-rich alternative.”
Homeless advocates say this approach blurs the line between social service and incarceration. Eric Tars, legal director at the National Homelessness Law Center, warned that Utah’s plan could become a model for Trump’s broader effort to move homeless people out of cities and into remote compounds. “Their end goal is not just jail,” Tars said. “They want to put up more of these Alligator Alcatraz sprung structure type facilities,” referring to an immigration detention site in Florida where detainees have been cut off from access to their lawyers and face reports of mistreatment.
Tars said the most alarming part of Utah’s plan involves its proposed “work-conditioned housing.” “This is the thing that scares me the most,” he said, because it “means forced labor.” He noted that similar provisions have appeared in bills in other states, including Louisiana and West Virginia, where legislators proposed requiring those arrested for camping to perform hard labor or facility upkeep.
The Northpoint facility’s isolation and policing plan could make it effectively closed off, Tars added. “They’re going to be actively enforcing anti-camping, anti-loitering, all these other laws… if you step foot off the campus,” he said.
The state estimates the campus will cost $75 million to build and more than $30 million a year to operate. Advocates say those figures underestimate the expense of providing medical and psychiatric care for such a large population. “For a facility to treat such a large number of people adequately, the cost will be much higher than $75 million,” said Bill Tibbitts, deputy executive director of the Crossroads Urban Center in Salt Lake City.
Tibbitts also warned that mixing a homeless shelter with an involuntary treatment facility could have dangerous effects. “A 300-400-bed mental and behavioral health facility that people are not allowed to leave is not a shelter but an incarceration option,” he said. “Having such a facility colocated with a shelter would probably lead to a sense that if you do not follow the rules in one facility, you could be moved into the other.”
Democratic state senator and physician Jen Plumb said she is deeply concerned about whether the facility will provide real care. “I’m super anxious about it,” Plumb said. The state’s promise of comprehensive treatment, she said, is “pie in the sky.” Without significant new funding and staffing, Plumb warned, “the center could function less as a treatment facility than a prison or a warehouse.”
Legal experts are also questioning whether the plan’s use of civil commitment will comply with Utah law, which requires judges to find that individuals are dangerous or gravely disabled before mandating treatment. Trump’s federal order calls for lowering those standards, but Utah’s legislature has not yet passed such changes.
Civil rights advocates say the language of confinement and control echoes some of the darkest chapters in U.S. history. “It’s what they did in World War II in Japanese detention camps,” said Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center. “This reads similar to rounding up Jews or other people the Nazis didn’t like.”
At the Utah Office of Homeless Services conference earlier this month, Governor Cox praised the project. He called it “one of the most significant steps forward in decades here in our state” and told attendees, “This is more than a facility. It is a statement of who we are as a state.”
Nearby residents are uneasy. The site borders agricultural land and scattered homes, with no sidewalks or easy access to services. Property owner Nichole Solt, who lives adjacent to the parcel, said she fears for her safety and her neighborhood’s future. “They tell me there’s going to be all this security, but the reality is they’re going to be in my backyard,” she said.
Among homeless residents in downtown Salt Lake City, reactions are mixed but wary. Elizabeth Lowe, who has lived outside for years, compared the plan to historical camps. “OK, so straight up, this reminds me of a concentration camp,” she said. “Trying to get all the homeless in one area by the airport. I mean — would we be able to leave of our own free will?”
Supporters of the project, including the Cicero Institute—a conservative think tank influential in both Utah and the Trump administration—describe the plan as a forward-looking solution. “Utah is a harbinger of the future,” said Devon Kurtz of the group. But service providers see it as a warning.
To them, the new “accountability center” replaces housing with containment, social services with surveillance, and treatment with compulsion. Whether the Utah model becomes a path toward recovery or a system of confinement may determine the shape of national homelessness policy for years to come.
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