By Jeff Rose, PhD
People experiencing unsheltered homelessness often navigate a treacherous world in which the choices available to them are very limited. And they do it with compelling ingenuity and deftness. While functional, they are also fragile.
For many of us living in the Salt Lake Valley, we often look forward to seasonal changes. A big winter snowstorm means the opportunity to recreate and enjoy our state's natural beauty. Or when heatwaves bake the valley in August, we might spend the day relaxing at a mountain lake.
But it's easy to forget that this perspective is rooted in having reliable, comfortable shelter at our disposal.
For our unsheltered population, these climatic extremes have exaggerated effects. Sunny summer days bring a relentless, oppressive drain on their physical and mental health.
The Unique Challenges We Face
Salt Lake City faces a new set of challenges that have increased the prevalence of unsheltered homelessness. On top of this, urban development and climate change are producing hotter conditions each year.
The effects of homelessness are universally bad, both for the individuals affected and our society at large. Being unsheltered causes tremendous suffering for a person. But it also increases their risk of medical emergencies and exacerbates chronic illness. This, in turn, puts an increased strain on our health system.
As a health care system and as concerned community members, we have a duty to examine the issue of unsheltered homelessness in our community. We need to look at its causes, the effect it has on unsheltered people, and the ways we can engineer solutions.
How a Lack of Access to Housing Creates Homelessness
In the book Homelessness is a Housing Problem, authors Gregg Colburn and Clayton Aldern examine the underlying causes of homelessness in different cities across the United States.
Their comparative analysis shows the greatest predictor of homelessness was not based on drug use, poverty, mental health, or environmental conditions. Instead, it is the ratio of median income to the median housing price, the basic availability of housing.
In recent years, the median cost of housing in Salt Lake has seen a significant increase, which excludes more people from housing. It also makes it harder for people experiencing unsheltered homelessness to move toward housing.
Meanwhile, urban development contributes to a larger, more intense urban heat island effect.
In the summer, escaping the heat is one of the biggest daily concerns in an unsheltered person's life.
The Physiology of Heat Tolerance
A person's tolerance for extreme heat is dependent, in part, on their ability to cool back down. Physiologically, humans have a surprising capacity for adapting to heat. Our systems can adjust to extreme climates like we see here in the Mountain West.
We can tolerate heat and even perform physical exercise under extreme conditions. But only if we can then cool ourselves back down.
Physiological stress arises when we cannot cool down after a period of intense heat. Highs in the 100s do not pose a major problem for many of us. The problem comes when the lows only reach the mid-70s, as they often do in August here in Salt Lake.
The way people cope with these conditions depends on their access to cooling. For most of us, this means climate control in our homes and offices. It may mean public spaces like libraries.
But it also means private spaces like stores, restaurants, and gas stations. These spaces may be treated as public, but in reality, a person's right to access them depends on their capacity to consume in them. Because of this, unsheltered people may be denied access to them outright.
This means unsheltered people have fewer options for managing heat stress. They must make use of different resources than sheltered people do-using green space, waterbodies, and finding access to public and private spaces.
Traversing the Urban Landscape to Escape Heat
In partnership with my research collaborators, I conducted a series of studies supported by the Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy. We examined how people experiencing unsheltered homelessness employ adaptive strategies to navigate the harsh urban landscape during extreme heat.
Our study group was a cohort of 10 unsheltered people, each of whom agreed to carry a small temperature logger. These temperature loggers track the ambient temperature around our participants every ten seconds. We collected data for a six-day period in the summer of 2024, which produced nearly 15,000 data points.
Along with temperature loggers, we gave our study group GPS-enabled smartphones. This allowed us to cross-reference temperature extremes with spatial data. From there, we could conduct interviews about participant coping strategies.
Our temperature data recorded some shocking numbers.
In one case, one of our loggers recorded a point at 134°F, in a paved parking lot in a highly urbanized area. But minutes later, our participant's temperature plummeted to 67°F, when he walked into a nearby fast-food restaurant.
In interviews with our participant and the restaurant manager, we learned that our participant has an ongoing arrangement with the manager: if he buys a frosty (which costs him $1.69), he can sit, relax, and enjoy it for an hour. He picks this hour strategically, during the hottest part of the day. He calls this daily ritual "Frosty Time."
Another noteworthy strategy involved the use of public transit. In one case, a participant had a free bus pass, which they used to ride the bus to the end of the line. In an interview, they told us that they did not actually go anywhere. Their use of the bus was purely to sit, rest, and cool off in a climate-controlled space. At the end of the line, they boarded the bus again and rode back into Salt Lake City.
These strategies reveal the resourcefulness and power of cooperation in the unsheltered community. They demonstrate the constant effort that people experiencing unsheltered homelessness must expend to regulate their body temperatures. But they also highlight the inequity of cooling resources in the urban landscape.
Short- and Long-Term Solutions to Homelessness
This research points to several short-term solutions that could reduce the constant strain of environmental factors on people experiencing unsheltered homelessness.
Improving the urban environment with more green space would provide immediate relief from extreme heat. Creating more public cooling spaces would do even better. Providing water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) facilities would reduce the frequency of medical emergencies from dehydration and minor injuries.
It is also crucial that we adopt a policy of displacing people experiencing unsheltered homelessness as little as possible. Displacement results in unsheltered people losing their possessions and progress toward housing.
But these improvements can only provide short-term relief. As long as housing is inaccessible, we will see widespread homelessness in the Salt Lake Valley.
Three approaches for addressing unsheltered people are incarceration, congregate housing (high-capacity, single-room shelters designed for large scale emergencies), and permanent supportive housing.
Currently, incarceration and congregate housing are used most frequently. But these are the least effective and most expensive courses of action. Creating permanent supportive housing costs about half as much as incarcerating people or housing them in high-capacity congregate shelters. And it is the most effective way of moving people toward housing.
Housing as Health Care
Many people still have trouble with the idea of providing a "handout" to the unsheltered community. This is a primary stumbling block to creating lasting change.
But the truth is that housing is health care, and we need to view it as a necessity. When we help people move toward housing, we improve the efficiency of our emergency departments, our dispatchers, and first responders. We improve overall, as a health system. But most importantly, we improve the health of our population.
Jeff Rose, PhD
Jeff Rose is an associate professor in the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism and an affiliate faculty with Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah. A primary focus of his research explores the social and environmental justice elements of homelessness across the urban-wildland interface. Rose applies this approach in other settings as well, including park and protected areas, adventure and outdoor recreation and education, and social-ecological systems. His teaching experiences examine nature-society relationships, employing community-engaged learning with often underrepresented communities whenever possible. He has instructed courses in political ecology, critical social theory, wilderness, qualitative research methods, environmental social studies research methods, leadership, youth development, and people, place, and the environment, among others. Rose received an MA in geography at San Diego State University and a PhD in parks, recreation, and tourism at the University of Utah.
