Royal Allred lives in a motel in Salt Lake City, and he knows exactly how precarious that arrangement is. He is a double amputee with a long list of health issues, and weeks after being assessed as high need for housing assistance, he still has no caseworker and no placement, leaving him at risk of being priced out of his room and back onto the street.
“I’m going to be homeless pretty soon. I hate being homeless. It’s hard to get off the ground and get back up every day when you have no legs,” Allred said, according to ABC4 Utah. Allred’s case illustrates a problem playing out across the state: even people who qualify for urgent help can be left waiting because of overwhelming need, a shortage of available housing and too few case managers to go around, the station reports.
Allred received his high-need assessment through the housing priority system several weeks before the report published, but he still awaits placement. Without a caseworker assigned to his case, he’ll have to be contacted directly if housing becomes available — a passive process that puts the burden on him, and on the people helping him, rather than on an assigned advocate tracking his file.
Why the Wait Comes Down to Three Factors
According to the station’s report, housing wait times depend on a combination of available housing, the size of the client list and the number of caseworkers on hand to manage cases. Volunteers of America Utah President and CEO Kathy Bray told the outlet that funding simply doesn’t stretch far enough. “There’s just not adequate funding to do case management for everyone,” Bray said, per the same account.
Bray said VOA fields street-outreach, resource-center and housing case managers, but needs more staff at every level. The organization says that living at a resource center is one option for people to secure a caseworker, since there aren’t enough caseworkers operating on the street level to reach everyone who needs one. That leaves people like Allred, who is navigating the system from a motel rather than a shelter, without an obvious path to get matched with staff.
A Neighbor Fills the Gap
Sarah Jolley, Allred’s neighbor in the Liberty Park area, has been helping him organize the paperwork his case requires. Jolley also created a GoFundMe campaign aimed at helping keep Allred in his motel room until a placement comes through. Despite the uncertainty, Allred has said he continues working and persevering despite the hardship.
A Statewide Shortage Behind the Local Story
The scarcity Allred is experiencing reflects a much larger supply gap. The state had a shortage of about 40,000 housing units compared with demand as of January, according to The Salt Lake Tribune, and Utah leaders separately estimate a gap of roughly 77,000 units of deeply affordable housing statewide, per FOX 13 Investigates. Across Utah, there is a shortage of rental homes affordable and available to extremely low-income households, and many of those households are severely cost burdened, spending more than half of their income on housing, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
That math is brutal for someone relying on a fixed income. The coalition calculates that a minimum-wage worker in Utah would need to work 139 hours a week, or roughly 3.5 full-time jobs, just to afford a one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent — and 168 hours a week, or 4.2 full-time jobs, for a two-bedroom. Allred needs subsidized housing to afford rent on his Social Security income, a bar that remains out of reach without the kind of placement he’s still waiting on.
Vouchers Can Take Years, Not Weeks
The caseworker shortage is only part of the bottleneck. Wait times for Utah’s Housing Choice Voucher Program, formerly known as Section 8, can last years in some parts of the state, according to KSL.com. A survey of 16 Utah housing authorities found wait times ranging from a few months in Grand and San Juan counties to several years in Salt Lake County and St. George, with only 27% of authorities reporting waits under a year and a third reporting waits of at least three years. West Valley City’s housing authority alone reported more than 3,000 families on its waitlist while able to serve fewer than 550 at a time.
Federal funding hasn’t kept pace either. HUD has said nearly all of Utah’s housing authorities are operating at over 110% of their budgets because of rising rents and a plateau in program funding, KSL reported. For people already navigating homelessness, the strain shows up in how long they stay in shelter: Utahns spent an average of 65 nights in shelter before exiting homelessness in 2022, up from the state’s planned target of 40 nights, and the average stay in Salt Lake County climbed from 60 nights in 2017 to 88 nights in 2022, according to FOX 13’s investigation. The outlet also found Salt Lake County has an estimated deficit of 600 to 800 permanent emergency shelter beds, potentially reaching 1,000.
Where Applicants Can Turn for Help
Some organizations are trying to manage the overflow as best they can. Utah Community Action says its housing-assistance appointments are currently being booked two weeks out and that it cannot expedite applications given the volume of requests it receives. The Road Home, meanwhile, offers case-management assistance to low-income and homeless guests staying in its shelters, helping with the documents, training and supplies needed to qualify for housing.
For now, Allred’s situation remains unresolved. He has been assessed as high need, he has a neighbor working to keep his paperwork in order and a GoFundMe aimed at buying him time, but no caseworker and no placement — leaving him, like thousands of other Utahns caught in the same bottleneck, waiting to be contacted directly whenever something finally opens up.
