As the Salt Lake women’s homeless shelter was just opening 25 years ago, Deseret News photographer Kristan Jacobsen and I spent the night there with the residents so we could do a story. That brief experience is one I carry with me because I learned quickly there’s no such thing as “typical” homeless. And every encounter I’ve had since has reinforced that view.
Many of the people who find themselves homeless have some overlapping challenges, but they’re individuals, a similar best and worst of mankind that you’d find in any good-sized population.
Stereotyping them doesn’t help them to their feet.
Back then, one of the shelter’s monitors, a war veteran named Craig Lovejoy, explained in pretty simple terms how homelessness was evolving in Utah. He said there were more homeless people and they had more mental health issues, more substance abuse and less hope than in the past.
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