I spent most of 2019 in Salt Lake City’s homeless shelter, a massive old building directly across the street from the $375 million Gateway Mall, one of Salt Lake City’s premier malls. Across from the shelter to the west is a luxury apartment complex where the rent starts at an astronomical $1,400 a month; for a studio.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that moneyed interests had designs on the land underneath the current homeless shelter.
There was money to be made, lots of it, and the homeless were in the way.
In 2017, shortly after a billion-dollar real estate conglomerate purchased the Gateway Mall, a plan was hatched to remove the homeless from downtown Salt Lake City, sending them far enough away that they wouldn’t be a factor in the plans to capitalize on the increasingly valuable real estate in the area.