Apartments for homeless seniors worry neighbors

By Julia Lyon-West Valley City » Despite lingering community outrage and multiple financial delays, the Kelly Benson apartments for homeless seniors are finally under construction in West Valley City. For advocates of the homeless, the facility is one more housing success in Utah.

But for some community members, fear remains.

"I feel our neighborhood is being used as guinea pigs," said Scott Warr, whose front door sits about 80 feet from the Kelly Benson property at 3100 South and 3600 West.

As he sees it, the $8 million, 59-unit building, which is to be completed in spring 2010, will demonstrate whether homeless facilities and residential neighborhoods can happily coexist.

Housing officials believe they can, and point to a new study that indicates the 55-and-over population is not particularly dangerous.

But Warr, who has been perhaps the most outspoken opponent of the facility, won’t be around to find out. He plans to move later this year to escape city life. As a fourth-generation resident on his property, he admits heartache, but insists he is not being driven away solely by the complex.

The chief objection wasn’t about him, Warr says, but the well-being of hundreds of children who will walk past the Kelly Benson facility to and from school.

As the state pushes ahead with its plan to eliminate chronic homelessness by 2014, this may not be thelast time a neighborhood challenges the location of housing for the homeless.

More apartment complexes are planned throughout the state and some of those will be in residential areas. That’s a combination Lloyd Pendleton, the director of the state homeless task force, says can work.

"If you put in a strip mall, the indication is you get a whole lot more crime than you do from housing like this," he said.

Finding housing for the older homeless population is particularly critical, advocates say, because studies suggest living on the streets can decrease someone’s lifespan by decades. Among the roughly 15,500 Utahns expected to be homeless sometime this year, fewer than 2 percent are estimated to be older than 55.

Housing officials point to a new report that indicates the crime effect from this senior population should be far less than neighbors fear. The report’s author, Larry Bench, a sociologist at the University of Utah, writes: "As the prospective residents are to be 55 or older, it is unlikely that anything other than minor and infrequent criminal activity will occur."

The report acknowledges the potential link between homelessness and criminal behavior found in other studies, and proposes a six-month crime study of Kelly Benson by the U. of U. sociology department with the West Valley City Police Department.

No one can guarantee what your neighbors are going to do all the time, said Kerry Bate, the executive director of the Salt Lake County Housing Authority. But officials want Kelly Benson residents to be people whose lives are moving in the right direction.

"We’re not looking for perfection," he said. "We’re looking for redemption."

Whether it’s redemption or perfection, Warr believes his property value will be affected. He thinks there could have been a better site for Kelly Benson — even if it was just across the street.

That would have been away from the hundreds of kids walking on the sidewalk and bridge over Bangerter Highway.

After hearing neighbors’ concerns, officials did change some of the screening criteria for residents at Kelly Benson. A good candidate will be someone who is already in temporary housing or living with family members. Having a felony in the past won’t disqualify a candidate, but certain risky behaviors — such as assault and sex offenses — will.

The goal is both to protect the elderly residents and the neighbors around them.

"Anything that’s violent we’re going to screen out," said Janice Kimball, director of housing and services at Salt Lake County Housing Authority.

The majority of residents will be chronically homeless, meaning they will have been homeless for a year or four times in the three years before moving in.

That group will also have a "disabling" condition, such as an addiction, a serious mental illness or a physical disability that affects their daily living.

"We’re not going to be willing to take a chance on people with predatory issues," Bate said. "The neighborhood made a really excellent point — a lot of kids go by that property to and from school."

At the same time, people need to remember that not all homeless people fit a stereotype, he said. Just because someone is homeless, doesn’t mean they’re dangerous.

The neighbors’ interpretation of police data from Sunrise Metro, apartments in Salt Lake City for the chronically homeless , is that dangerous behavior is inevitable.

Bench, the sociologist, disagreed, noting that the majority of police calls at Sunrise over a six-month period did not involve criminal behavior. Many calls were for medical help.

"My true hope is that I’m 100 percent wrong," said Warr. "If I’m right, even a little bit, some kid suffers."

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