By the end of the day, Rene says, it will all be gone. I want to get you out of the homeless situation. And he does. He and all the other people who work with the homeless here have perhaps the best track record in the country.
In the past nine years, Utah has decreased the number of homeless by 72 percentโlargely by finding and building apartments where they can live, permanently, with no strings attached. One of the two phones on the dash starts ringing.
Or the 7-Eleven? Five days ago, William Miller, 63, was diagnosed with liver cancer at St. He vomits when he wakes up in the morning and has gone through two sets of clothes due to diarrhea.
Yesterday he went to the LDS Hospital for a checkup and slept for five and a half hours in a bathroom. A friend staying at the motel let him take a shower in his room, but then William started feeling weak, so he called Rene.
Rene helps William get in the passenger seat and drives him to the Fourth Street Clinic, which provides free care for the homeless and is where Rene used to work as an AmeriCorps volunteer. He knows the system and trusts the doctors and nurses. William gets out of the van and walks inside very slowly and sits down in the waiting room. Rene checks him in. The next stop is at a camp next to the railroad tracks. A year-old man and a year-old woman are living in a three-man dome tent covered with plastic tarps.
