SALT LAKE CITY — Salt Lake City’s massive tiny home community won’t be built by this winter for people experiencing homelessness.
The delay comes despite high hopes from Mayor Erin Mendenhall.
“It’s cold out here and this is it, what I’ve got,” Pat Westlake said, pointing to her jacket.
“It’s hard because you’re always cold. There is nowhere to sleep, really,” Tiffany Day added.
The women hope to get a spot inside the women’s shelter the first week of November. For the last month, they’ve slept outside.
A proposed village of more than 400 tiny homes is no longer expected to break ground on the city’s west side before next March, pending a rezoning hearing at the end of the month.
“Of course it would be ideal to have tiny homes up and running in Salt Lake City as soon as possible, and an urgency to be able to provide this unique housing type is what influenced an aggressive timeline,” Mayor Mendenhall said in a statement to FOX 13 News. “But with transformative projects like these, delays can happen."
The massive tiny home community was proposed to provide permanent housing to people in temporary living situations.
Right now, Salt Lake County’s four homeless resource centers reached 93 percent capacity with only 50 free beds, the vast majority at the men’s facility in South Salt Lake.
An estimated 300 additional temporary beds are needed this winter.
“You just suffer and you learn to cope and you run to shelter as much as you can get,” said Westlake.
