The site of a future homeless services campus at 2520 N. 2200 West in Salt Lake City is pictured on Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2025. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
The state of Utah’s chosen site for a massive new homeless campus is generously sprinkled with wetlands that environmentalists desperately want preserved, and as such is also a haven for mosquitoes. Despite ample warnings against it, the Utah State Prison was relocated to a similar site not far away. As predicted, prisoners and staff are besieged by mosquitoes and swarms of other biting insects that provide food for the 12 million migrating birds that feed near the Great Salt Lake. Forcing the homeless into that same environment just exploits them even more.
As the climate warms and mosquito season lengthens, the homeless, like the prison population, will find life in a mosquito factory about as pleasant as a root canal that never ends. But that inevitably launches the “solution” of insecticide warfare, under the assumption that if enough toxic chemicals are sprayed, and evolutionary science and collateral damage conveniently ignored, the mosquitoes will surrender and the biting will stop…