Homeless Are People Too
We say it. We nod along. But then we walk past a homeless tent and try not to look. In Salt Lake City, the line between housed and unhoused is thinner than most of us want to believe, especially for seniors whose Social Security checks no longer stretch far enough to cover rent. Their stories aren’t statistics; they are lived realities. And they remind us that homelessness is not a moral failure. It’s often the result of a single event such a pandemic layoff, a rent hike, a medical bill that tips a life into freefall.
Petey knows this too well. A stagehand with Local 99, she was one of the first workers laid off when COVID-19 shut everything down, and one of the last to return to work. When unemployment checks were delayed and rent was due, her landlord told her to leave. “It’s like I was okay one day and the next day it was over,” she said. She moved from motel rooms to a small trailer, then onto the streets. “All of a sudden, out of nowhere, you got 48 hours to move,” she recalled. “If you’re not moved, they bulldoze your stuff and dumpster it.”
The weight of that constant displacement broke her down. “I finally just let the trailer go because I didn’t want to deal with the stress from day to day, wondering if I’m even going to have a place to lay my head,” she said. “They had already taken everything else from me. That was the last that I had.”…