34 The Impact of the Environment and Air Quality on People Experiencing Unsheltered Homelessness in Salt Lake County

Faculty Mentor: Jeff Rose (Health, Kinesiology, and Recreation, University of Utah)

The Salt Lake City region and its environment experience weather in extreme ways through heat, cold, and episodic poor air quality. As an already vulnerable population, people experiencing unsheltered homelessness are impacted in drastic and disproportionate ways. Our research project has aimed to better understand this impact through 20 semi-structured interviews with people from this population recruited by both the Youth Resource Center and Men’s Resource Center in Salt Lake City. Using thematic analysis to analyze the interviews we conducted, we found 4 common themes among our participants in relation to our topic. These themes were displacement, survival, place/safety, and policy. Displacement captures our participants’ experiences of being pushed further into places where they are less protected from environmental hazards. Survival explores the importance of survival and being in constant fight or flight mode when experiencing unsheltered homelessness, but how environmental issues are not top priority when it comes to survival. Place/safety covers all of the places that our participants commonly mentioned as environmental refuge. Their top priority in these spaces was overall safety. Policy explores some challenges that our participants have found in protecting themselves from the environment due to various policies and also some suggestions on what would help them with that protection. This information shows the lack of conversation surrounding the overlap between environmental justice and unsheltered homelessness. People who impose displacement onto this population, are not taking into account the environmental safety of the spaces they are pushing these groups into. We aren’t talking to this group enough about the impacts of extreme heat, extreme cold, and air quality despite the challenges they face due to these factors. We need to make spaces of environmental refuge safer and more accessible and also create more spaces that provide greater consistent protection. To achieve this, we need improved policy that considers environmental justice, especially in respect to the extreme weather and episodic poor air quality found in the Salt Lake County region of Utah.