Erick Trickey is a writer in Boston.

Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski keeps a photo in her office of Martin Luther King Jr., standing deep in thought under a portrait of Gandhi. “I’ve been working on behalf of oppressed groups my whole political career,” Biskupski says.

To many who elected her, Biskupski symbolizes equality: She’s the first lesbian mayor of Salt Lake City, the capital of deep-red Utah, and her November 2015 election made headlines in both The Guardian and People. She’s fought for gay rights in her Mormon-dominated state since 1998, when she was the first openly gay politician elected to the state legislature. She was sworn in as mayor with her fiancée, now wife, by her side.

“We have a city that was becoming more and more segregated,” Biskupski says. Her platform included promises to tackle homelessness and affordable housing and be the mayor “for all people.” In progressive Salt Lake City, Hillary Clinton outpolled Donald Trump 66 percent to 16 percent and residents chafe at the state’s Mormon-influenced conservative politics. Biskupski’s identity and activist reputation helped her beat incumbent Ralph Becker, a two-term fellow Democrat, 52 percent to 48 percent. “I think there was this mood of, ‘We’ll show the state, we’ll show the Mormon church, we’ll elect an out lesbian!’” says Stan Penfold, the city council chairman. Penfold, who is also gay, endorsed Becker.

But the goodwill from her historic victory evaporated quickly. Biskupski has struggled to make good on a campaign promise to deal with the city’s burgeoning homeless population. She has run afoul of voters who accuse her of stabbing them in the back, the top county official has second-guessed her decisions, and the council, including Penfold, has feuded with her and pressured her to act on affordable housing.

In Salt Lake City, like other American cities, winning election as a liberal is relatively easy. It’s governing as a one that’s hard. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio swept into office in 2013 with a landslide 73 percent of the vote. But the towering de Blasio has been brought low by political stumbles, in particular over homelessness, an issue he calls his “No. 1 frustration.” He increased spending on homeless services by 60 percent, then stopped new shelter construction for eight months in 2015 due to neighborhood opposition. Now, New York’s homeless population is growing, and DeBlasio’s potential challengers in this year’s mayoral election are seizing on the issue.

Mayor Biskupski at a staff meeting in Salt Lake City. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

If Biskupski doesn’t already feel the same pressures, she probably will soon. She’s learning that her identity helped her deliver a message about the need for hard change, but it isn’t much help when it comes to persuading voters to put those policies into action.

***


A couple of days after New Year’s, more than 100 people crowded into Salt Lake City’s council chambers, where Victorian lamps illuminate an immense portrait of Brigham Young. They had come to tell Biskupski they don’t want a homeless center in Sugar House, their up-and-coming, middle-class neighborhood.

“I think the mayor needs to really take a look at how this has been handled,” said Chris Sveiven, looking straight at Biskupski, “and realize you have betrayed our community.” Biskupski met his gaze, and listened for the next two hours as more than 30 Sugar House residents delivered the same message: Not in my back yard. The homeless center, they argued, will import downtown’s crime and drugs to their neighborhood. They accused the mayor of making the decision in secret.

Biskupski took office as Salt Lake City began to address a crisis: A thriving drug trade had taken root outside the city’s largest homeless shelter, a 900-bed building near the city’s old Rio Grande train station. She promised a new approach to drug enforcement, with treatment for addicts instead of jail. She endorsed the county government’s plan to break up the homeless population across smaller shelters, to “share the responsibility for care.” That went over well during the campaign, since the town was crying out for new answers to the Rio Grande neighborhood’s problems. But once she was elected mayor, Biskupski got the thankless task of choosing the sites for those new shelters.

After the meeting, Biskupski stood in the City Hall’s massive central corridor, talking to reporters. Portraits of mayors past—mostly Mormon men from long ago, with dark, sharp-angled beards—looked down on Biskupski, her face serious, her hair a cascade of blond curls. Would she do anything differently, she was asked, given the criticism about transparency? She insisted that a public debate about which parts of town should take in the homeless would’ve been too divisive. “I would not pit neighborhoods against each other,” she said. “I just wouldn’t do that.”

Questions finished, she excused herself and retreated to her office through a side door. For a moment, the open door revealed a flagpole holding a giant rainbow flag.

***

Outside The Road Home, Salt Lake City’s main homeless shelter, dozens of people congregated on a 30-degree winter morning. Some huddled under makeshift blue tents, really tarps draped against fencing. Others sat on the sidewalk, half-covered in sleeping bags. A woman near the shelter door twitched as she tried to take a few restless steps. Nearby, a man ate ramen noodles from a Stryofoam cup. In the street police officers had a man in handcuffs.

Most of the biggest issues Salt Lake City is struggling with right now have some connection to these few blocks just west of downtown. Drug dealers blend in among the homeless, say city leaders, preying on their addictions while also selling to a wealthier clientele who dash off the nearby freeway for quick drive-through buys. Utah’s first needle exchange, legalized by the state legislature last March, last year, operates nearby. Here, police shot Abdi Mohamed, a 17-year-old Somali immigrant, last February while trying to break up a dispute about an alleged drug deal. (Mohamed, now in a wheelchair, faces drug possession and robbery charges; he denies he was involved in a drug deal.)

Rio Grande has “functioned as a containment area for a lot of things we don’t want to have happen in other parts of our city,” said Glenn Bailey, executive director of the city’s Crossroads Urban Center, which serves low-income people.

The Road Home, Salt Lake City's main homeless shelter. | AP Photo

When The Road Home opened in the 1980s, Rio Grande was a no-man’s land. Since then, thanks to Salt Lake City’s gentrification, coffeehouses, a shopping mall, and rehabbed housing stand a mere block from the city’s modern Skid Row. “People are moving there to live,” Bailey said. “The homeless are, frankly, in the way.” Yet their population is growing—by 20 percent in a year, according to one estimate. Bailey blames rising housing costs, low wages, Utah’s rejection of Medicaid expansion, and the national opioid epidemic.

Biskupski campaigned on addressing Rio Grande’s problems with a mix of strategies that reflect her background: progressive activist and law-enforcement professional. A former private investigator with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, she was hired as a civilian employee of the Salt Lake County sheriff in 2007, while still a member of the part-time state legislature. She worked for the sheriff for eight years, until she ran for mayor.

“One of the things I kept saying to the public was, ‘Look, we can’t just run around, arrest a bunch of drug dealers, take them to the jail, and watch them come out the revolving door because there’s no room for them at the inn,’” Biskupski said. “We have to be strategic in how we’re going to separate the criminal element from those experiencing homelessness.”

So in late September, the city police and county sheriff launched Operation Diversion, several days’ worth of drug arrests in Rio Grande. Dealers went to jail, while users were offered a choice: jail or treatment. Crucially, before the arrests, the county set aside jail space for the dealers and treatment beds for the arrestees. The operation won praise from social-service providers and the neighborhood, and the Utah ACLU expressed cautious optimism. Biskupski said most addicted arrestees chose treatment, and their progress has been encouraging.

“Operation Diversion is still being monitored,” she said. “Are people leaving treatment? Are they going back out and buying again, and are we re-arresting? What we’re finding is, we have a higher success rate on treatment than we had anticipated.”

But Biskupski and other local leaders are struggling to replace The Road Home’s 1980s-era emergency shelter model with new ways to deal with homelessness. When Biskupski took office, she inherited a new, but untested strategy that had broad support among city and county officials. The plan was for the city to build new, smaller homeless centers (local officials avoid the term “shelters,” to stress that the new model is different from The Road Home). There, the county would offer social services to different homeless populations based on their various needs.

But this is the point where the consensus breaks down. It’s Biskupski’s job to figure out where to put the centers, since Utah gives mayors broad power to buy city property. And while she inherited a site selection committee that wrote unbiased criteria for placing the new centers, this has not helped Biskupski make her case to the neighborhoods she has designated to take the facilities.

Instead, the homeless debate has led to rifts between the mayor and both the city council and county leadership. Initially, Biskupski proposed two shelters, one for men, one for women, but after a contentious debate, she yielded to the city council’s insistence on four smaller sites to spread the impact. In December, after consulting with the council, Biskupski announced the four locations: three in the central city and the Sugar House site on the East Side. Backlash was swift. Sugar House residents complained the process wasn’t transparent. The mayor and city council chairman say they kept the decision closely held to preserve their negotiating power and avoid a war among neighborhoods.

“You can’t just say, ‘Not in my neighborhood, but in that neighborhood, it’s OK,’” Biskupski says. Her campaign website declared that no homeless shelter should be moved to the city’s West Side, which is home to much of the city’s Hispanic population and already has several social-service providers. Biskupski said one of the Sugar House residents who spoke to her after the council meeting in early January suggested moving the homeless center to Glendale. “Well, Glendale is west of the freeway,” she said. “It’s exactly what we don’t want to have happen. We don’t want to create a divided city.”

But Salt Lake City is dividing anyway. During the hunt for sites, Penfold said, the council talked about the importance of staying united. That hasn’t happened. The council members who represent Sugar House and a neighboring part of town have come out against the site. So has county Mayor Ben McAdams, who argued this month that the city should build affordable housing there instead.

As a candidate, Biskupski pledged to have an affordable housing plan ready in her first 100 days as mayor. It’s still not done. Biskupski said the homeless issue and a $10 million budget shortfall were much more time-consuming than she expected. This fall, the council diverted money to affordable housing to try to push her into action, a move she argued was improper.

“We all know we need a real plan for housing,” Biskupski said testily. “I am going to take time to create a real plan.” Her office now says she’ll unveil the plan this month.

Critics say Biskupski is also suffering the consequences of her decision to let go many of the previous mayor’s aides and bring in her own team. “They’re hampered by a lack of municipal experience,” said Penfold, the city council chair. “I think people are learning on the job. That’s delayed things.”

Homeless advocates give the mayor credit for naming shelter sites. “It’s harder to site a homeless shelter than a prison in some ways,” says Bailey. But they want more urgency on affordable housing. They’re also critical of Biskupski’s December announcement that The Road Home will close once the four new centers open. That would leave just 600 beds in the new centers, compared to the 900 currently available downtown.

Bailey says Biskupski is betting that new programs to help the homeless and prevent homelessness, plus new affordable housing, will reduce the demand for shelter beds. “Don’t announce you’re going to close the shelter at an arbitrary time,” he says. “Reduce the demand and prove these new strategies work.”

Biskupski says she’ll keep listening to residents, but she says many people’s fears are based on “misinformation.” They think a neighborhood homeless center will attract the downtown shelter’s problems. She thinks the new model—separate centers for men, women and families, with intensive services—will prevent that. She thinks Sugar House could be a good spot for homeless families with children. “We want to be sure that children who experience homelessness are living in a neighborhood, not a business district,” she said.

Biskupski hints at the dilemmas that urban progressives face when they actually try to apply ideals of equality to a city’s toughest issues. “I want people to realize that we as leaders are showing up with courage, facing very harsh realities of the dynamics down by the shelter today, and moving forward with a new model,” she said, “because the community has been asking that we do something.”

The city aims to have the four new homeless centers built and open within two years. That could be just in time for a mayoral challenger to use them as an issue against Biskupski in 2019.