LAYTON—Davis Behavioral Health is building a new housing complex for their clients located next door to their main facility in Layton. Construction has begun on a 60 unit development called Timberwood Creek. Davis Behavioral Health purchased the property in 2023 and started construction in 2025. Completion is anticipated to be at the end of January 2027. 

“The units will be single occupancy,” said Ryan Westergard, Chief Financial Officer at Davis Behavioral Health (DBH). “So they’re really studio units. It’s three levels.”

It’s intended to be permanent supportive housing, he said. “It’s nice because it’s right next door to our main outpatient clinic and headquarters building so we’re able to be right here to help provide services.”

Westergard said DBH will be able to surround them with other services. “Hopefully when some of them are stable enough and ready we’ll be able to help transition them into other options within the community.”

It’s all for clients of DBH, he said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with homelessness other than we’re trying to prevent homelessness. It’s not for homeless individuals. It’s for clients of DBH that might be at risk of homelessness that we’re trying to prevent from becoming homeless. It’s our way of trying to help with homelessness by getting upstream instead of dealing with it after the fact.”

Westergard said they don’t want people to get the wrong idea of what this is. “This is an effort to help some of these clients that don’t have a lot of other options for housing.”

Builders have used mass timber so it’s going to have a lot of exposed, natural looking wood in the building. Photo by Jaime Krohn

 The approximately 54,000 square foot building will have a front desk that is staffed 24/7, he said. “That controls access for people coming to visit. It makes it a safe place for clients where they don’t have to just have visitors that can come whenever. They can kind of control who they want to come and visit and if they don’t want visitors they can just let the front desk know.”

DBH is the Medicaid provider in Davis County, said Westergard. “That’s why we exist. These folks are our Davis County residents.”

Clients are selected by a housing committee at DBH, he said. “Our clinicians are able to refer people to the housing committee and then the committee looks at it and determines what type of vacancies we have and who is most appropriate to go into those vacancies. We always have more people on that housing list than we have beds available.”

There will be a full-time housing manager onsite, Westergard said. “That manager works for us and he does that for all of the housing that we have currently. His office will be in this building. We think having him right here and being staffed 24/7 gives us better opportunities to monitor what’s going on and to just check in on them all the time and to know the condition of the apartment and if they’re needing extra help.”

KIER Construction is the contractor, he said. “Timberwood Creek is the name of the development.”

This building is a little unique in some of its construction, said Westergard. “It’s being built with a lot of trauma-informed concepts. We’ve used what they call mass timber so it’s going to have a lot of exposed, kind of natural looking wood in the building which is supposed to add to that trauma-informed design.”

It’s a concept out there that is definitely used in behavioral health, he said. “A bunch of the therapy methods that we use are trauma-informed therapy.”

 A lot of these folks have experienced some kind of trauma in their life at an earlier point and they can have certain things that are triggering for them that make their illness worse, Westergard said. “So we try to avoid some of those things that could be trauma triggering and bring up things from their past.”

This building has a lot of natural light that comes into it to make it so that there’s no dark spaces, he said. “The stairwells have windows in them to make it so there’s not a confined dark space because it may be that some of them experienced something like that and it was traumatic earlier in their life.”

Lots of use of natural materials is supposed to be very comforting for them, said Westergard. “It’s just to make it so that it’s a welcoming, comforting place for them to live.”

Davis Behavioral Health is located at 850 S. Main Street, Layton..