Anchorage homeless face cold and bears. A plan to offer one-way airfare out reveals a bigger crisis
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Shawn Steik and his wife were forced from a long-term motel room onto the streets of Anchorage after their rent shot up to $800 a month. Now they live in a tent encampment by a train depot, and as an Alaska winter looms they are growing desperate and fearful of what lies ahead.
A proposal last week by Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson to buy one-way plane tickets out of Alaska’s biggest city for its homeless residents gave Steik a much-needed glimmer of hope. He would move to the relative warmth of Seattle.
“I heard it’s probably warmer than this place,” said Steik, who is Aleut.
But the mayor’s unfunded idea also came under immediate attack as a Band-Aid solution glossing over the tremendous, and still unaddressed, crisis facing Anchorage as a swelling homeless population struggles to survive in a unique and extreme environment.
Frigid temperatures stalk the homeless in the winter and bears infiltrate homeless encampments in the summer.
A record eight people died of exposure while living outside last winter and this year promises to be worse after the city closed an arena that housed 500 people during the winter months. Bickering between the city’s liberal assembly and its conservative mayor about how to address the crisis, and a lack of state funding, have further stymied efforts to find a solution.
With winter fast approaching in Alaska, it’s “past time for state and local leaders to address the underlying causes of homelessness — airplane tickets are a distraction, not a solution,” the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska said in a statement to The Associated Press.
About 43% of Anchorage’s more than 3,000 unsheltered residents are Alaska Natives, and Bronson’s proposal also drew harsh criticism from those who called it culturally insensitive.
“The reality is there is no place to send these people because this is their land. Any policy that we make has to pay credence to that simple fact. This is Dena’ina land, this is Native land,” said Christopher Constant, chair of the Anchorage Assembly. “And so we cannot be supporting policies that would take people and displace them from their home, even if their home is not what you or I would call home.”
Bronson’s airfare proposal caps a turbulent few years as Anchorage, like many cities in the U.S. West, struggles to deal with a burgeoning homeless population.
In May, the city shut down the 500-bed homeless shelter in the city’s arena so it could once more be used for concerts and hockey games after neighbors complained about open drug use, trespassing, violence and litter. A plan to build a large shelter and navigation center fell through when Bronson approved a contract without approval from the Anchorage Assembly.
That leaves a gaping hole in the city’s ability to house the thousands of homeless people who have to contend with temperatures well below zero for days at a time and unrelenting winds blasting off Cook Inlet. At the end of June, Anchorage was estimated to have a little more than 3,150 homeless people, according to the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness. Last week, there were only 614 beds at shelters citywide, with no vacancies.
New tent cities have sprung up across Anchorage this summer: on a slope facing the city’s historic railroad depot, on a busy road near the Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson and near soup kitchens and shelters downtown.
Assembly members are slated to consider a winter stop-gap option in August falling far short of the need: a large, warmed, tent-like structure for 150 people.
