June 2 – For the first time since 2021, Anchorage enters the peak summer months with a city-run, low-barrier homeless shelter.
While Anchorage’s new mayor says maintaining the shelter is a priority, its future beyond the end of June remains uncertain due to an expected change in operators and unresolved funding.
This summer, about 200 of Anchorage’s most vulnerable people are staying at the mass shelter on East 56th Avenue, just off Old Seward Highway. The shelter is located in the former administrative building of the city’s Solid Waste Services. The cavernous space once housed garbage trucks but is now home to unhoused people, who live in tightly packed cots and are allowed two bins full of belongings.
The situation offers more shelter than the past two summers. In 2022, unhoused people were directed to a municipal campground in East Anchorage when the Sullivan Arena shelter closed for the summer. Last summer the city offered no shelter at all. Lacking that, large encampments grew on Third Avenue and Ingra Street, near downtown, and in Cuddy Park in Midtown Anchorage. As more people live outside, the number of deaths outside the home is increasing.
The numbers are not exact, but city officials say they estimate more than 500 people are living outside around Anchorage this summer.
The cold weather shelter was scheduled to close by June 1 due to a lack of funding, but an Assembly appropriation of about $500,000 allowed it to continue operating through the end of this month, said Assemblymember Felix Rivera, chairman of the housing board. and the city’s housing organization. homelessness committee.
After that, the city hopes to receive about $4 million for Anchorage’s protection from the state, which will allow the shelter to continue operating until October, Rivera said. The money has entered the state budget, but “it’s not guaranteed until the governor signs the budget,” Rivera said.
It is not clear whether Governor Mike Dunleavy will veto the funding or not. Dunleavy has not yet made any decisions on vetoes, his spokesman said.
“The budget bills have not yet been sent to the governor,” spokesman Jeff Turner said in an email. “Once that happens, he will analyze the bills and decide whether to veto the line items.”
Questions from operators
The city will also have to find another shelter operator: The private nonprofit that runs the large-scale shelter says it does not plan to run the shelter after the end of June.
“We’re going to focus on other things,” said Henning Inc. CEO Shawn Hays.
Henning Inc. is being investigated by the Anchorage Assembly after a series of disturbing text messages between employees and the city’s top homelessness official became public in May.
Rivera said a reporter was the first to tell him that Henning would not offer to continue running the shelter. An investigation into the allegations against Henning — including text messages that raised questions about election interference — is not expected to be completed for several weeks.
“The allegations about Henning are very concerning to me,” he said. ‘I need to know if they are valid or not. If they are valid, I would like to terminate any contractual relationship.”
Hays has denied the allegations. In a letter to the General Assembly sent Tuesday, Hays wrote that the text messages had been “misinterpreted and taken out of context.”
Rivera said he hopes an existing organization will expand their capacity and take on management of the shelter.
“Otherwise, it’s hard for me to imagine that a completely new operator will emerge,” he said.
The city health department plans to issue a request for proposals for an entity to operate the shelter from July through December, the department said. According to Hays, the last time Henning was the only group to attempt to operate a mass shelter.
All the changes are happening as Anchorage is about to see a consequential leadership transition, with the administration of newly elected Mayor Suzanne LaFrance taking office on July 1.
In a statement, LaFrance said she was “committed to maintaining current shelter capacity and developing a comprehensive shelter plan before winter.”
“My focus now is on building a competent, qualified team to prepare for the work ahead,” the statement said.
In the summer residence
Thursday morning, a van pulled up to the entrance to the shelter building and a slow trickle of people got out. They had moved from the Aviator Hotel, a downtown non-congregational shelter that gave unhoused people their own hotel rooms. With funding for the program set to expire at the end of May, people trickled out throughout the month and ended up in other situations, said Alexis Johnson, the city’s homeless coordinator.
The people who got out of the van at the shelter were among the last to leave. Some were close to being housed through transitional housing programs, Hays said. For them, the mass shelter would be a stopover.
“Hopefully they will come out in a few weeks,” she said.
Inside, cots were packed an arm’s length apart, a far cry from the days of social distancing in the cavernous Sullivan Arena. While the space is better in some ways than the Sullivan’s — a sports and entertainment arena with lots of stairs, dark corners and concrete — it is still essentially a garage, Hays said.
“We still think it is inappropriate for people to have to take shelter in a garage,” says Hays.
The target group was older, with gray hair and wheelchairs in the room.
“We’re finding that the people who want to be in shelters (in the summer) are people who need help” and want to work with case managers and get three meals a day, Hays said.
At the height of the summer months, “There are people who have been camping for decades and they automatically go back outside,” she said.
Cindy Cornell sat outside the shelter. She had been to every type of shelter Anchorage had to offer over the years – from Sullivan Arena to camping at Centennial Park in the summer of 2021 to Brother Francis and many more. Lately, she had spent a lot of time at the shelter this past winter. Still, she had developed frostbite on her feet, with blisters that didn’t seem to go away, she said. She was on all the housing lists, she said.
Cornell said there weren’t enough bathrooms to accommodate residents or microwaves to heat the prepackaged meals being distributed.
Darrell Thompson was in a wheelchair. He’s lived at the Sullivan Arena, the Aviator Hotel, Complex Care and now here. Thompson said he recently had surgery for an infection in his foot. He showed drains snaking out of his leg. He was also connected to a supplemental oxygen machine. It’s not easy being disabled and living in a shelter, he said.
A friend handed him a bag of breakfast, packaged oatmeal.
“But there are some of the most generous and kindest people in the world here,” he said. “Some not so much.”
The worst part about living in a shelter is the rules, he said. “They treat us like five-year-olds here,” he said. ‘They tell us what we can do. We can’t do that. When we can go in and when we can go out.”
Still, Thompson believed the shelter was needed for the summer.
“It keeps people off the streets,” he says. “If they were on the street, Walmart, Carrs, Fred Meyer, they’re all getting ripped off. Because these people have no food, no place to go.”
The number of people camping outdoors typically peaks this time of year as the weather warms, said Mike Braniff, head of the Anchorage Parks and Recreation Department.
The city plans to dismantle a large encampment on the hill above the Alaska Railroad depot near Ship Creek on June 2. The camp was originally given 72 hours’ notice, but officials decided to give residents more time, Braniff said.
Meanwhile, other encampments have sprung up in new areas: Some of the people living in RVs and cars in Cuddy Park have moved to a short stretch of Fairbanks Street, on the north side of the Home Depot store. A dense camp of vehicles, tents and makeshift structures has grown.
Fairbanks Street is “on the radar,” Braniff said, but there are no immediate plans.
A tent camp has also sprung up on the sidewalks of Karluk Street, near the Brother Francis Shelter in Ship Creek.
There are also no plans to immediately dismantle that area, Braniff said.
Daily News reporter Emily Goodykoontz contributed.
