Anchorage cleans out homeless camps for the first time in mid-winter, raising concerns among advocates

This story was originally posted by Alaska Public Media and is republished here with permission.

It’s a relatively balmy 25 degrees as Lucille Williams drags a cart down a bike path in the Mountain View neighborhood of Anchorage.

The temperatures turned the snow to mush in some places, leaving Williams breathless. Above the cart is a repurposed dog house filled with pots and pans, blankets, tarps, and other items.

“What we have is kind of what we really have, which is next to nothing,” she said.

Williams, 46, said her body ached from living on the streets and shivering from Anchorage’s winter temperatures. She has a bruise under each eye – she doesn’t say why.

She’s exhausted, but has to get to her next campsite — about a quarter mile away in another city park — before city workers come to clean her current home. As part of the city’s clean-up program, park department workers stapled a paper notice to a tree near her old camp warning her that she had ten days to move out.

The program has been around for years in the summer, but starting in late December, for the first time, Anchorage began reducing homeless camps on public property during the winter months. The Department of Parks and Recreation says it has cleared more than 50 camps since Dec. 22.

Policymakers say this will put pressure on campers to seek refuge in shelter or accommodation, where they will be safer and have more direct access to services.

“Winter reduction is – should be this little nudge, to get people to a type of situation where they can get help, they can get help,” said Felix Rivera, a member of the Midtown Assembly.

He supported allocating about $650,000 of the city’s liquor tax revenue to the reduction of camps.

But advocates worry about the city’s approach and say the city doesn’t offer viable alternatives to camping.

“We just don’t have any units available,” said Jessica Parks, who oversees housing for RurAL CAP, one of the nonprofits that serves campers directly. “And if we have units available, they’re not always the right unit types.”

Williams said she has no plans to move to a shelter, despite outreach from RurAL CAP and more than 100 beds open at Sullivan Arena, the city’s main shelter. She’s been there before, but prefers the outdoors.

“There are a lot of problems (in the shelters), a lot of people stealing and they only give you what you can bring,” she said. “And then there’s the whole COVID thing.”

Some other campers are drug addicts or suffer from PTSD which makes life difficult in a shelter alongside more than 400 people. Some are banned from the Sullivan and other havens for bad behavior on previous stays.

By law, the city is required to have open space in shelters before it can tear down a camp. This prevented the city from making cutbacks in October, November and December, when the Sullivan was typically at capacity or above.

In late December, the city increased the Sullivan’s capacity to about 100 people. It’s unclear what changes the operator has made to accommodate the extra people. The city did not respond to a request to tour the facility and speak with the city’s senior homelessness coordinator, Dave D’Amato, that Alaska Public Media made on Jan. 10.

Residents have long complained of low nighttime temperatures in the arena and broken bathrooms, which has forced residents to use portopots since last summer.

The current living situation at the Sullivan is undesirable for many people without a permanent home, advocates say.

“My God, sharing a bathroom is really hard with two teenagers and you can just amplify that problem when you host … 510 people at Sullivan Arena,” said Owen Hutchinson, spokesperson for the Anchorage Coalition to Put end homelessness, which coordinates awareness of the reductions.

This means that many residents who do not want to be sheltered simply move from one illegal campsite to another.

“It’s a ball game,” said Parks, of RurAL CAP. “You just clear out a camp, and they just move out and set up camp somewhere else.”

Outreach workers sometimes help campers move, as part of a process of building relationships with campers in the hope that one day they will be willing to look for accommodation. Jerry Staten is one of the workers.

Each day of the week, he travels around town on a pre-determined route of known campsites. He brings cigarettes, sandwiches and blankets and knows many campers by first name.

Often he is joined by other social workers who help campers enroll in Medicaid or food stamps. If campers are interested, Staten says he’ll help them get clean clothes and even set up a job interview. It will also register them for Coordinated Entry, a housing waiting list that prioritizes the most vulnerable campers coordinated by the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness.

But being on the Coordinated Enrollment List is not a guarantee that campers will be housed in the near future due to housing shortages and eligibility nuances.

“If you go out and say, ‘Hey, sign up, if you talk to me and I’ll put you up,’ that’s a promise you can’t make,” Staten said.

In some ways, the clean-up issues are the same the city has had for years. The difference, proponents say, is that during the winter months, campers face significant risk of frostbite whenever they are forced to move.

Campers often spend weeks in the fall winterizing their camps by constructing platforms from wooden pallets, draping tarps over their tents, and installing foam insulation on walls and floors.

Brian Vaughn, who camps with the same group as Lucille Williams in Mountain View, has recently had his camp toned down.

One morning last week, he found himself shivering in a bare-floor tent in a Mountain View park. This is almost the exact spot where he had a tent in the fall before it was taken down in September. Vaughn appealed because there wasn’t enough space at the Sullivan for all the campers at the time, and thinks the city won’t bother him now that he’s backed off during his appeal.

It lost supplies during the last cut, including tents. The zipper on the door of the current tent is torn and several other campers are bundled up next to him.

“It’s tough because a few months ago we were normally supposed to prepare for winter by doing the cold weather upgrades,” he said. “Now we’re on the move again, sitting here on a patch of ice.”

Within days, the camp is filled with supplies covered with tarps for insulation. Campers insist their belongings are legally owned, although sometimes parks and recreation staff throw away items they consider scrap.

“We kept telling them, ‘That’s not trash, stop taking it,'” Vaughn said, describing a recent cut, “And they laugh at us about it.”

Parks and Rec says they are doing their best to make the discount as easy and safe as possible for campers by working closely with campers and coordinating with the weather.

“If it’s raining, for example, and we can look at the forecast and see that tomorrow will be better if it’s snowing or just freezing cold,” said Mike Braniff, who coordinates discounts for Parks and Rec. . “The only thing we don’t want to do is jeopardize campers’ safety to meet a deadline. So we are certainly adaptable.

Braniff said decisions about when and where to remove camps are often made for public safety reasons — both for campers and neighbors. Camps can be a fire hazard in some areas, and Braniff says camping on school roads has been a problem.

“Whether it was right next to a highway or – gosh, there were a number of situations with structures that weren’t safe,” he said. “We are also approaching it for this reason.”

Some advocates and Assembly members have expressed concern about the city’s confusing communications about the cuts, which has made it unnecessarily difficult for campers.

The city did not publicly announce that it had begun winter camp cuts until an Anchorage Assembly housing committee on Jan. 26, where City Manager Amy Demboski said it was happening. “on a limited basis” in certain neighborhoods with a priority on public safety.

She said that supplementary questions from the Assembly should be submitted in writing.

Lawyers said the city never stopped posting discount notices at campsites when the Sullivan was over capacity, which Braniff with Parks and Rec denied. RurAL CAP, Covenant House and the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness say notices were posted around campsites in November and December, even though the camps were never cleared.

Parks, with RurAL CAP, said this affects the relationship outreach workers have with campers.

“When we can’t even give them some certainty about the information we have, it really undermines some of that trust,” she said.

For people like Williams, camping is worth it, even with the added risk of discount. It’s what she’s used to and she doesn’t have to worry about anyone but those in her group.

“It became like our place of comfort, like we were fine here,” she said. “It’s just us – we don’t bother anyone.”

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