Anchorage officials say the number of people hoping to move from outdoor camps into one of the city’s shelters is now double that of its expected capacity.
The city’s health department anticipates bringing a new shelter online Wednesday, which would add roughly 150 beds to Anchorage’s strained homelessness response system.
“In total, we have about 1,000 people who are wanting to move throughout the sheltering system,” said Alexis Johnson, Anchorage’s homelessness coordinator.
The city anticipated needing to find roughly 450 beds at the end of the summer, but that number grew when the city started putting people on a shelter registration list, Johnson said.
“We had people that, you know, were not seeking outreach that maybe didn’t stay in emergency shelter last winter, that are actively seeking this winter,” Johnson said. “And so I think the number’s north because of the way that we gathered information this year.”
The city plans to open its former Solid Waste Services building as a shelter on Wednesday. Combined with two other city shelters at the Alex and Aviator Hotels that opened earlier this month, that would bring the total number of beds in the city-run shelters to about 524.
The city health department, which handles homelessness issues, is also focused on finding more permanent housing for the roughly 500 people currently using the shelters, Johnson said.
“I think we’re gonna let the emergency cold weather shelter system kind of settle and really reevaluate what the need is,” she said. “Because maybe the need is something like a complex care facility or a shelter for elders or something like that.”
The city is working to move people out of three small encampments around Anchorage, but Johnson said doesn’t anticipate any large-scale camp clear-outs in the near future, like what was recently done at a downtown encampment nicknamed “Tent City.”
The city is currently looking at a potential fourth building to use for a city-funded shelter, with a goal of providing an additional 150 beds, Johnson said.
Wesley Early covers Anchorage life and city politics for Alaska Public Media. Reach him at wearly@alaskapublic.org and follow him on X at @wesley_early. Read more about Wesley here.
