The city of Anchorage plans to open 24 tiny homes in mid-October to help people transition out of homelessness.
The city announced Thursday that the project, called Microunits for Recovery Residences, will be located on the southwest corner of Elmore Road and East Tudor Road, close to the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium and the Anchorage School District’s bus lot. Visser Construction is set to build the two dozen homes, which will each be 96 square feet and house one person, according to the city.
The tiny homes, which the city is calling “microunits,” will be used to house people seeking treatment for substance misuse, said Thea Agnew Bemben, a special assistant to Mayor Suzanne LaFrance who is leading the project.
“It's a way of us creating some immediate supply that can provide a place for people to stabilize, so that they can more successfully move into more permanent housing,” Agnew Bemben said.
It’s the first time the city government will use tiny homes to house people who are homeless. To do so, the city is partnering with the Anchorage Community Development Authority.
A much smaller effort launched by the local nonprofit In Our Backyard has been operating in Anchorage for the better part of a year. Agnew Bemben said she learned a lot from that project and from others around the state.
“We feel confident that we can have a bigger group of people, because that's what's working in other locations,” she said. “We have recovery residences operating in Wasilla and Fairbanks, and they run at that scale. So we know that that can work.”
Residents of the city’s tiny home neighborhood will be part of a structured recovery program, Agnew Bemben said. The plan is for them to have case workers and treatment for behavioral health and addiction.
Assembly member Felix Rivera, who represents the district where the tiny homes will be located, said he hopes the project will serve as a test case for both the city and other community organizations.
“If we can just replicate this again and again and again in different parcels of land around the municipality, I see a lot of potential for that,” he said.
The city has set aside $1.2 million from an opioid settlement to fund the project's construction. Rivera said the program should become sustainable, because the plan is for the treatment facility to be operated by a behavioral health organization that will bill Medicaid.
Requests for proposals on operating the treatment facility are set to go out sometime in August, the city said.
