Leaders at Anchorage’s keystone homelessness nonprofit are raising the alarm over what they describe as an affordable housing emergency.
Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness executive director Meg Zaletel said her organization recently announced a program to provide rental assistance to community members.
In just two-and-a-half days, Zaletel said, “1,300 households said they were either 14 days from losing their housing or already experiencing homelessness.”
“That's shocking, quite frankly,” she added. “Those households, 808 of them have a child.”
Zaletel said the need is likely much higher, and speculates that they would’ve seen more demand if they’d opened the application period for longer. She said the city’s homeless response system is at capacity, with shelters and transitional housing programs full, and roughly 500 people currently on the streets.
“Family shelter capacity diminishes significantly during the summer,” Zaletel said. “So if 808 households have a child, are we going to see families on the streets of Anchorage this summer? I don't know, but I don't want us to be surprised by it.”
Zaletel said another reason the need to bolster housing assistance is vital and timely is due to a number of cascading community impacts on the horizon.
“This number is before federal layoffs,” Zaletel said, “before possible layoffs from ASD based on their budget, before economic impacts due to tariffs, before rising food costs, before slowdowns in SNAP or anything else.”
Zaletel said she doesn’t know the best way to address the looming affordable housing crisis, but she's hopeful that the dire nature of the nonprofit’s data will help spur community members and government bodies to come together to work on a solution.
Officials with Mayor Suzanne LaFrance’s administration say they're working to address the concerns raised by the coalition.
“This is not a new emergency,” LaFrance spokeswoman Berrett Wilber said in an email. “Our housing challenges are years in the making. We know we need more housing and more shelter.”
Wilber said the administration hopes to soon start dispersing over $5 million in federal funds for housing assistance. Specifics on how the money will be distributed are expected to be made public next week. Additionally, the city is looking to transition away from the cold weather shelter model to a more year-round approach.
“This new system will have a predictable baseline of beds in the summer and the flexibility to scale up more beds in the winter,” Wilber said.
