Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance said her administration is working to ramp up the clearing of major homeless camps.
At a press conference Wednesday, she said her team would start to abate two large homeless campsites at Davis Park in Mountain View and the nearby snow dump site in early summer.
“Encampments are dangerous,” LaFrance said. “They're not safe for the people living in them. They're not safe for people living near them. Let me also be clear that being homeless is not a crime.”
LaFrance said 23 homeless camps have been cleared since January. The Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness estimates there are more than 500 unsheltered people in the city.
Farina Brown, a special assistant to the mayor who focuses on homelessness issues, said city officials are working to connect homeless residents from cleared camps to various resources.
“Our goal is to absolutely ensure, through our coordinated shelter providers, that we can connect and help that person,” Brown said. “If it's a linkage back to warming or other supports that are not just the muni-operated shelter.”
When asked about the gap between the number of people who are homeless in Anchorage and the amount of housing or shelter space available, Brown did not have an exact figure. She acknowledged that while there is some capacity at the city’s shelter, she expects there will be days when there are not enough beds.
LaFrance said her administration is hoping to address issues at camps through two other avenues. She said prosecution of crimes committed at camps and by homeless residents should improve with the recent full staffing of the city’s municipal prosecutor positions.
She added that the city also now has year-round shelter.
“In the past, shelter was primarily emergency shelter increased around cold weather, and we recognize that it needs to be available year-round,” LaFrance said. “And so we have done that.”
The last year-round shelter Anchorage had was the Sullivan Arena, which operated as a mass shelter from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic until 2023. Brown said the city’s current shelter has a smaller capacity and increased access to services like case management, behavioral health and emergency medical technicians.
