Will Campos boarded the new Fairview shuttle one Sunday afternoon, headed to the grocery store. He was hoping to get three weeks worth of food.
“I’ll just get what I could fit in this bag,” he said, laughing wryly and gesturing to a duffel on the seat beside him.
Campos is a security guard and works 12-hour night shifts. He used to go to the Carrs in the neighborhood once or twice a day. But then it closed. The nearest grocery stores are about a mile away. Campos doesn’t have a car, so in the couple months after the store shut down, he walked, which took a lot more time, and a lot more planning.
“It has been very stressful and unfortunate,” he said.
Campos’ situation isn’t uncommon in Fairview. A lot of people in the low-income neighborhood don’t own a car. Getting groceries without one can be hard, since the bus route only goes downtown, away from the closest stores. On foot, it’s hilly, and sidewalks are sometimes nonexistent or, in the winter, buried in snow berms. Cars whiz by at high speeds. That’s why, in the weeks after corporate owner Albertsons Companies announced the store closure, several organizations and municipal agencies scrambled to find a way to connect the people of Fairview with the food and medicine they needed. They landed on the free shuttle as a longer-term fix got underway.
A team effort
Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance was among them. She remembers the announcement in April — the store would close in May.
“It was like, ‘What? This is horrible. This is devastating. What a blow,’” she said. “I mean, it's served such a need in that community.”
The Fairview Community Council held its monthly meeting just a couple days later. LaFrance decided to go.
“Connecting with the community, going and hearing firsthand from them about the concerns and about their ideas, was very important to me,” she said.
It was clear residents were worried, she said, but they also had all sorts of suggestions.
For example: Could the city create a new bus line to take them straight to the nearest grocery stores in Midtown?
LaFrance said she talked with folks from the Public Transportation Department. They told her it would be hard, since a new line can cost millions of dollars and take years of planning. But they had another idea. By using existing bus stops, a reroute could be done without extra funding. The only problem was that the shift wouldn’t be ready until late October.
That meant more than six months without transportation for the residents of Fairview. So the mayor’s office reached out to NeighborWorks, a nonprofit with a mission to strengthen communities and a history of working in Fairview. Could they put together a shuttle service to fill the void? Lyndsey Hajduk is with the organization. She said it was an easy “Yes.”
”When the community says, ‘Here's what we want to do,’ we want to be able to support them in doing that,” she said.
The Assembly managed to find $75,000 for the shuttle. That was just enough to contract with a private company to run it on the weekends. NeighborWorks took care of the details, and launched the shuttle in mid-July, a couple months after Carrs closed. The organization also did outreach, trying to make sure everyone in the community knew about the service.
‘I love it’
The effort is already a success, Hajduk said. Ridership on the shuttle is averaging more than a dozen people per day. Those are great numbers, according to the Anchorage Transportation Department. Hajduk said she’s heard from people in the neighborhood who say they’re delighted – and surprised – that the municipality prioritized their food security.
“To have the city step up and support this again, not just for Fairview, but for Downtown, for Government Hill, for all these neighborhoods that no longer have safe access to food or pharmacy, it is a big deal,” she said.
She said she’s glad that next month, the rerouted bus line will plug the gap in a more permanent way. NeighborWorks contributed to that effort as well.The nonprofit partnered with the transportation department to survey Fairview residents about what would be best for them, looking at which city bus stops were most practical and what route would be most useful. It’s important, Hajduk said, that the reroute really meets the community’s needs.
Gary Buchman lives right by the now-closed Carrs grocery store. On a recent Saturday, he was riding the Fairview shuttle home after shopping for staples like cereal and milk and mild cheddar cheese. He said he’s been using the service since it started in mid-July. He grinned as he looked around the shuttle.
“This is a blessing,” he said. “I love it. I got a ride to the supermarket today ‘cause of this blessed shuttle.”
Buchman said when the reroute comes online, he’ll ride that too.
