I just read Julia O’Malley’s “You can drive through Midtown” column. Buried deep in it, in the eighth paragraph, she wrote that the truth is there is no total cure for homelessness — on this one statement we disagree. There is one ready, housing. Radical, I know, but no-barrier housing for everyone that will accept it is a total cure for homelessness. Let’s remember the population of Anchorage is shrinking, not growing, thus there should be more housing, not less, but somehow we seem to have a very high rate of homelessness, when at one time we could shelter all the unhoused people successfully.
I know it works because Finland — the nation that seems to be the model for everything, even happiness — decided a decade ago they were going to take a moon shot and the citizens made a goal of no unhoused people; it worked. Now they have less than 0.5% unhoused people.
Here are the real-world, hard adult facts: We can make a choice to invest and house our citizens, or we can live with people in ugly encampments. For everyone who asks who pays, I don’t need to go on about the amount of wealth that is extracted from Alaska every year and the amount we waste and give away to both people and corporations.
— Shawn O’Donnell
Anchorage
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