Park Strip homeless protest in Anchorage has morphed into a homeless camp at odds with the city

What began with tents on Anchorage’s Delaney Park Strip, set up in early July as a protest of Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s budget vetoes, has morphed into a group of homeless campers occupying the woods on the east side of Valley of the Moon Park, said a spokeswoman for a nonprofit organization working with the group.

Justina Beagnyam, who said she is a former Bean’s Cafe employee now part of an organization called the Alaska Poor People’s Campaign, was part of organizing the original protest. At first, the protesters, aiming to bring attention to Dunleavy’s broad vetoes of funds to homeless services, were not homeless, she said.

“We encouraged people who were camping to bring extra tents ... then we started lending them to people that were homeless,” she said. “They just stuck around.”

That was three weeks ago. Beagnyam now is helping with the food, shelter and organizational needs of what she described as a “self-governing” homeless camp in the woods on the edge of Valley of the Moon Park. They have moved a couple of times and have had several run-ins with Anchorage police.

None of the advocates who originally organized the Park Strip protest are sleeping there, Beagnyam said. The group of homeless people, which has been in the park since the weekend, meets daily to talk about the community goals, she said. The campers have assigned jobs. They voted in members and have limited their group to 50. They call it “Camp Here.” It is no longer a protest, she said, though a number of protest signs remain posted around the camp.

“This all just happened organically,” she said.

Anchorage police have visited the campers several times since the protest, according to Nancy Burke, homeless services coordinator with the Municipality of Anchorage. When campers were located on the Park Strip, the city used the formal camp abatement process to clear them out, she said. They moved briefly to Westchester Lagoon and then settled in Valley of the Moon. As of Tuesday afternoon, the city had not yet posted signs at their camp to begin the legal process of clearing it.

“They are there supporting each other, they are finding community, they are finding healing. Those are all things we support, but we just can’t support a group of people taking over a public park,” Burke said.

The fate of the camp is complicated by the ongoing debate over the state budget in Juneau. If Dunleavy’s vetoes stand, it will reduce state support for homeless programs by 85%, from $14.1 million to $2.6 million. Cuts would hit hardest in Anchorage, where they would cripple the infrastructure that keeps people off the streets, dramatically shrink shelter space and increase the unsheltered homeless population by as much as four times over the next year, organizations have said. Without shelter space, Burke said, the city cannot clear any camps, including the one at Valley of the Moon.

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Alaska Poor People’s Campaign is a chapter of a national organization with Christian roots, based in Washington, D.C. Its website says its mission is “deepening the leadership of those most affected by systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, and ecological devastation and to building unity across lines of division.” Beagnyam said her group, which is loosely affiliated with some local churches, including the First Congregational Church of Anchorage, has been active a few years, Beagnyam said. This is its highest-profile action.

Many of the campers said that the environment at Brother Francis Shelter was too chaotic and they wanted some limits on who could be at the camp, Beagnyam said. Asked about liabilities or other problems that might happen among campers that would be hard to manage, Beagnyam said she it wasn’t an issue.

“I’m not worried at all. They would be camping regardless. All we’re doing is saying you guys come together, there’s safety in numbers. You build your community,” she said.

A woman staying at the camp Tuesday afternoon who said her name was Beverly Cano, 36, said that she’d recently become homeless because of “family problems.” She is a mother of five, she said, but wasn’t able to take care of her children at the moment because she had nowhere to live. Part of her problem was that she lost her ID, she said. Without an ID, she couldn’t get started on the paperwork to get into housing or find work, she said. Being at the camp was soothing, she said.

Another camper, Daniel Ayagarak, 45, said he’d been homeless the better part of 20 years. He and some others were camping on the Park Strip when they saw the protest and decided to join it, he said. He also found Brother Francis too crowded, he said. He also liked having duties at the camp, he said, and it made him less likely to drink.

Beagnyam said the campers would like to find a way to become more permanent, with a year-round camp, possibly consisting of tiny homes or other small shelters, she said.

Burke said she was trying to contact churches involved to see if they could find a place for the camp.

“This could move to private property and would not be an issue for anyone,” she said.

Many people have explored the idea of some kind of permanent homeless camp, Burke said. Alaska’s winters make the prospect complicated, if not untenable. There are liabilities that must to be taken care of with training and other measures, she said. There are rules about sanitation and safety. The cost of putting one together is “almost what it would take to do a 50-unit apartment building,” she said.

“There’s a lot that goes into structuring something that you can say is safe,” she said.