Uncertainty looms for unhoused people remaining at Anchorage’s Centennial Park Campground who will soon be kicked out

Phillip Demientieff rubbed at a fouled bike sprocket, a few feet from a half-burnt birch round and blackened kettle sitting on a grate over a dead cook fire.

“It’s really empty. Very empty,” Demientieff said of Centennial Park Campground, where his tent was pitched among several others, pallets and plastic sheeting propping them up off the cold mud.

For almost four months, the Municipality of Anchorage experimented with a new approach to homelessness, shuttering a large-scale shelter that had occupied a hockey arena for over two years and guiding hundreds of people to an outdoor campground across town, in East Anchorage.

Now, that chapter is ending. The city reopened a mass shelter inside Sullivan Arena and for the last few weeks has been trying to steadily close Centennial to homeless campers, some of whom have dug in over the course of months. Notices were posted in September all around the grounds telling the remaining campers, somewhere between 70 and 100 of them, that they have to move on, even as it’s uncertain where they can go.

The deadline to leave is Thursday. That, according to the omnipresent postings and municipal officials, is when city employees will start moving through, clearing encampments, carting off trash, supplies and possessions alike, some of it for temporary storage and the rest for the dump.

On Monday, with a few days to go, Demientieff planned to move along and camp elsewhere.

“I’m gonna pack up and move. Anyway, winter is coming,” Demientieff said.

Crews from the municipal Parks and Recreation Department and Community Action Policing team are scheduled to arrive on scene and begin overseeing abatement proceedings, the city’s tightly regulated process for clearing camps.

[ADN Politics podcast: Back to the Sullivan Arena — the latest on Anchorage’s homelessness crisis]

Fierce, sustained criticism followed the decision by Mayor Dave Bronson’s administration to move people out of Sullivan Arena to the sparse public campground squeezed between the Glenn Highway and northern part of Muldoon. Services for elderly, addicted and disabled people staying there were almost nonexistent. Black bears raided tents, and five bears were shot dead by state wildlife employees. Complaints of violence, theft and widespread substance abuse were constant. And the second half of the summer turned cold and wet, drenching campers, many of whom were ill prepared to live in the elements with few ways to keep warm or dry.

At the end of September, with winter weather bearing down, the administration announced it would reverse course, reopening low-barrier shelter beds inside Sullivan Arena and clearing encampments from Centennial. It assisted dozens of homeless people from the campground move back in, transporting them on city vehicles with two plastic totes’ worth of possessions to keep beside cots laid out on the stadium floor and in hallways. The facility, which is currently approved to house 150 people, quickly hit capacity.

[Bronson administration approved $4.9 million for construction for East Anchorage homeless shelter without required Assembly approval]

As Sullivan was being reassembled as an emergency shelter, the city was steadily winding down Centennial. Vehicles can no longer drive in and out. Free supplies and meals are over. Though there are still Port-a-Potties scattered around the campground, workers welded metal plates over the doors to the bathroom facilities and shut off the water spigots.

Among those still staying in Centennial is Virginia Christie, who on Monday was bundled under a thick scarf and heavy jacket bearing a whistle dangling from the zipper, her bright blue eyes blazing from inside a sweatshirt hood.

“We’re trying to get something accomplished today,” Christie said. She was figuring out how she and a friend could get to another part of town to meet with a case worker, “to try to figure out what’s going on with housing. To get out of here.”

The Sullivan and a few other shelters with stricter requirements for admission aren’t an option, she said. Even if there was room, she and many other campers have more stuff than will fit in the modest storage allotted, not all of it allowed inside.

“Knives, hatchets, any weapons of defense. Some people have paraphernalia,” Christie said.

Though Centennial has thinned out from this summer, when upwards of 200 people a night were estimated to be staying there, it is not markedly safer, according to Christie, who has been staying there since June.

“Wherever you go, you have a buddy. Try not to go anywhere by yourself. That’s male or female,” she said.

The bladed tools aren’t only for self-protection. Keeping warm has been a persistent struggle for campers. Hatchets and axes for splitting wood sit out by some campsites. Earlier in the summer, the city was dropping off cords of firewood for people to burn.

Though that stockpile is all gone now, the air still smells like a campfire. Thin wisps of smoke trickle out of burn rings, the occasional metal stove pipe juts cockeyed out of ripped tent tarps, and half-charred logs lay all over the place. Birch stands have bands of bark freshly peeled off their trunks at head-height, a wilderness trick for kindling a blaze. Other small trees are hacked, pulverized, splintered or chopped apart.

“We pretty much gotta scavenge-hunt,” Christie said of firewood.

People are keeping warm with propane and electric heaters, or snaking blue and yellow extension cords to the few power posts still working. As the population has dwindled and temperatures creep down, campers have moved from the outer edges of the woods in toward the main loop “so they can have access to dropping a cord,” Christie said.

“And everyone’s cuddling together, pretty much,” she said of nights inside tents. “There could be anywhere from two to maybe six.”

In the weeks since the Bronson administration announced an end to sanctioned camping at Centennial, the social service providers who stepped in to meet basic needs this summer have largely left. There are no more daily meals doled out. The Salvation Army is not managing distribution of donated supplies from an on-site container any more. There are no security guards at all. The gate into the park is locked, bolstered by adjacent fencing, and city workers have had to move thigh-high boulders into grassy paths through the woods after people started using them discreetly to drive in and out once the main entrance was barred. Water for drinking or washing is a considerable distance away off site.

“To me, that’s really inhumane,” Christie said. “You have to walk in and out. So you have to haul water. And I understand why they’re doing it, they’re trying not to enable us, but all they’re doing is just making it more difficult and causing more crime.”

Without free food or supplies on site, Christie said, desperate people shoplift from grocery stores and other businesses.

“People are just surviving right now,” she said. “I want the community to know what’s going on over here.”

If abatement moves forward, there are literal tons of material at campsites that will have to be cleared. Several RV campers that have seen better days are still on site, and plenty of other vehicles are either stripped to the axles for parts or appear barely drivable.

Some of the encampments stretch across the full length of gravel pads at campsites, made from layers of tents, tarps and blankets to buffer the cold, with some further fortified by lengths of chain-link fence, stacks of tires, PVC pipe and rope fences marking boundaries. Others are little more than bivouacs, lean-tos bolstered by a pallet or plastic sheeting. On Monday afternoon, a spastic red squirrel furrowed and tugged at a wet blanket draped over the rain fly of a red single-person tent ringed with empty containers. It was unclear if anyone was inside.

Even as the city moves to clear people out of the campground, it’s unclear where they can go. Under federal court rulings, the municipality can’t kick people off public lands if there’s no alternative shelter space for them to go, and even with Sullivan Arena back online, the city’s dashboard tracking open beds shows almost none available.

“We will only abate if there’s shelter space,” said Bronson spokesman Corey Allen Young, adding that bed availability is assessed on a day-by-day basis.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the posted notices still call for abatement on Thursday, though Young said city officials will have to make a determination on the day of whether there’s anywhere for people to go.

“The priority is people and their personal belongings,” Young said.

The Parks Department plans to have people on hand with the necessary equipment for hauling people’s possessions off for short-term storage, as is required under city code.

One group with concerns about the pending abatement is the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness.

“It is very disruptive and shuffles individuals around the community. One of the negative results is that street outreach teams must reestablish contact with individuals once they have moved,” said Owen Hutchinson, who directs external relations for the coalition. “It is frustrating and difficult to plan with campers where they might go, or to identify options to move out of unsheltered situations without adequate shelter capacity. If outreach receives a potential location for shelter the day before or day of abatement, it is very difficult to plan transportation and moving.”

Though the coalition and other groups that work with people experiencing homelessness are not necessarily against abatement itself, the targeted closure of Centennial follows a summer-long pause in camp clearing that’s led many encampments across the city’s greenbelt to balloon in size.

“Overall, it is unclear how the municipality prioritizes which camps for abatement. Having more clarity would be helpful to assist with outreach efforts,” Hutchinson said.

The coalition sees non-congregate options, like the double-occupancy rooms at the Alex Hotel recently approved for funding by the Assembly for emergency use this winter, as better options for getting people off the streets than either outdoor camps or mass shelters. If that facility can be opened by Thursday, it may — at least on paper — provide legal cover for the city to follow through on abating Centennial without the risk of violating campers’ civil rights.

“I’d imagine that the administration is right now very hurriedly trying to get the 55 units at the Alex Hotel online as non-congregate shelter,” said Felix Rivera, who chairs the Assembly’s committee on housing and homelessness. “The administration is going to, at the very last minute, make the legal determination on whether they can legally follow through with the abatement as posted.”

The current policy decisions are driven entirely by the Bronson administration, which has not consulted with members of the Assembly, Rivera said.

He called use of the campground this summer a “horrific chapter in the municipality,” and hopes city policy can turn back toward a focus on supportive housing, substance abuse beds and affordable units for residents transitioning out of homelessness.