Anchorage city officials suggest hotel rooms, small warming areas and volunteer efforts for winter homeless sheltering

For the first time in several years, Anchorage isn’t planning to shelter its hundreds of homeless residents in a singular mass facility over the winter. City officials on Wednesday revealed an emergency cold weather shelter plan with an assortment of ideas, which include opening non-congregate shelter in hotel rooms and relying largely on volunteers to staff several small warming areas in public or privately owned buildings.

The city would need to get creative, like relying on donations and volunteers, and find workarounds to some of its rules and regulations. But the biggest wrinkle to the plan is the most important — finding the money to pay for it all, according to Alexis Johnson, the city’s homeless coordinator. Johnson presented the plan to the Assembly’s Housing and Homelessness Committee on Wednesday.

“We are now approaching a fiscal cliff,” Johnson said. “And I know that’s scary verbiage, but we no longer have our reserves of alcohol tax. All the funding that we have identified for this year is one-time. It will not come back next year.”

And that money, if the Assembly chooses to re-allocate it toward shelter, would only be enough for the first few months, she said.

“We are out of money. And our plans, although they may be decent, are not going to sustain” beyond Jan. 1, she said.

Over the last two years, the city spent about $25.5 million on homelessness efforts. That includes direct spending on its former winter shelter in Sullivan Arena and in hotels, and funding given to outside organizations providing services such as outreach, Johnson said. That level of funding isn’t sustainable, she said, and the portion of the city’s alcohol tax revenue that goes toward homelessness has already been allocated for the year.

Still, Assembly members on the committee expressed some confidence that the money could be found, suggesting possible funding streams, such as unspent money from the 2022 fiscal year.

“The big takeaway is that we just need to find a way to fund it all, right? So that’s going to be a big part of the work going forward,” said Assembly member Felix Rivera, who chairs the committee. “... We still have time to do this work. I think we are at a good point right now.”

The city is months behind on closing out accounting for its spending in 2022. Assembly Chair Chris Constant said he believes there will be leftover funds that could be used, in part, to address the coming “cliff.” And, projections for the city’s bed tax are 30% higher this year, “to the tune of millions,” he said.

The city should also look for ways to use tax credits to incentivize hotel owners to open rooms for shelter, Constant said.

In the first two years of Mayor Dave Bronson’s term, the Assembly’s majority and administration officials fought bitterly over how best to address the city’s homelessness crisis. The mayor favored building a shelter large enough for several hundred people, while Assembly members and many social service providers favored a housing-first approach, advocating for several small, population-specific shelters and services located in different neighborhoods across the city.

Wednesday’s meeting was markedly different from those of the recent past. Members largely discussed the plans from Bronson’s homeless coordinator with tones of alacrity instead of frustration.

“I’m blown away, in a very positive way, that for the first time, I believe this administration has put forward a document that demonstrates a proposal for a scattered site model,” Constant said.

About 750 people left shelter to live outside this spring when the city closed its winter shelter operations in Sullivan Arena and in the Alex and Aviator Hotels. Right now, officials are planning for only about 400 people who will need shelter this winter, Johnson said.

That’s because over the last year, the city has helped fund conversions of hotels into low-income housing. It recently opened the former Golden Lion Hotel to house people with physical disabilities who might otherwise be homeless. The additional 300-plus housing units are creating movement in the homelessness response system, Johnson said. Spots in private shelters are opening as people move into housing from shelters, while others are moving directly into housing from living unsheltered on the street — so the city can estimate about 300 fewer people will need shelter, she said.

Also, about 40 or 50 have plans to continue camping during winter or to stay with friends or family, she said.

[Anchorage hotel conversions are adding hundreds of low-income housing and shelter units at a time of dire need]

Private shelters in the city are full and all but one are unable to add capacity for the winter, even with more funding, Johnson said.

To shelter about 400 people in hotel rooms for six months, November through April, it would cost between $6.3 million and $7.4 million, officials estimate.

That comes with other issues besides funding. While many people do better in non-congregate settings and those programs see better outcomes compared to mass shelter, not all fare well in hotel rooms, Johnson said.

“One question that we cannot answer is, when people are kicked out of a non-congregate setting, where will they go? Last year, we had some people that were not allowed to go back to non-congregate settings, and we marshaled them to the Sullivan Arena. And so we don’t have a facility of that nature this year,” Johnson said.

If the city finds municipality-owned, state-owned or even privately owned buildings, volunteers could run several small warming areas, health department officials said.

“People are willing to help. And there potentially is a greater volunteer network out there that we haven’t tapped into yet,” said Michael Hughes, homelessness planning coordinator with the Anchorage Health Department.

To reduce costs for food, the city could coordinate a restaurant donation program, solicit other donations from grocery stores or purchase MRE meals. It could cut red tape by waiving health permits, fees or commercial kitchen requirements for volunteer groups like churches, nonprofits and others who want to cook and donate meals, health department officials told members.

It may be possible for the city to offer restaurants tax credits or rebates in return for their donations, Constant said.

Certain building code requirements are inhibiting church groups from opening winter warming areas in their buildings, and they can only operate warming areas that require sobriety. The city should look into code changes to reduce those barriers, officials said.

Johnson also told Assembly members that, because the city is required in code to activate a winter shelter plan, it should have a dedicated funding mechanism for that.

But, ultimately, shelter is “the most expensive method to keep people under a roof,” she said.

Bronson’s stalled project to build a large shelter and navigation center would cost around $8 million each year to run. (The Assembly is holding a work session on a proposal to revive the project on Friday, and is scheduled to vote next Tuesday.)

The city can’t pay for those operations costs, Johnson said, adding that “the state needs to step up. They need to provide funding.”

Assembly members said the situation underscores that increasing housing stock and making it affordable to low-income people is the most prudent and effective solution.

That the city is planning to shelter 400 rather than 750 people “means we’re making progress,” Constant said. “And that’s what people need to understand. That’s nearly 50% of the people that we’ve identified that would be on the streets, who will be housed.”

Johnson largely agreed, and said the city needs to explore using federal funding for housing, rather than sheltering.

“I do want to say there’s good work being done. Year over year, we’re bringing on more housing. We’re just not there yet,” Johnson said.