Anchorage officials face mounting public pressure to clear Midtown homeless encampment

It’s been just over a month since a man was killed and another injured during a shooting at a large homeless camp on Fairbanks Street in Midtown Anchorage.

Since then, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling has upended legal protections for homeless residents and has given cities more power to enforce camping bans.

Neighbors and business owners in the Fairbanks Street area say the city hasn’t done enough to mitigate escalating problems with public health, safety, crime and drug use at the encampment.

Frustrated, they’re calling for the city to clear the encampment and move people, vehicles and tents out of the area.

“It is very, very dangerous. We cannot allow this in our community,” Midtown Community Council president Kris Stoehner told Assembly members and other city officials during a meeting Wednesday.

Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance’s chief of staff, Katie Scovic, said the Fairbanks Street camp “is a top priority as we look at potential upcoming abatements.”

Officials have not said exactly when the city will begin abatement, the city’s official term for dismantling and dispersing a homeless encampment.

In a written statement, LaFrance said there are “extensive public safety concerns that impact the surrounding community and also the people in the camp” and that the encampment will be addressed “in the near future.”

“This is a camp that has existed for over 60 days at this point. And the trend lines that we’re seeing suggest that it is only becoming more dangerous and not less dangerous,” Scovic said during the Wednesday meeting.

Scovic said the administration sees abatement as a public safety tool, and that it is “not a solution to the experience of homelessness.”

“We need to focus on housing and services and shelter and making sure people have places to go and ultimately getting to a point where fewer people are camping in the first place,” Scovic said.

‘Abatement with nowhere to go’

LaFrance, elected in May, took office on July 1 — just about a week after the Fairbanks Street shooting, in which two men fired 17 gunshots into the crowded row of tents and vehicles, according to criminal charges against the men.

The encampment runs along the edge of a busy Home Depot off Tudor Road. It’s also near a small strip mall, numerous other businesses and offices, a liquor store and a hotel.

[Earlier coverage: Midtown Anchorage camp where a man was killed is a site of despair and dysfunction, neighbors say]

Stoehner told city officials that the businesses “have lost millions and millions of dollars from theft and vandalism and other things.”

“We have human waste on the roads. We have motor homes who dump their waste underneath them. We have needles — we have a lot of needles. One of the hotels had to hire someone to clean the needles up off their area,” Stoehner said. There are children in the camp, she said.

“We have guns, knives and machetes. On and on,” she said.

LaFrance’s administration is assuming city governance at a time when an estimated 500 homeless residents are living unsheltered this summer, sleeping in vehicles, tents and makeshift structures in city parks, green spaces and streets, while homeless shelters are largely full.

“Abatement with nowhere to go just pushes it to another neighborhood,” Assembly member Karen Bronga said.

During abatements in the recent past, the city has offered homeless campers spots in shelters. Right now, that’s largely not possible, especially for encampments where dozens of people are living.

“Everyone is demanding us to act, but there’s no action that we can take to achieve a successful outcome that is anything more than just pushing them into someone else’s corner” of the city, Assembly Chair Christopher Constant said Friday.

The city did clear a small encampment early in July, and the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness moved the campers directly into housing. City officials and the coalition are preparing to do the same at another small encampment.

But there are hundreds of other people living outdoors who have no shelter bed or housing yet available to them.

The municipality is also grappling with financial problems and serious staffing issues across its departments and agencies, described in a transition report from the former Bronson administration.

In her Friday statement, LaFrance cited staff vacancies as a hurdle to managing and clearing encampments.

“Our abatement policy calls for cross functional collaboration, and as noted in the Transition Report, multiple departments have significant vacancies,” LaFrance said. “We are feeling the impact and working to staff up, and looking to be strategic and responsive with limited resources. Fairbanks Street will be addressed in the near future. Funding is always a constraint, but public safety is the priority.”

A shifting legal landscape

In late June, just after the shooting at Fairbanks Street, city officials in the former Bronson administration said poorly defined rules in city code about people living in vehicles on city streets meant the city did not have the legal latitude to disperse the camp.

Junk or abandoned vehicles can be towed. But when someone depends on a vehicle for shelter, forcing them to move or towing the vehicle becomes much trickier, officials said.

Meanwhile, a recent ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court has since significantly shifted the broader legal landscape for how cities can handle homeless encampments. The decision now allows cities to enforce camping bans, even when there is no alternative indoor shelter available to homeless residents.

[Taking cue from Supreme Court, mayor to launch aggressive homeless sweeps in San Francisco]

The city Department of Law is working to develop and provide officials with “the legal framework ... that the law requires the municipality to operate within,” Municipal Attorney Eva Gardner told the Assembly during her confirmation hearing earlier this month. Gardner was recently confirmed in the role by a unanimous vote of the Assembly.

For Anchorage residents and homeless advocates, the decision has created numerous questions about whether the city would take a tougher tack on encampments.

“The legal landscape changed, but the reality hasn’t changed,” Constant said. “The simple act of having the power to abate doesn’t actually give these people a place where they can go.”

There are several large camps in Anchorage and smaller ones scattered throughout the city, Constant said.

At times, “they are probably equally as problematic” as Fairbanks Street, he said.

“The question everyone’s asking is, how do you prioritize them?” Constant said.

[Earlier coverage: What the Supreme Court’s ruling on homeless camps could mean for Anchorage]

LaFrance on Friday said the administration is operating under its existing internal policy for abatement, which then-Mayor Dave Bronson approved in April.

That policy outlines prioritization criteria for deciding which camps to abate — guidelines that are somewhat similar to the criteria the Assembly recently outlined in city code.

Internal policy tasks the Anchorage Police Department’s Community Action Policing team, the Parks and Recreation Department, the Health Department and municipal manager with coordinating and carrying out camp removal, including outreach to campers.

The policy — written before the Supreme Court overturned the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision on camp clearing — dictates that the city can only clear encampments when shelter isn’t available in some limited circumstances.

Gardner on Wednesday said the administration is currently “attempting to harmonize” the internal administration policy with the Assembly’s changes to city code and a new overall approach to abatement.

“One thing we are excited to do is, to work with you to bring those two things — the administration’s policy and city code — into alignment with a more nuanced, informed, humanitarian, practical approach to these problems,” Gardner told Assembly members.

The LaFrance administration is still transitioning into office.

[Gov. Gavin Newsom orders California officials to clear homeless encampments]

The mayor said that Municipal Manager Becky Windt Pearson starts on Monday and that the homeless coordinator, Farina Brown, will begin on Aug. 5. They will take the lead on policy efforts, LaFrance said.

Stoehner, the Midtown council president, told officials Wednesday that she agrees abatement is not a solution to homelessness.

“But we’ve got to abate this camp. We’ve got to break it up somehow,” she said.

Scovic said that when encampments reach a certain size and level of criminal activity, dispersing the situation can itself be a positive outcome. But the city needs to talk about what steps should follow, she said.

“We’re taking this seriously. We want to do it right, and do it thoughtfully,” Scovic said.