The city dismantled a Midtown Anchorage homeless camp. Almost immediately, another formed nearby.

After the city cleared a large homeless camp on Fairbanks Street last week, another encampment has settled in Midtown Anchorage along a busy stretch of East 33rd Avenue, near a rock climbing gym, busy restaurants, a hotel, a clinic, a daycare, a dance theatre studio and numerous other businesses and agency offices. A few other camps are also now scattered on streets nearby.

The situation has led to outcry from business owners in the area, who are calling for the city to remove the camp. They say the area is experiencing a surge in criminal activity, trespassing and drug use, which they say has come with the camp’s establishment.

Homeless residents in the area say they moved there from Fairbanks Street because they had nowhere else to go. There isn’t an area in Anchorage where they are allowed to camp in the tents, vehicles and RVs, which now line the northern side of 33rd Avenue between Old Seward Highway and Denali Street.

Anchorage officials forced homeless residents to leave Fairbanks Street, between East 40th and 42nd Avenues near the Tudor Road Home Depot, following similar outcry from businesses and residents over serious public health and safety issues. A man was killed in a shooting at that camp in late June.

“They just moved the problem down the road,” said Laurie Mapes, who owns Alaska Premier Health, a clinic on the corner of 33rd Avenue and Fairbanks Street.

People working and visiting businesses in the area are experiencing harassment, said Mapes and Rod Hancock, founder and majority owner of Moose’s Tooth.

The bustling pizza restaurant at Old Seward and E 34th Avenue is generally packed with tourists and locals all summer.

Hancock, who also owns the Bear Tooth Theatrepub in Spenard, said there have been homeless around his restaurants “pretty much for 28 years of doing business and Anchorage — but this was a whole different level,” he said.

This time, it’s mostly vehicles, instead of just tents, he said.

“This whole caravan moved in... and immediately you saw a lot of drug activity, people congregating there under tents and things, and then coming out really intoxicated on whatever they’re using, and harassing customers and staff, and wandering into the facilities and the bathrooms and just really making a ruckus and scaring people,” Hancock said.

The restaurant has changed how it runs its to-go service area after thefts of food, he said.

Mapes now keeps the doors locked at the clinic 24/7, and employees and patients are escorted in and out.

“I was watching a guy yesterday on my back porch over here, getting all his drugs out, getting these things all set up, getting his tourniquet out. He has his aerosol, you know, and he’s spread out on my porch over here. What am I supposed to do?” Mapes said on Thursday.

Mapes and Hancock want the city to take action at 33rd Avenue, but also worry the camp would just move to another area of the city.

“What’s the bigger solution? Because if it was Lowes’ and Home Depot’s problem before, now it’s Rock Gym’s and Moose’s Tooth’s problem, it’s going to be someone else’s problem if you just take the whack-a-mole approach,” Hancock said.

In a statement Friday, Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance’s office said the situation is “an example of how abatement itself is not a solution to the problems playing out on our streets and trails.”

“We will continue to abate areas as they pose a significant public safety threat and as we have resources to do so. We also recognize the need to have a wider services continuum available to reduce the number of unhoused individuals. That’s where year-round shelter planning and housing come into play.”

City officials and the police department are tracking the situation at 33rd Avenue, and performing daily cleanup, the mayor’s office said.

It’s also monitoring “several encampments that pose safety concerns,” including some near schools, according to the mayor’s office.

“We will have information about which abatements will be posted next on Monday,” the statement said.

From camp to camp

After enduring several days of heavy rainfall, people in the 33rd Avenue camp were relieved for a break in the weather Thursday afternoon.

“My feet and my clothes, I mean, physically, like from head to foot, I have been wet for three days. I finally am beginning to dry,” said Denali Ketah, who is staying in the camp.

Ketah, 40, has been homeless in Anchorage for about two years, and doesn’t have another place to stay, she said.

“The campsites are full, like, legitimately, they’re full. So there is an overflow of people. The homeless shelters do not have the bed space for the amount of people in the homeless population,” Ketah said.

Beneath a tarp still dripping with rain, Ronald Coulson sat in a chair just outside his RV, fixing the bicycle he rides to run errands.

“With me, I can’t go to an RV park because I got no money. This is all I get to do,” Coulson said, gesturing to his bike.

Coulson, 58, fixes bikes mostly exchange for food and gas, sometimes for a little money, he said.

“I maybe work on the one bike, three, four days, and it’d usually take a person a day to do it. For me, I messed my back up in a truck wreck. I’ve been fighting Social Security for six years to get disability, and the still ain’t give it to me. So that’s disability for you.”

Six years is about how long Coulson has been homeless “this time,” he said. He’s moved from one camp to another, over and over.

Last summer, he lived in the RV at a previous large encampment near downtown at Third Avenue and Ingra Street. When the city cleared that camp last fall, he moved to Midtown to the empty lot near Cuddy Park. The city dismantled that encampment earlier this year, and Coulson moved to Fairbanks Street. Forced to move from there last week, he’s now parked on 33rd.

He’ll stay there for a while, likely until the city abates the camp, “probably within about a week,” Coulson said, guessing.

“I’m usually pretty close to being right about it. Everybody hates me for it,” he added.

To Ketah, 33rd Avenue area feels safer than the recently abated area of Fairbanks Street. It’s well lit, with businesses and security cameras around. She hasn’t heard any gunshots there.

“Being here, this is all a temporary thing, hopefully,” she said.

Ketah said she wishes there was an empty lot or area where the city would let them stay.

“There are those of us who are here, who, we don’t thieve. We do not vandalize things, items, places of business or whatnot. There are many people who try speaking to us and try to come and associate with us who we ignore or ask them to just leave or to go away, because we’re already stigmatized,” Ketah said.

Some people do come through the camp and cause problems, she said. Some inebriated people defecate or urinate on the street, she said.

“We do not enjoy being out here — I don’t,” she said.

‘Chaotic and frustrating’

The Mayor’s Office said the administration has “three major goals these next few months: 1. Address significant public safety concerns, 2. Implement a shelter plan ahead of winter, and 3. Build dependable and predictable year-round shelter plan and address housing needs.”

Upcoming plans will “take vehicles and RVs into account,” the Mayor’s Office said. LaFrance’s special assistant on homelessness, Farina Brown, will be speaking with people in encampments “to learn more about the factors that make camps dangerous and how they can be mitigated.”

“We’ve started the work to ensure that we are going to be in a different place as we continue to move forward,” the Mayor’s Office said.

In April, the Anchorage Assembly laid the legal groundwork to create “designated safe parking areas” for homeless people living in vehicles.

The camps at Fairbanks Street and 33rd Avenue “are the perfect examples of the need for these designated areas for folks to go to,” said Assembly member Felix Rivera, who represents Midtown.

But the former Bronson administration did not set one up when winter shelters closed at the end of May, Rivera said. LaFrance took office in July.

“We’re really in this unfortunate transition period where all of these, this nexus of issues, are all coming together, and people want to see action,” Rivera said. “Now we have a new administration that’s still staffing up, that’s dealing with all of these issues from the old administration, and now they’re having to try to figure out these huge and critical safety and health issues.”

“This is a horrible situation for everyone,” he added.

The city has successfully cleared two other small camps, and, with the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness, moved those people directly into housing, Rivera said.

But when encampments become large and unsafe, like the former camp at Fairbanks Street, it’s difficult for street outreach and other social workers to go in and offer services.

“And in the absence of a working model on how to address this situation, it’s just somewhat chaotic and frustrating,” Rivera said.

Rivera said he believes the LaFrance administration will make headway, but it will take some time.

Community frustrations over camps have been growing for years, he said.

“I feel like we’re a little bit at a boiling point here, and we need something to happen,” Rivera said.