In sign of policy change, city will clear Midtown Anchorage homeless encampment this week, with more to come

Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance said Tuesday that the municipality will begin clearing a large homeless encampment at Fairbanks Street in Midtown later this week.

City officials say the move is the beginning of a new approach to homeless policy, partly as a result of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that has freed the new administration to take a more assertive role in dispersing big camps.

The Fairbanks Street encampment has drawn scrutiny from residents and businesses for months because of health and safety concerns. In late June, a man was killed and another injured during a shooting there. Since then, elected officials have faced mounting public pressure to clear the camp.

Unlike many Anchorage homeless camps tucked discreetly in the woods or off trails in greenbelts, the stretch runs parallel to a busy Midtown Home Depot just off of Tudor Road, with shelters and debris spilling over the edges of the sidewalk onto the street.

On Tuesday afternoon, city officials began posting notices for abatement — the municipality’s term for dismantling and dispersing homeless camps — on vehicles, structures and trees in the area. A handful of Anchorage Police Department officers were present, walking from encampment to encampment, speaking with people about alternate shelter options and services.

“We started doing some outreach efforts Monday,” Police Chief Sean Case said in a phone interview, “to give people advance notice of the abatement process that started today, and also to determine if there are some resources we can point people to.”

Over the last several years, the city has largely cleared camps only when there were shelter beds to offer homeless residents. Two previous decisions from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that protected homeless residents’ rights to sleep on public property when no alternative indoor shelter was available. But last month, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned one of those decisions, giving cities more legal latitude to clear encampments.

Assembly members, residents and the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness have questioned why the administration had not yet ordered people to leave the area, given the safety problems.

Assembly Chair Christopher Constant said former Mayor Dave Bronson’s administration had the legal authority to dismantle the camp in June, directly after the shooting.

“I’m glad the new police chief and the legal department are taking seriously the public safety issues that the camp and others have made apparent,” Constant said.

According to Case, several factors led officials to clear people from the site just this week. The LaFrance administration took office July 1, firming up its executive and legal teams over the last few weeks, and needed time to examine the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision, he said.

Another reason was the location and the camp’s visibility, he said.

“Businesses have a vested interest in the area. And they’ve been vocal,” Case said.

According to the LaFrance administration, within the encampment were “41 units being used as shelter.” Cars, trucks and RVs were scattered up and down the block Tuesday, many lived in or cluttered with possessions. In between were small tents and several shacks built from pallets and scrap wood, tarps and lengths of clear Visqueen stretched over some of them to blunt the weather.

“We knew it was coming,” said Melvin D’Anza, who has lived on Fairbanks Street for several months in a makeshift wooden hut that stood about chest height.

“It’s not water-tight, and it definitely ain’t safe,” D’Anza said of the structure. “Just don’t push on it and it won’t fall on me.”

The administration cited a section of municipal laws allowing the city to clear a campsite immediately, when “exigent circumstances” pose a serious risk to human life and safety, Case said.

The number of shelters in the encampment also exceeds 25, he said. In May, the Assembly by ordinance directed the city to prioritize encampments with more than 25 tents, huts or other shelters, including vehicles.

Beginning with federal court rulings in 2019 and through the COVID-19 pandemic, local governments have faced restrictions on how they can respond to homeless encampments. But over the last few months, conditions have begun shifting. According to Case, the abatement at the Fairbanks Street site is not a one-off, but the beginning of a new policy by the LaFrance administration toward significant homeless camps.

“I think what you’re gonna see is from this moment on, we’re going to have a much more rapid response, because that homeless plan that the mayor is developing is now coming into action,” Case said, adding that the police department has identified other trouble-prone camps for abatement actions in the future.

“Abatement itself doesn’t solve the problem of unsheltered homelessness,” LaFrance said in a statement Tuesday. “But it is a tool to break up dangerous areas like what we’ve seen on Fairbanks Street.”

The city needs to “get out of crisis response mode and build toward a future where we have more housing and options for people who are sleeping outside, less crime, better economic opportunities and a community we are all proud to call home,” LaFrance said during her opening remarks at Tuesday night’s Assembly meeting.

After the June shooting, teams from the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness stopped providing regular street outreach inside the camp, citing risks to safety, and notified the city and police of the change, said the coalition’s executive director, Meg Zaletel, who is also the Assembly’s vice chair.

“This is the third time in three years this has happened,” Zaletel said, referring to shooting incidents at Centennial Campground in 2022 and an encampment near downtown at Third Avenue last summer. The coalition also stopped going into those camps due to safety concerns.

“Why are we waiting until something gets as bad as that, is my question,” Zaletel said.

After seeing serious problems in large encampments, the coalition advocated for the city to limit camp sizes in city statutes, she said.

Municipal code sets out legal grounds to abate camps that grow too large and unsafe, and sets the city’s criteria for prioritizing camps.

“I hope we can learn our lesson and stop repeating what’s going on here. Police response is appropriate when there’s a public safety concern. That’s not a homelessness response at that point,” she said.

Midtown Community Council President Kris Stoehner, during a meeting last week, implored city officials to clear the encampment. On Tuesday, Stoehner said she’s relieved the city is finally taking action.

But concerns remain, she said.

People began staying along Fairbanks Street when the city dismantled the former encampment near Cuddy Park, just a few blocks away. People who had lived in the Cuddy Park area relocated to the strip of land along Fairbanks Street.

“I just hope that the people leaving that camp don’t all congregate in another area. It will be the same problem,” Stoehner said.

Assembly member Anna Brawley, who sits on the Housing and Homelessness Committee, said “it’s realistic to assume that we’ll see another site nearby, unfortunately, that becomes the next place where people congregate.”

But Fairbanks Street is “obviously not a safe place to be, and there’s a lot of people being victimized,” so abatement is necessary, she said.

Asked where he would go now that abatement was underway, D’Anza pointed down the street.

“Over there somewhere,” he said. “A hop, skip and a jump away.”

Marc Lester contributed reporting.