Anchorage Midtown homeless shelter set for closure and replacement this year

Every night at Anchorage’s congregate shelter on East 56th Avenue, homeless clients fill up 200 green cots, spread in rows across the concrete floor of a vehicle maintenance bay in Solid Waste Services’ former administrative building.

The walk-in, low-barrier shelter has been at or near capacity on most nights since the city first opened it at the end of October 2023, to serve as a temporary emergency cold weather shelter through spring of last year.

A $4 million grant from the state helped keep its doors open through 2024 and into this year. But the shelter has an approaching expiration date: In mid-October, the Anchorage Health Department’s lease on the building ends.

It will go back to Solid Waste Services and is slated to become a materials recovery facility to improve recycling services, according to officials in Mayor Suzanne LaFrance’s administration.

The move would be a major shift away from the city’s approach to sheltering over the last five years, and back toward the largely privately run shelter system that existed before the pandemic — but with more shelter capacity and services, and a dedicated funding stream in the municipal budget.

The Midtown facility “was never anybody’s first choice of shelter location,” said Thea Bemben, special assistant to LaFrance, during a visit to the shelter on Wednesday.

The roof above the shelter area leaked until it was replaced in December. The women’s area is separated from the men’s by a makeshift barrier of tables placed end to end and draped in black plastic sheets. There’s just a handful of toilets and showers for use inside the facility, and there are port-a-potties outside the building.

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A contractor providing third-party oversight of the shelters for the city reported that the Midtown facility has seen problems with bedbugs, its laundry service and transportation options for clients over the last several months, but in recent reports noted the issues have improved.

Though the location is far from ideal, it provides crucial services to some of the city’s most vulnerable residents.

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Clients can get basic medical care at the on-site clinic in a small suite of back rooms. In another area, a behavioral health clinician and case managers work with clients.

“Those are human beings helping other human beings, and that’s what we’re paying for, and that’s the most important, valuable part of it,” Bemben said. “And that can go on in a lot of different types of buildings.”

The shelter also has a room where clients’ pets can stay. A few dogs and a cat lay quietly in separate crates Wednesday.

A shuttle takes people to the Third Avenue Resource & Navigation Center twice a day, where people can get showers, cellphones and access to other services like case management.

The administration plans to try to replace the shelter capacity by funding organizations to run a few smaller locations via a competitive bid process, and not using city-owned buildings, Bemben said.

That process hasn’t begun and there are several months to plan ahead, she said. The administration will seek input from the Assembly and community, she said.

The city already provides money to privately run shelters, Bemben said, including Catholic Social Services’ Complex Care facility, the Brother Francis Shelter and Covenant House Alaska’s youth shelter.

The goal is to solidify a year-round shelter system with smaller, “scattered” sites around the city, Bemben said.

“We see this approach as part of that of getting to a more stable system where we don’t have this kind of ramping up, ramping down (of shelter) over the course of the year,” she said.

That cycle of the city opening shelter in the fall and closing it in the spring is disruptive to everyone — the homeless clients, service providers and the city — and deters some residents from using the shelters, said David Rittenberg, senior director of adult homeless services with Catholic Social Services. The nonprofit has been running the shelter under a contract with the city since October.

However, for the coming months, the building on East 56th Avenue remains a critical piece of a stressed shelter and housing system for which the demand far outpaces its capacity.

“Pretty much, as soon as a bed becomes available, it’s either filled by a walk-in, someone being referred from warming, or someone being referred from a hospital discharge,” or from street outreach teams, Rittenberg said.

Only about 10 to 15 beds open up each day, Rittenberg said.

Other shelters across the Anchorage are full nightly, too. At the municipality’s three non-congregate winter shelter locations, 332 homeless clients double up in hotel rooms.

A separate warming area at one of the locations, the Henning House downtown, serves as a lifesaving measure for up to 45 people at a time — and it’s seeing about double that number daily, Bemben said.

That means people have to rotate in and out, she said.

“People come in, get a snack, get something to drink, warm up for a bit, and then they have to go outside so someone else can come in,” Bemben said.

A major focus of the LaFrance administration is finding ways to build more housing and to support more transitional housing programs, such as using tiny homes, Bemben said. Opening parking sites for people living in vehicles may be an option this summer.

“We absolutely want to avoid people having to return to camping in the summer and seeing an increase” in unsheltered homelessness, she said.