OPINION: Anchorage, clean up your act. Visitors are noticing.

Sometimes you need a friend to tell you to shape up before you present yourself to others. I’m here to tell you, Anchorage, that you are looking pretty grungy, and pretty greedy, and that without some changes, you could start hurting one of your most important industries, which is tourism.

Under deep snow, it’s hard to believe they will be coming soon, but many visitors are making plans now, investing precious vacation days and savings. They will research the details online, but I’m betting that what they hear from past visitors is more important.

I’m a lifelong Alaskan now living most of the year in New Jersey. Three families I know from here visited Alaska last summer, and we traveled with one of the couples on their tour.

A warm and thoughtful business owner from Pennsylvania, trying to avoid insulting my hometown: “Charles, Anchorage is a dirty city.”

A couple nearing retirement from a New York corporate career, world travelers who have been everywhere: “We paid over $400 a night for a generic room in an industrial area.”

Where? It turns out they were in the heart of downtown Anchorage, but on their overnight visit (they were in the city only 12 hours before taking the train to Seward), it looked to them like they were in the rugged, run-down outskirts.

A family traveling with young kids, hoping to see wilderness and wildlife. “What are we doing here?”

My friends were overcharged for hotels and cars — and by overcharged, I mean they paid well above New York City prices, which are among the highest in the country — and they were alarmed, saddened, and hassled by homeless people.

The most important thing about Anchorage’s endless, tragic homeless crisis is that so many people die in the streets. That is a disgrace that puts the city to shame. But homelessness also is a threat to an industry that is among the largest employers and sources of outside economic support.

Tourism is the only basic industry that is within Alaskans’ control. Oil, fish, minerals, air freight, timber, Alaska Permanent Fund investments — all depend on markets and prices outside the state and, like federal government spending, which is Alaska’s most important industry, most decisions are made elsewhere.

But the visitor industry is Alaska’s to build or destroy. As in any business, success depends on competition for quality and price, followed by marketing, which helps once you have a desirable offering.

Anchorage loses on price. It’s cheaper to go almost anywhere. And now quality is a problem, too.

When my friends got out of Anchorage, their visits improved. Fishing at a lodge in southwest Alaska. Watching bears in Kodiak. Hiking to a glacier on Kachemak Bay. It’s hard to beat any of that, you don’t miss city amenities, and you don’t mind paying a lot for a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

But Anchorage is a city much like others. And visitors entering Alaska through this front parlor see dusty streets with overgrown medians and roadsides. Wide, roaring thoroughfares, impassible except by car, look like the neglected shopping mall fringes of most cities, but in Anchorage that’s Midtown.

And downtown, the tourist center, is a ghost town except for other tourists and zombie-like homeless people. The region’s most historic building was there — the 4th Avenue Theatre, with its spectacular interior — but now that’s just a hole.

Our city was never beautiful. When I was young, we had a lot of gravel parking lots and strip-paved roads without sidewalks, and on a windy day, the whole town was shrouded in clouds of dust.

But we tried.

Mayor Tony Knowles used the era of oil wealth to build nicely planted modern roads and finished public facilities that gleamed with pride in their day, including the Loussac Library and Alaska Center for the Performing Arts.

Mayor Rick Mystrom adopted the slogan, “City of Lights and Flowers,” and he spent what it cost to sweep the streets, mow the grass, plant flowers in the boxes, and decorate the trees with white lights in winter.

Mayor Mark Begich focused on bringing back downtown, building the Dena’ina Civic and Convention Center and upgrading sidewalks.

But those mayors left office 36, 24, and 16 years ago. The progress they made has been lost. Anchorage is getting worse.

This is a real challenge. Spending the money to clean up and plant flowers would help. But the bones are not all good.

Most of Anchorage was built in the early 1980s, especially the housing. When they were new, all those split-levels and zero-lot-lines at least looked fresh. Now the collapsing roofs of commercial structures from that era symbolize a citywide problem: A lot of these plywood buildings are worn out.

The city needs a reset. There is a lot of work for a new mayor to do. Whoever leads must be able to inspire pride and generosity in the residents of Anchorage to make changes. Voters should consider the mayoral candidates’ vision for the city and their competence to clean up and restart an upward trajectory.

But the visitor industry has work to do, too. Standing in the shoes of a tourist — as we unexpectedly had to do for a day last summer — we constantly felt like we were being ripped off.

It’s understandable that wilderness lodges and fishing charters are expensive. But when lower-tier hotels in Anchorage are charging as much as luxury accommodations in other cities, that is hard to justify. Rental cars have always been expensive in the high season, but not triple the price in Seattle or New York.

And an attitude adjustment would help, too. Service was often poor, and in some cases was hilariously appalling.

I get that there is a labor shortage. But that’s another reason for the community to look in the mirror.

Visitors don’t have to go to Alaska, and if they do, they can skip Anchorage. But these are problems Alaskans can fix for themselves.

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