The Aviator Hotel and Alexa Hotel and Suites were awarded contracts by the Anchorage Assembly on Tuesday.
Henning, Inc., a nonprofit, will get $1.55 million to run hotel-room shelter space in the Alex Hotel and Suites in Spenard. The group will rent 50 rooms to house up to 100 people through the winter months until April.
Alaska Hotel Group, which owns the Aviator Hotel downtown, was awarded a $4.34 million contract to provide 137 rooms for up to 274 people. This is the same group, led by Mark Begich, as provided similar services to the city during the Covid pandemic.
The total that taxpayers will spend on this winter shelter aspect of homelessness is $5.89 million for up to 374 people, or nearly $16,000 per person for six months of hotel shelter.
For the extremely-hard-to-help homeless, the Bronson Administration wants to use a mass care approach that would be located at the old waste transfer station in midtown Anchorage. The Administration has asked for an award of over $2 million for Henning, INc. to run the facility, which is currently an empty warehouse-style building. The Anchorage Assembly will take up that matter at a special meeting set for Thursday. and will vote on contracts for food services for these and other shelters around town.
Anchorage must provide heated shelter for homeless, if nonprofits run out of room, once temperatures dip into the mid-40s, which they have. This morning, Anchorage is in the mid-30s with icy rain.
Earlier this year, Mayor Bronson said it would be cheaper to buy tickets for people to fly out of Anchorage to be taken care of by family, but that plan was never going to be funded by the Assembly.
In addition to the Alexa Hotel and Suites and the Aviator Hotel, homeless are now sheltered in the former Golden Lion Hotel and the former Sockeye Inn. Anchorage Affordable Housing and Land Trust purchased three more hotels and converted them to homeless hotels: Guest House in downtown (130 people), and the Barratt Inn (96 units) and LakeHouse in Spenard (45 units).
The trend toward “Housing First” in Anchorage through converting hotels started in 2011, when Karluk Manor was converted to become Anchorage’s first permanent housing for chronically homeless alcoholics. It has 46 units.
