In the spring of 1915, a tent and shanty community grew along the banks of Ship Creek, as workers headed north to work on the Alaska Railroad. The conditions were rough and unsanitary, but the workers were there to be part of something and make a living. There was no safety net for the people who set up the tent city.
In 2025, Anchorage still sees tent communities popping up along roadways, trails, and sometimes on the streets themselves. The difference is that those in the tent communities are drug- and alcohol-addicted mentally ill people who are not looking for work, but looking for a fix.
Between 2020 and 2024, Anchorage appropriated nearly $190 million toward fighting homelessness, with no success. The Assembly is now focused on making Anchorage more affordable, in hopes that the street people will find a place to live.
A gallery of Anchorage’s lost souls who make the streets their home, photographed during the past week:
Photo at top of this page on the left is credited by the US Library of Congress to August Cohn, who worked for the Alaska Engineering Commission in 1915-17 as a civil engineer and surveyor. In the photo gallery directly above, Anchorage in 2025 is littered with addicts and forlorn individuals living on the streets, in greenbelts, and inside abandoned buildings.
Assemblywoman Meg Zaletel, who is the CEO of Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness, says homelessness is escalating in Anchorage. That has been clear to the public for some time.
At a Friday news conference, Zaletel called for immediate action, although tens of millions of dollars have gone to her agency, and the problem is getting worse.
“Anchorage is facing an escalating affordable housing emergency, with more than 1,000 households at risk of eviction due to rising rental costs and lack of available affordable housing,” Zaletel said.
But the people who are living on the street are not the ones being impacted by rising rental costs, because they could not pay even a nominal amount of rent, due to their personal problems.
$190 million? how many one-way airline tickets to somewhere warm could that have bought?
Every “solution” has already been tried in Anchorage or elsewhere with a 100% failure rate.
The solution is simple – we had this problem after the Great Depression Google Hoover Towns.
The solution.
Enforce the following laws with ZERO tolerance.
Vagrancy.
Loitering.
Trespassing.
Shoplifting.
Public intoxication.
Public urination and defecation.
Panhandling.
Public drug use.
Public drug dealing.
Littering.
Write them tickets.
Fine them.
If the fines aren’t paid or if the committed crime warrants it – arrest and incarcerate them – ZERO tolerance.
Take the resources that the Anchorage police departments uses to harass and extort legal, law abiding, tax paying citizens commuting in the Glenn Hiway.
Do your damn job you worthless, feckless politicians – for once!
To eat ya had to work. Thats way before welfare and handouts. How we have evolved as a society
The municipality has a section on the website to report bum camps, which they ignore.
The Lyons Park and Hobo Camp in east mountain view is large enough to qualify for a zip code. Now on both side of Mountain View drive within a few hundred yards of JBER and now sporting those really attractive derelict RVs. That place should be declared a toxic waste dump and biohazard.
People were better in the early 1900’s, my grandfather live in the tent Anchorage and worked for the railroad. They didn’t have a corrupt incompetent government throwing money at them. Today the government wants you dependent and needy. Don’t do it, it’s slavery.
And where are the multi-billion $ Alaska native corporations?
Aren’t a disproportionate of these street cretins “their people”?
They want to cry racism and discrimination at every turn but are doing ZERO to help their own people out.
Instead they put in on the backs of hard working, tax paying citizens who job, in reality, it isn’t.
Do you have any other proposed solutions for this problem, or are you just going to b*tch about it and “pray” that it goes away? At least Zalatel is trying, as many do. But almost all fail because the problem is so intractable. Constant negativity and complaining doesn’t do anything to fix it.
My distinct impression is that MRAK readers believe that funds spent on the homeless are wasted. Perhaps things would be worse still without those efforts. What I always hear here on MRAK is “ship them somewhere else” so that they become someone else’s problem.
I know you don’t like to see them. Neither do I. But most likely they are here to stay until some fundamental things change in our society, like reduced drug availability, more mental assistance, adequate wages that don’t force people out of housing, and programs to rehabilitate the afflicted.
Suzanne… careful deary, but there except for the indulgence and planning and ultimately profiting of and by Democommies go I!