The Anchorage Assembly is holding a work session Monday, July 28, to deliberate two major contract awards totaling over $18 million for congregate shelter services aimed at chronically homeless individuals who are not adaptable to other forms of shelter because they generally cannot follow rules of more structured shelters.
The proposed awards come as part of Request for Proposal 2025P012:
- Assembly Memorandum AM 562-2025 recommends awarding up to $11,115,360 to MASH Property Management, LLC.
- Assembly Memorandum AM 567-2025 recommends awarding up to $7,147,126 to Henning, Inc.
Both contracts would be administered through the Anchorage Health Department, with the total not-to-exceed amounts contingent on all renewal options being exercised.
The stated goal of the funding is to provide safe, supervised, and appropriate congregate shelter environments for individuals who have not successfully transitioned to other housing models such as low-barrier shelters, hotel conversions, or permanent supportive housing.
The contracts add to a growing list of public expenditures aimed at managing Anchorage’s homeless crisis. In 2024:
- The Assembly approved $4 million in emergency funds in September to secure 450 winter shelter beds.
- The state budget drafted in April included another $4 million for a year-round, 200-bed low-barrier shelter in Midtown.
- The municipality spent $1.5 million to move 150 clients into permanent housing with supportive services.
These figures represent only a portion of the city’s annual spending on homelessness, and does not include all the overhead of running programs, or the public safety responses, including incidents such as the vagrants who set fire to a park in protest of the city’s abatement of the encampment.
A 2023 report noted that Anchorage had spent $161 million on the crisis since 2020, an average of roughly $40 million per year. That figure is likely only a portion of the real costs.
Despite the enormous outlay, residents of Anchorage continue to grapple with escalating problems associated with chronic hobo lifestyles, including shoplifting and camp violence fueled by alcohol and drug transactions and addiction.
Reminder.
The April ballot had bond initiatives to buy needed police and firefighting equipment, in the amount of about $3M.
But, the assembly has millions for the vagrants.
It will soon reach 1 million$ per homeless person, like other cities.
If these vagrants are not capable of caring for themselves, following the law, and ensuring public safety, then legal intervention is warranted. API, court ordered inpatient drug and alcohol treatment, or at worst, jail for criminal activity was Anchorage’s past response. Why does our leadership reject a policy that worked successfully for decades? It seems these current responses just enable the behaviors we need to stop!
“aimed at chronically homeless individuals who are not adaptable to other forms of shelter because they generally cannot follow rules of more structured shelters.”
Hell no. We are going to pay millions of dollars on a few hundred social outcasts who do not any rules to infringe on their irresponsibility. NO. They should just lose all benefits and be forced to conform. Burn their gear and give them an option. In patient long term treatment or jail or a plane ticket. Essentially the same as far as access to ETOH or drugs. I would rather spend the money keeping them AWAY from the part of society that follows basic rules.
If we just executed the chronically homeless, who are and always will be nothing but a millstone around the neck of our society, so many problems could be solved at once.
Providing them a one-way trip to an otherwise uninhabited Aleutian island would be the next-best choice.
This is a multiple of Mayor Bronson’s planned budget which had the capacity to help every single homeless person but was denied by the Assembly as too expensive. Irony doesn’t begin to cover it. The current proposals are so much more expensive for several reasons but a primary one is that they spread shelters out across city, rather than having a single site, thoughtfully located and designed, where efforts and money are not duplicated. It is termed economy of scale.
More than half a dozen of the former Mayor’s proposed facilities – each one more than sufficient by itself – could have been built and operated for what Anchorage has spent on homelessness over the past 3 years.
Is there anyone still out there that thinks more money is the answer to this problem?