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.
Of which the vagrants themselves see pennies, while the NGOs that are providing services get extremely rich.
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.
Really? We don’t even execute serial killers or mass murderers.
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?
“…was denied by the Assembly as too expensive.”
I have to disagree with you on that front.
.
It was denied by the Assembly because it was proposed by a conservative. Had Dunbar won the runoff election, the Assembly would have rubber stamped the proposal without debate. Then again, if Dunbar had won, it would be more status quo, throwing money at the problem without actually getting any improvements.
The failed, dysfunctional, education bureaucracy has something in common with the protracted homeless problem. The more money we throw at them the worse and bigger they get.
Housing for people who can’t adapt are called asylums or jails.
We don’t have asylums and our jails are full. Also, these people tend to die when incarcerated and then the state gets sued and settles out of court.
The other problem that nobody seems to mention is that the squalor breeds disease. Disease that doesn’t stay in the camps.
Sounds familiar, A bit like something that guy they couldn’t stand proposed. . A big shelter where the needs could be considered and arranged. But but that was double plus ungood!!
Double plus ungood because a conservative proposed it. Had Dunbar won the run off, and proposed the same thing, it would have been built already.
Then again, probably not, because the Bronson proposal had the chance of getting some homeless off the streets, and the Assembly is all about perpetuating the problem, not solving it. Mainly because it benefits their friends (Zalatel/Begich)
We should have some of the best looking bums on the West Coast for that kind of money.
MOVE THEM TO THE LANDFILL !!!!!!!!!!!. Seriously. They are turning Anchorage residential areas into Little Landfills. Liquor Stores can sell out of vans, weed stores too. There could be Social Service Medical Vans also. Let them live in THEIR WORLD. Let Anchorage have their city back. THE TWO CULTURE’S WILL NEVER MIX. They will be happier at the landfill.
Increase homeless camps?? Build it and they will come as they saying goes. Seattle, Portland, San Fran will take notice and there will be many bookings of one way flights to Anchorage.
My property taxes at work again, I do suppose.
Are there encampments in every city in Alaska?
No doubt, most if not all assembly members sit on the boards of non-government organizations that will benefit from this money throw-away.
$11 million to MASH which is, I believe, Mark Begich.
Now you know one of the ways the Politicians start poor and leave rich
Who decided it was the responsibility of the taxpayers to feed the homeless?
Message to the Assembly majority and Mayor LaFrance: Enjoy it while you have it. Trump is coming for your Homeless Industrial Complex sooner rather than later. First round was signed last week. Cheers –
Search the municipality web site and look for homeless appropriations 2016 through 2025.
In that period of time they spent $263 million dollars.
None of that money has anything to do with any public safety support as in APD AFD the community service, patrol and others.
I would not be surprised if we’re close to a half billion dollars spent.
Yes, and the parks given them, the properties like the Sullivan Arena, destroyed… and no events anymore I do not believe….
There has to be an end to it.