Over 350 Anchorage residents came out to take a stand against Assemblyman Felix Rivera’s proposed homeless shelter in a midtown Anchorage neighborhood. Only one person spoke in favor of it.
The public spent their Friday night at the Arctic Recreation Center, attending a town hall meeting called by Mayor Dave Bronson, and said that their neighborhoods and children living there were not ready to take on the assault of a homeless industrial complex envisioned by Rivera.
Rivera has called the pushback against his homeless plan “reactionary.”
Rivera, who is running for reelection for the Anchorage Assembly’s midtown seat, is the chair of the Assembly’s homelessness committee and has advanced the idea of buying the Arctic Recreation Center from a church. The gymnasium is south of Tudor Road and West of C Street.
Rivera’s idea has been to permanently shelter up to 200 people there, while also purchasing nine adjacent acres and building low-income housing. The shelter itself would be “low barrier,” which means it would have the least amount of standards of any shelter in town, to take the most aggressively difficult vagrants who won’t adhere to shelter rules elsewhere.
Currently those individuals have shelter at the Sullivan Arena, where they sleep on cots in an area that once was a venue for sports and concerts.
The initial cost of purchasing the Arctic Recreation Center would hit taxpayers with a $13 million bill, but that would just be the beginning of the costs. Anchorage is spending tens of millions on homelessness issues each year.
Both Rivera, who delivers for Door Dash to augment his salary on the Assembly, and Assemblywoman Meg Zaletel, who has a lavishly paid day job of running the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness, attended the town hall.
Rivera and Zaletel have been leading the opposition to the mayor’s solution, which had included a “navigation center” at Elmore and Tudor Roads, where people could start their journey back to sobriety, work, and stable housing.
Rivera and Zaletel blocked the mayor’s navigation center effort, even after approving it initially. Now, they and their comrades on the Assembly will not authorize the pay for the site work done for the navigation center, stiffing the contractor who did the dirt work, while attempting to spend $13 million to buy a building near a residential neighborhood that apparently opposes their efforts.
Rivera, who started his political life working for former Mayor Ethan Berkowitz, has said he wants to relaunch the homeless plans with a clean slate. He has begun to realize the extent of the opposition to his plans for the Arctic Recreation Center, as he has seen the pushback at the same time he is up for reelection. Travis Szanto has challenged him for the midtown seat.
Already, the radical Assembly has purchased the Golden Lion hotel at 36th Avenue and Seward Highway for $9 million for a drug rehab homeless center, but it sits vacant because the neighborhood, a nearby Jewish preschool, and Mayor Dave Bronson don’t think it is a good site to treat drug addicts.
Last week, Rivera called the pushback against the Arctic Recreation Center a “reactionary response.”
“This division and reactionary response are impeding my laser-focused work to stand up a shelter by November, before winter arrives,” Rivera said in a statement.
Rivera and the Assembly majority, which opposes nearly everything proposed by the mayor, blocked the mayor’s efforts to get a navigation center stood up before winter hit. That disagreement is still ongoing, as the Assembly is now refusing to pay the contractor who did the site preparation work for the navigation center.
Rivera says now he wants to start over. He will present a new “clean slate” proposal to the Assembly for consideration at a work session on March 31, 2023. The meeting is titled, “Discussion on Permanent Year-Round Low-Barrier Shelter” and will be held from 11 am to 12:30 pm at the Assembly Chambers in the Loussac Library, at 36th Avenue and Denali Street.
