Another year, another lineup of meetings about homelessness in Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance’s increasingly dystopian realm.
Residents of Anchorage are invited to participate in a two-day summit focused on Anchorage’s coordinated response to homelessness, taking place on March 20-21, 2025, from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.
That’s right in the middle of the Anchorage Municipal election, which ends April 1.
The event is organized by the Mayor’s Office, the Anchorage Assembly’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, and the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness.
Although she ran on reducing homelessness and claimed former Mayor Dave Bronson was incompetent, Anchorage’s homelessness scenario has only grown since LaFrance took office. Streets and trails aren’t safe and children’s playgrounds are routinely taken over by drug-addled vagrants, who leave their needles behind. She scrapped the plans made by Bronson and started over.
According to the latest report from the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness, the current number of people homeless in Anchorage is about 3,070, a dramatic increase from last year and likely an all-time high.
The Anchorage summit is marketed as providing residents with an understanding of the systems and strategies that the Municipality and its partners are using to, without success, address homelessness in the community.
“We’re working every day toward the goal of seeing a significant reduction in the number of people sleeping outside in Anchorage. It’ll take a team to get there,” said Mayor Suzanne LaFrance. “I hear from so many people who want to contribute to the solution but don’t know how. This summit will help residents answer that question and identify how to help in the way that makes sense for them.”
Two days of talk
On Thursday, March 20, attendees will learn about Coordinated Entry (CE), the system used by Anchorage providers to transition individuals from homelessness to housing while prioritizing those with the highest levels of vulnerability. CE professionals can complete their annual training, while community members can gain insight into the process, best practices, and methods for building trust to connect people to necessary care and housing.
Friday, March 21, will bring together community members, leaders, policymakers, municipal departments, service providers, and media to discuss the community’s multifaceted response to homelessness. Topics will include shelter, services, housing, behavioral health, camp outreach, and more.
“I am proud to welcome residents and community members from across the Municipality to join in our coordinated response to addressing homelessness that puts people first,” said Assemblyman Kameron Perez-Verdia, co-chair of the Assembly Housing & Homelessness Committee. “From service providers and policymakers to neighbors and friends, we all know that one person can make a difference, but we don’t have to do it alone. Together, let’s build a system to make a difference – and lasting change.”
The summit will be held at the Southcentral Foundation Nuka Learning Institute, located at 4085 Tudor Centre Drive in Anchorage. The event is free and open to the public, but space is limited, so advance registration is encouraged here.
Let me make a wild prediction on the result of this summit:
“WE NEED MORE MONEY”
“We’ll all come together to make a difference for lasting change.” Liberal speak for we have no idea what to do except to throw more money at the problem.
They can’t define “homeless”, how they going to fix it. The corrupt socialist assembly and mayor are creating the rise in substance abusers and the mentally insane.
A total waste of time and money. I have reported the 2nd and Barrow camp for over 6 months and yet it still exists.
Mayor, do your job or resign!!!
I thought the big shot mayor was going to fix this problem as nobody else could.
How many more millions are they going to spend on the homeless?
The choice is AFD or the homeless who is going to screw the taxpayer.
Go out by cambell air strip and carve out some land and let them stay there.
Put a fence around it and have bus service a couple of times a day and station a couple of police officers and paramedics outside the area.
Just make an area for the Bums.
Call it Addled Acres.
Why bother attending.
The only voice the Mayor and the bulk of the Assembly will listen to is the homeless industrial complex. The average citizen seeing their quality of life disappear, all while their taxes are raised will be outright ignored by this Mayor.
Yep, more talk. That will surely solve the problem.
I wonder how much “covid” money LaFrance is going to waste on this?
All the money they haven’t spent on snow removal.
Right. Use more taxpayer money to talk about the issue with no solo. Meanwhile the homeless industry gets richer!
No, Perez-Verdia will not welcome residents who are fed up with the bums trashing Anchorage. They’ll be silenced. We’ve been mollycoddling the mental cases, inebriates, psychotics, sociopaths and people who do not want to live within the system for far too long. Since the 80s we’ve been donating and funding more and more money to this cause and the problem has grown ten fold. The mental cases need to be put in API, the rest either put in the system or behind bars. I’m sick and freaking tired of these people trashing our city.
Let us take names and remember when the time comes to vote (hint: April 2025) lets make it count and start turning things around for Anchorage. Vote for those that have real solutions and not those who pay lip service. And please vote no on the bucket load of bonds that are coming. Or do nothing but belly ache and you’ll just get more of the same. Your choice.
The only option they haven’t tried, let alone entertain, is to stop funding this mess completely. This has become the golden calf of the prog left and is nothing more than an avenue to push money to opportunists (some former local politicians) to line their pockets with. I’m assuming that 90% of the “unhoused” are drug-addled and lack any and all incentive to better their situation considering the Assembly has wrested that burden from their shoulders.
The term ‘community leader’ should not be applied to the same losers that have had years to ponder the issue and resolve it. Change never comes from the group who’s legacy has been a lack of progress. A different outcome will require a different mindset and that won’t come from these same coddlers.
Someone w/ a full pair please… Clear this up will you?
Book ’em, offer them a fullest jail sentence possible or a flight to a sanctuary city w/ their incarceration starting immediately upon return. Ta daaa.
Anyplace w/ a crap map will do perfectly.
There is rather large difference in perspective on the homeless issue at work here. Leftists like the Mayor, Assembly and components of the Homeless Industrial complex want a LARGER number of homeless as that means MORE public money must be raised and distributed through the homeless system. A bigger problem means higher importance and more money. The Left does NOT want to solve, reduce or end homelessness. The rest of us, the stupid ones that pay taxes, want fewer vagrants, less garbage and excrement on streets and trails and in parks. And we might have money for stuff like street maintenance, snow removal and actual public safety. Rest assurred that this conference will only be reflective of the Left, their operators and desires. The Left has no interest whatsoever in a smaller homeless problem.
I will be very interested to see what creative ideas the Marxist Nine and their cohorts in the homeless-industrial complex manage to dream up and push forward to expand the level of homelessness in Anchorage. Because clearly, all their efforts to date have only had that result, so one can only conclude that expanding homelessness is their goal.
Besides, if homelessness were truly to be eliminated in Anchorage, where and how would NutMeg Zalatel rake in all that extra lucrative lucre?
“It’ll take a team to get there,” said Mayor Suzanne LaFrance. “I hear from so many people who want to contribute to the solution but don’t know how.”
You can count yourself among those people, Mayor Marxist Nine.
Damn, Eaglexit cannot come fast enough.
Appears the electric elected someone who does not know, who does not have a plan, or an answer.
The strategy is to get a Cabal together so one can point fingers at each other therefore there’s no accountability…
These idiots thrive on soaking money up from the tax payers who keep voting for these morons on the assembly. What are we at now, 200 million and nothing solved? Could have built an apartment bldg. for the wasteful spending they have done.
Make homelessness a crime.
And enforce it.
The ONLY way the homeless problem will be solved is to lock up vagrants and force help on them!
I would like to see a graph of the number of vagrants living in Anchorage compared to the amount of funding the Muni flushed down that toilet.
I have a feeling the number of homeless increased after every budget infusion the assembly provided to the homeless industrial complex.
To solve the homeless problem, they must get on programs to get off addictions and/or receive mental health. No amount of $ being spent on “homes” is going to heal addiction or mental illness. Why doesn’t anyone ever talk about 12 step programs anymore? Time tested and it works.
“Time tested and it works”
That’s why.
.
Well, to be honest, it only works for people who actually want to change their lives. It does not work for addicts that are not interested in getting off the drugs.
.
Which is why the leftists cannot allow it to happen. If it cannot help everyone, then it is not OK. And, if I remember correctly the Assembly barred charities which required the vagrants to be sober to get help. If you were not willing to waste money on the hopeless, then you are not allowed to help anyone.
More money = more homeless everywhere. Stop enabling them
We should attend the conference and suggest Mayor LaFrance host all the homeless in her house.
Remember July 2019?
Mayor Berkowitz declared a “homeless emergency” with approx. 1100 individuals, who he claimed were homeless in the city. Declaring an emergency removed the shackles of accounting from spending taxpayer funds. Fast forward almost 6 years and millions of dollars later, paid to the Coalition to promote…err sorry END homelessness, a myriad of non-profits and others now we have over 3000 homeless….what a farce!
The interesting side story here was Camp Berkowitz on the Park Strip. Somehow all those Berky voting neighbors did not like a tent city in their midst and it was abated quite quickly. The moral of that story is clear, when the city wants, they CAN aggressively enforce….
Which is why I will deliver any vagrant I see within one mile of my home to my Assembly member’s street.
.
If the homeless are so special and deserving of so much financial help, they can start with them in their neighborhood first.
I had a friend who asked me to house sit for a short time. Weirdly, she liked to feed the birds, specifically magpies. She would put out a couple of pans of scraps and cheap dog food for them, and asked me to do so. I did, four or five birds came, and the food was gone in a very short time. Later she told me that she had to double the amount of food, because there were more birds now. I explained to her that if she put out a 55 gallon drum of food, that hundreds of magpies would show up and eat it all. Her utterly blank, deadpan stare was priceless.
I’d be curious to know how many of the homeless are on Medicaid.
As an aside here, Suzanne, two or three times when I have tried to post comments on MRAK yesterday and today, as soon as I’d hit the “Post Comment” button, I’d get a blank white page saying “403: Forbidden”. Can you tell us what that is all about?
I appreciate the feedback. I will certainly look into it. – sd
Kameron Perez-Verdia. These self-serving assembly members don’t give a care about the Homeless. They have wasted the 14 Million dollar tax on Alcohol for the Homeless. Have you seen any positive outcomes? No.
When I saw the headline, I thought all the homeless people in Anchorage were having a get-together or something. Then I read the article and realized it was a meeting of the people who earn their living off the homeless problem. Treating the problem, not curing it.
Our Anchorage Charter dictates that we make certain nobody goes cold or hungry, except those that are Taxpayers.
Right?
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