By PEDRO GONZALEZ
Between 2020 and 2024, Anchorage appropriated nearly $190 million toward fighting homelessness, according to a document published by the municipality.
Those funds, derived from federal pandemic relief dollars and a new alcohol tax, have been allocated for major investments in housing.
What do the results look like? Mixed, mostly, with the biggest winners being those who profit from what seems to be a perennial problem.
Last year, Linda Burke, the owner of Wild Starr Creations and Coffee House, complained about the growing homeless population in Anchorage to KTUU. She said it was hurting her bottom line. “When you have people outside passed out, smoking weed and drinking alcohol, there is no business,” Burke told reporters. “If it keeps happening, people will never come back, and with the police presence not visible, it makes it even harder.”
Survey data shows that, even as the city threw money at the problem, homelessness rose 54 percent between January 2019 and 2024, mirroring statewide trends. There was a short period of decline, but it was followed by the number of homeless shooting up again at the tail end of last year. As of this January, there are more people experiencing homelessness compared to November 2023, according to data from the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness.
In 2022, the Anchorage Assembly greenlit nearly $12 million in federal relief funds to the Rasmuson Foundation for a low-income and supportive housing project. That was the biggest slice of an over $51 million federal relief pie. It happened around the time that there were 65 other similar projects, often hotels and inns being converted toward the same use by other nonprofits, like the Anchorage Affordable Housing and Land Trust.
The land trust is illustrative of how these nonprofits work. According to its website, its mission is “acquiring, creating, operating, and preserving permanently affordable housing for low and extremely low-income residents.”
It’s a public-private model that is further sustained by an influx of homeless individuals from the villages and rising costs of rent and living that sometimes contribute to people being pushed into homelessness for the first time.
A kind of complex emerges: nonprofits and other entities make a business out of developing housing projects, as they are almost guaranteed a steady stream of funding, and the demand is maintained by a seemingly endless stream of the newly unhoused and those who are perpetually so—both of which have a good chance of becoming dependent on this system for support. The model is also reinforced by the addition of migrants. In 2023, the head of the National Alliance to End Homelessness told Alaska Public Media that there had been a “surge” of these people seeking resources.
Right now, whether the issue actually ever gets solved might be beside the point. Establishing permanent ghettos doesn’t seem like a good solution to anyone but the people collecting tax dollars to develop the projects.
If you build it, they will come. If you don’t, you are morally inferior to those who want it built. The reality is that public-sector unions need a dysfunctional society to fuel their pension obligations. Society, let’s call them the Walking Dead. Well, their dependency on pharmaceuticals, strange, and some odd sense of moral superiority. Well, there is the fuel for the fire.
You will never be able to reason with a socialist politician because they want to take away your money to throw at a problem they believe they know more about than you, but can be fixed without money; stop giving bums free clothing, free food, free sleeping quarters, free everything. Make it criminal offense to give beggars anything; give money to a beggars, $1000 fine or ten days in jail and enforce it. The only thing you can give them is a plane flight home: report them back to their hometowns and villages.
Society has a rght to manage public property and rights-of-way. The homeless should be given an area where they can live in their tents and waste their lives away, but they must be forced to do it there and not where they damage or impede the public.
“…whether the issue actually ever gets solved might be beside the point.”
People have tried to “solve” the homeless problem for hundreds of years.
Listen up, people: It has no solution, but the Anchorage assembly will continue throwing our money at it, and some of them will personally profit from it.
If we quit funding them, the number will get smaller. They’ll quit being homeless the more you hand out the more homeless they’re gonna be.
Yes, I feel sorry for him but feeling sorry for him for how much how about if the whole town of Anchorage goes homeless and will let the assembly fund everything that sounds good to me all of us go homeless and let the assembly pay for it all.
Just like the school district throw more money at it and the problem will get better. It’s been proven over and over and over again the school district getting worse in the same with the homeless problem the more money is throw at it the worse it gets try something different And quit giving money to the school district and the homeless.
I suggest a slight modification to your title: “Anchorage Homeless Industrial Complex grows due to massive taxpayer dollars”.
As some wags used to say when the War on Poverty started to heat up under LBJ, there is big money in poverty.”
The Great Society Legislation in 1965 has been the worst thing that has ever happened to the US economy.
Begs many questions but, the most glaring:
$190MM divided by 3,000 = $63K per homeless person
… Is this investment helping to relieve the problem?
… Is throwing more $$$ resulting in better outcomes?
… Who is really benefiting from this investment?
… When should Taxpayers expect a “positive” ROI?
… What could we expect if all funding ceased immediately?
… Why should Taxpayers continue to allow this grift to occur?
In Summary … If you keep handing out free fish to willing – able people (at Taxpayers expense) they’ll never learn to fish for themselves! Sometimes, ‘natural selection’ is the best course of action, and it is the best course of action here too!
Mark Begich got a new remodel on his downtown hotel out of it, for one.
That is correct, he got tons of money to house homeless and he used that money to remodel his hotel, to become a fancy boutique hotel. Nice gig if you can get it.
Why is the Rasmuson Foundation involved in this? They’ve soiled themselves. Money laundering?
Racketeering, misappropriation of funds, fraud, among others. If a group of private individuals tried this crap, they would be in jail. RICO laws were written for this stuff, but here we are. Muni attorney or state AG are MIA.
That’s our even honest department of injustice doing what they do best…….. nothing
The “homeless” problem is getting worse because of the assembly and mayor are making it more attractive to the substance abusers and the mentally insane.
The people that are being put in shelters and accepting free food and other means of survival need to help shovel snow, clean then streets and highways and or at whatever the city can get done to pay for their room and board.
The Homeless Industrial Complex is indeed real. Since the 80s when we suddenly felt the need to spend taxpayer dollars and renamed these bums as “homeless” (now “people experiencing homelessness”) the problem only gets worse. Chronic bums should be forced to either enter a program to clean themselves up and join the mainstream, or find themselves in API or jail. Nothing will be done until we stop spending tax money on them. And nothing will be done until assembly members can no longer accept money to run the Homeless Industrial Complex, or muni vote funds for their buddies who do. Moreover, this should be investigated and people charged if there is even a hint of legal wrongdoing.
Pedro, your headline almost gets it right: “ Anchorage Homeless Industrial Complex grows despite massive taxpayer dollars”. I believe it should read: “ Anchorage Homeless Industrial Complex grows BECAUSE OF massive taxpayer dollars”.
Cheers, glad to help.
The “homeless” have long been the money machine that enriches “non profit” executives and does ZERO to affect any long term result with regard to the vagrancy problem in any city. And, it should be called what it is, which is vagrancy. Very few of the actual problem people are truly homeless, they are vagrants, drug addicts, drunks, or thieves. The money that has been appropriated from the citizens of Anchorage through these illegal sales taxes have been deposited into the pockets of Zaletel, Constant, Rivera, Mark Begich, and several others involved int his racketeering operation being run by our elected assembly, and new mayor. It is a criminal enterprise to appropriate public money, period.
LeecH grows Despite finding blood supply
Thanks for shedding light on a dark problem.
Interesting as Anchorage homeless population has grown, the Fairbanks homeless shelters, this season, have room with empty beds according to Alaska News Source.
Do you wonder how many “Anchorage Homeless” are from the Interior/Fairbanks metro area?
How long does it take to be called an “Anchorage Homeless” person regardless of where the person comes from? In a previous conversation with Muni reps of SNAP,
this writer was told that as soon as an individual without shelter arrives be sure to contact “SNAP” to get the new arrival on a housing list provided they have a local phone number or sponsor.
Even the famous Assembly member and ACEH head has explained that her experience is this is a State problem, Anchorage being the recipient….
Typo in that headline. It says:
“Anchorage Homeless Industrial Complex grows despite massive taxpayer dollars”
.
It should say:
“Anchorage Homeless Industrial Complex grows because of massive taxpayer dollars”
.
Subsidize it, and get more of it.
Also, private shelters like the rescue mission and downtown hope center get no taxpayer or public funds, only what individuals donate. Many of their guests are elderly and or handicapped and some mentally ill, they have no where else to go, sadly