The days are getting shorter and the nights are getting cooler in Anchorage. Vagrants who camp around the city will are now sleeping outside at 45-degrees. Soon the mayor will be activating the city’s cold-weather shelter program, providing mass shelter and hotel rooms for those who are ready to come inside. The program is required by city ordinance. Over the past five years, the municipality has spent well beyond $250 million in services and shelter for homeless, vagrants, and drifters. This does not count the indirect costs to taxpayers (fire suppression, camp clearing) or expenditures by nonprofits. In our ongoing gallery series about the vagrant crisis in Anchorage, we have photos from the past two days in downtown Anchorage:
Monday dawn stroll through vagrant-overtaken Peratrovich Park in downtown Anchorage
Glamping in the greenbelts: Anchorage’s luxury lawlessness, with free tents
Video: Drone footage reveals sprawling vagrant occupation expanding in S. Anchorage
Photo tour of a vagrant TarpMart, where everything must go (because it’s probably stolen)
Gunfire in vagrant encampment brings in large police response near Mulcahy Stadium
Good reporting, SD. A quarter of a billion dollars has been wasted on subsidizing the bums! Reagan warned that if government wants more of something, it subsidizes it.
When will Anchorage citizens wake up?
Do not think for a second the citizens actually have any say in this spending. The Assembly will bend whatever rules they need to in order to give millions to their friends in the homeless industrial complex. The Mayor is even worse, preventing anyone that disagrees with any of her policies from ever contacting her. (It was really no different when she was assembly chair.)
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And do not tell me to “vote them out.” Not an option in ANC. 100% mail in voting, gerrymandering to the extreme, and extreme restrictions on observing the ballot counting will ensure the leftists always retain their seats.
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Until we start tar and feathering them, do not expect any change.
Great comment! I’ll remember that one and spread that valuable fact.
Apparently Anchorage has just around 1,760 homeless people, as of Jan. 2024. So really? For $250 million dollars (!!) we ALL deserve better results! Here’s a suggestion: convert the former Northway Mall to a housing and treatment center. Or, let’s return to Mayor Bronson’s proposal: a central location for care, right next to the local ‘cop shop!’ Good God! Surely for that much money we should expect better results!
Anchorage…the once grand city in the North. Now it’s crime ridden, dirty town with s@it, piss and puke on our sidewalks!!! Where men are men, women are too and sheep are scared 😳
At the same time children cannot play in parks or use bike paths, and some bus routes are even being shunned by adults.
Mar Begich will be given more money to house the lawless.
With the pending rezoning Real Estate developers will rebuild single family neighborhoods into sh1thoods.
The city is being run for the political elite and using criminals, drug addicts, and voluntary homeless to effect the change to a ghetto everywhere Except their neighborhoods.
Understand that the Mayor and Assembly WANT Anchortown to be a sh****le. They want to “normalize” vagrancy, drug use and squalor to the point where residents no longer complain about the mess. When this is reached, the Muni can make minor improvements seem like major breakthroughs. The real money will continue to flow to the favored and connected. Ongoing flight of normal folks from the city will ensure that the Left retains power. It works so well in Portland and San Francisco.
Note that the Muni “leaders” talk less and less about this stuff. It is all part of the “normalization” effort.
You have not figured it out yet even though the evidence has been in the public eye for years. It is mint. Millions have been spent from the public coffers and the problem just grows. Who gets the money and what do they spend it on? Clearly they don’t spend it on the problem.
My question is where are the multi billion dollar “Native” Corporations ? NANA, CIRI, ANTHC, Doyon, BBNA, TCC, Alaska Federation of Natives, I’m looking directly at YOU. ? Oh yeah getting rich and not helping “Their people”. Meanwhile MOA residents keep getting the shaft. The radical leftists that want this to happen in the name of “diversity, inclusivity and tolerance” are the same ones using tax dollars to subsidize this all, then giving deals to their friends to do more of the same. When will the State attorney general look into Austin Quinn Davidson, Meg Zalletal, Felix Rivera and the others for a money laundering shell game ?
Remember this: That 250 million should had been spent on road maintenance repairing the municipality poorly maintained neighborhood roads, sidewalks, and trails. Anchorage businesses and neighbors You do not deserve to be driving over bumpy, holey, and poorly maintained roads. you deserve better.
The Muni would rather float bonds to do that work. They must borrow funds to provide the fundamental government services the taxpayers are paying for. But, they never seem to run out of money to support the vagrants.
Thumbs up to that Tina.
I’m going to deviate a little off topic here, but follow your lead. Two days ago, I passed a caravan of six road sweepers cleaning the curbs and gutters of the very same aggregate that they will be spreading in six weeks. Seems very counterproductive.
With all our highly educated engineers, seems like we could devise a road system (unlike the lower 48 because that’s what we seem to think we need to follow) Winters aren’t bike, friendly, and pedestrian friendly.
Those pretty yellow vision impaired yellow placemats at every intersection with sidewalks are only visible four months out of the year.
Most of the homeless look like that are from Savoonga, Gambel, Little Diomede….Most NANA shareholders wouldn’t be doing that I don’t recognize any of those natives. Most NANA live up north not in town or ASRC. Those natives are mostly from Savoonga, Gambell, little diomede. Duno what everyone else think but they look like different natives to me from that way.
For what it is worth, a fully loaded Boeing 747-400 weighs considerably more than 744,000 pounds. That particular model in fact at maximum gross weight will weigh 875,000 pounds. I flew them for a number of years. It is a lot of trash to clean up any way you describe it.