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?