If you thought the trails and greenbelts around Anchorage were becoming overwhelmed with vagrant homesteaders, welcome to downtown Anchorage, where the views are breathtaking — if you can overlook the human sprawl and excrement on the sidewalks.
Once a hub of commerce and entertainment, the city’s core now resembles a set from a post-apocalyptic docuseries, complete with tents, tarps, and territorial disputes over electrical outlets — all under the overflowing flower baskets provided by the city.
In this exclusive photo series — part of our summer coverage of the new-normal under Mayor Suzanne LaFrance — we take you on a 12-hour tour of a downtown where flower baskets and vagrancy are the key features. But relief may be on the horizon, if you consider 24 government-built sheds to be constructed at Elmore Road and Tudor Road a solution. The question isn’t whether those sheds will be ready. It’s whether the downtown population is willing to trade prime park real estate for a “Crampground” compound far from their favorite haunts.
Our other coverage of Anchorage vagrancy includes what is happening in the greenbelts:
Any information on where the “free” tents and clothing coming from? My grand kids just destroyed my tent playing Mongol Invaders in the front yard. I could use a new one. I’m too busy working to cover my new updated property tax bill to research the freebies. Flexing my privilege, I guess.
This is just a hint of what downtown looks like. Most of Anchorage doesn’t go downtown anymore and apparently doesn’t care but this is the tourists’ first impression and what they have to deal with. Why would they want to come back????
thanks for the article but i wonder if our leadership will do anything about it.
yaw-youbetsha
Realize this. These are fully grown and fully developed human beings. Human beings capable of vast potential to build the most advanced civilizations we have ever seen. We have modern conveniences and the ability to learn anything we want within the palms of our hands. Yet these particular human beings actively choose, every day, not to live up to their potential. They choose to inebriate themselves and act like zombie roaches. They choose not to dispose of their own garbage and they choose to behave like wild animals with no self control. They will even try to attack you as if they are territorial beasts. (Not all, but most) They deserve compassion, but they also deserve accountability.
We have built this city and we hope to advance beyond our beast-like nature.
Those who hide behind the identity of “progress” want only power and control.
Democrats will use the bums as a tax cudgel against the working class and we will see not advancement towards progress, no. We will only see more burden on the ones who create a healthy society in order to feed the useless consumers of society all while the Democrats will fatten their own wallets along the way.
If you see any initiative that will cost the working class anything at all to remedy this situation, you must loudly oppose and demand that the progressives who want to use a gentle touch to use their own damn money and stop placing the responsibility and burden on the rest of us!
So true and I am sure they all vote!
My favorite was when a couple of years ago we witnessed two persons of the transient persuasion having sex while lying on a sidewalk area close to the Northern Lights / C Street intersection and then having to answer my 4-year-old who asked what they were doing. Doesn’t appear that things have improved any.
The last pic is somewhat apropos…. The store front cannabis. Wonder if there has been any parallel found with increased homeless vagrancy and the legalization of marijuana. Just a thought and we know there are many variables.