As the saying goes, nothing good happens after midnight. It applies to downtown Anchorage, where the city blocks continue to be congested with sleeping or inebriated people often found right at the doors of businesses.
Visitors venturing downtown at night are likely to encounter this scene all summer, as Mayor Suzanne LaFrance finishes her first year in office. She ran on “competence,” accusing the former mayor of lacking the competence to run the city, after having led the opposition against his plans for a navigation center for those without shelter.
Earlier this month, Must Read Alaska gave readers a tour of some of the elaborate shelters being built in the greenbelts of Anchorage, where the city’s trails are no longer safe for citizens to use. Some of the structures have become multi-story sprawling shantytowns such as you might see in a third-world country. That pictorial tour can be seen here:
Downtown Anchorage is where the vagrants without the ambition to set up shantytowns have made their stand, so to speak. The city workers are found most mornings hosing off the sidewalks in front of buildings such as City Hall and the Alaska Performing Arts Center, where human excrement is evident, sometimes smeared across buildings.
Here’s a gallery of what we found late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning in downtown Anchorage:
Mayor LaFrance has not been engaged in solving the downtown vagrancy problem, but she has been busy.
Last week, LaFrance announced the winners of her city snowplow naming competition. The winning names of the snowplows are: The Berminator, Taylor Drift, Blizzard Wizard, Luke Sidewalker, and Bladey Gaga.
“Now – just in time for the plow equipment’s spring hibernation – the ‘win’-ters have been selected and names have been assigned,” her press team merrily wrote on her behalf. “For the Municipality’s graders, Berminator froze out the competition, coming in first place. Bladey Gaga clinched second, and The Big Leplowski and Plowasaurus Rex tied for third. Other winning names for graders include Ctrl Salt Delete, Darth Grader, Knik of Time, Plowabunga, Betty White-Out, Blizzard Buster, Austin Plowers and Arctic Blade.
“Taylor Drift was the top name for the city’s sidewalk clearers. Blizzard Wizard and Luke Sidewalker tied for second place, while Flurrious George and Sweeping Beauty came in third. Other winning names include Clearopathra, Pathfinder, Drift Destroyer, Drift Lifter, Edgar Allan Snow, Nunhdecheni (“One that eats snow”) and Snow Big Deal.”
In March, the mayor announced $5 million in federal funds that would be distributed directly to people in the form of housing assistance grants, and in April, she announced that she will create 10,000 more homes in Anchorage in 10 years.
May she be hounded as much as she hounded Bronson! Not so easy now is it LaFrance?
You barely scratched the surface. There is hardly an alcove downtown without someone unsavory inhabiting it. And this is not the only problem facing tourists, now they have to show ID every time they enter a business serving liquor no matter what their age. How do you explain that to the pensioners on their once in a live time trip to AK? And are these folks, who are mostly over 50, going to go back home and brag about the wonderful visit they had in Anchorage stepping over bodies and having to whip out their ID when ordering a glass of wine or beer with their meal?
I don’t see homeless or unhoused people. I see free-minded earth roamers that aren’t trapped in the system matrix of modern society.
With that being said; they do not deserve handouts from said society.
They do need to pick up their garbage though. There are trash cans all around. If they can’t do that one simple thing, they can be exiled to Fire Island.
The assembly should hold every meeting in the tent camp in east Mountain View. That cesspool is a public blight. No residential property would be allowed to have such filth. A public health hazard. Isn’t there a law against parking in a park overnight?
It’ll be familiar to those visiting from the West Coast.
Who know, Maybe we shouldn’t build “ 10000 houses in 10 years”…
We want visitors to feel At hope don’t we?
She did get elected on the snow plowing issue with the help of the local democrat supporting TV media.
She is a freaking joke and a clown. 🤡
10,000 homes for homeless in 10 years wanting to get involved in port project that anchorage residents can’t afford to pay at $13 billion so she increases port tariff and cost of containers and metric tons of them thinking hats gonna expedite getting the monies to allocate for the funding ????? You democraps and all the non existent people in anchorage are to blame for her getting picked and the people in the assembly as well as the ASD board and now Chugiak electric trying to push renewable energy crap
LaFrance is a joke & everybody knows it “except” the assembly & the dimlibbys that voted this bride of Frankenstein into office.
“Come visit the once beautiful downtown of Anchorage, see all the bums sleeping in the business doorways & panhandlers begging for your spare change, get your drugs & ladies of the night in our $500,000 portland loos, leave your cars unlocked there is no crime”
Anchorage would be a great place for Marlin Perkins & Jim to produce an episode of “Wild Kingdom”
“While Jim is wrestling a drugged up zombie, Marlin will interview the blind left-wing Anchorage assembly members & count how many lies they can say in 2 minutes”
10,000 homes in 10 years. Where is she going to get the thousands of skilled craftsmen to build that many homes? That is almost 3 homes every day year round which we all know can’t happen in this permit ridden city with maxed out taxes. Nor is there enough workers to even come close to meeting those requirements. Was she smoking something when she had that pipe dream? It must have been some really good stuff to have that wild of a pipe dream.
It’s not 10,000 more homes…there will be conversions of single family homes into Russian-style share housing. Select builders and investors will buy the homes and convert them into multi family, where there may be 4 or 5 families living in one home. Strain on utilities and services? Don’t worry about it.
This is reminding me of a website that I saw a fair number of years ago already, “The Ruins of Detroit”, highlighting the numerous decayed and ruined, formerly vibrant and grand buildings of Detroit in the manner of a tour guide to the Roman ruins in Rome.
Somebody ought to start a different site, “The Wretched Dregs of Anchorage”.
I drove west in downtown on Saturday. There was a guy dropping a deuce in the vacant lot at Fifth and Eagle. When he was done he turned around and swung his junk at the traffic with one hand while flipping us off with the other. This has become the downtown of the (D)ems. When I chat with my friends, I now call what that guy did, “Doing a LaFrance.” They love it. Maybe it will catch on and take off.
Winning!