Winters in Alaska are not to be taken lightly. In Anchorage, the metropolitan area that is home to around half of Alaska's population, winter temps can and do drop beneath -20 — that's good American Fahrenheit, not commie Celsius. Anchorage also gets snow measured in feet.
A little global warming would be well-received by plenty of Alaskans, especially around New Year's Day.
Even with these harsh winter conditions, the city still struggles with a problem that's all too common with American cities today: huge homeless encampments. Must Read Alaska's Suzanne Downing has given us a stunning look at how pervasive this problem is in one of America's coldest cities, and how the municipal government seems unable or unwilling to do anything about it.
When tourists arrive in Anchorage and check into one of the downtown hotels, they’re often greeted with two starkly contrasting views. On a clear day, they might catch a glimpse of majestic Mt. McKinley on the horizon. But every day this summer, without fail, what greets them closer to ground level is another sprawling homeless encampment, just steps from where the Saturday Market sets up and directly beneath the Ramada by Wyndham.
As part of our continuing series on Anchorage’s worsening vagrancy crisis, we invite you on a photo and video tour of what has become the city’s unofficial welcome mat. This is the reality visitors encounter in downtown Anchorage — a visual story of what life looks like under Democrat leadership in Alaska’s largest city.
Below the video and images, you can find links to our tours of other vagrant encampments around Anchorage in recent weeks, as Mayor LaFrance continues to oversee the decay of the largest city in Alaska.
The photos at the link are bad enough, but there's a video walkthrough as well.
Some local wags are pointing out that Anchorage started as a tent city, and now it's just returning to that time.
Anchorage, we might note, shares something else with all of the other American cities suffering from this mess: A Democrat mayor and city council. Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance has promised, laughably, to build 10,000 homes in 10 years to address this utter disaster, without being overly bothered by how much that would cost. This, after Anchorage's last Republican mayor, Dave Bronson, was largely blocked by the Democrat council in his attempts to do anything.
Anchorage is unlike a lot of American cities in dealing with this.
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These same kinds of enclaves plague cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. Those cities have climates more amenable to people sleeping on sidewalks and in makeshift tents. But those cities don't have grizzly bears and black bears within the city limits. Aside from the garbage, filth, rampant drug use, and thefts from local businesses, Anchorage's homeless encampments come with that added appeal to hungry bears. It's something of a minor miracle that nobody has been killed by a bear — yet.
10,000 houses at taxpayer expense won't fix this, any more than the apparent current practice of playing musical chairs with the encampments, cleaning up one only to have the homeless build another somewhere else. Most of these people have serious issues: Addiction, mental illness, and so forth. Those are the problems that have to be addressed, after which the encampments can be cleaned up for good.
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