A team from the Anchorage mayor’s office stood before the Mountain View Community Council last month and made a promise: The city will force out the many dozens of homeless residents camping in and around Davis Park.
“I said this when I was here three months ago, four months ago, that Davis Park and snow dump will be abated, and I want to reiterate that. They will be abated,” Farina Brown, Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance’s special assistant in homelessness and health, said at the council meeting.
But it’s not clear when the city will move to abate, or tear down the camps and force homeless residents to leave the area. The city hasn’t set a date, and the resources it should offer them, like shelter beds, are spread thin, Brown said.
For years, groups have camped in or near Davis Park. A few people say they’ve been living there for nearly a decade. The encampment has been the subject of lawsuits, with an ongoing challenge to the municipality’s anti-camping laws and abatement policy. On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska filed another lawsuit against the municipality over its plan to abate a few encampments next week in the North Star neighborhood.
Mountain View residents said they are sympathetic to the plight of their unhoused neighbors in Davis Park. But as LaFrance’s administration dismantled several other encampments around Anchorage in recent months, residents say they feel like the city’s approach has pushed more unhoused people into the park, leaving the neighborhood to bear the burden.
The council’s treasurer, Roslyn Grady-Wyche, said she wants to see the city help people in the camp, and doesn’t just want them gone. But at the same time, “I do want my parks back. I do want the kids to be able to play baseball at the baseball fields.”
“This is just a hard conversation, and it’s just a thing that we have to do. But we also feel like it just shouldn’t be a thing that we should be dealing with, right?” Grady-Wyche said. “... If we’re burdened, if we’re bleeding with the homeless, everybody in the city needs to bleed as well. It shouldn’t just be a Mountain View problem.”
‘I just don’t think it’s fair’
Since LaFrance took office in July, the city has abated 17 different locations around Anchorage. In most cases, homeless residents were offered some form of shelter — some were even moved directly into housing — or were at least offered some resource. Meanwhile, the number of vehicles in the Davis Park encampment has grown.
Phil Cannon, the Mountain View Community Council’s president and pastor of a small local church, has been visiting the camps around Davis Park regularly for months.
For a few months, he passed out daily meals donated by Bean’s Cafe, until the donations stopped in November. He passed out about 120 meals a day on average, and said he estimates that at least that many people live there.
These days, Cannon still visits to check on a few friends he’s made there, and to pass out what supplies he can rustle up.
“I don’t have anything against the people living there. I just don’t think that it’s fair of a city to let that be the neighborhood where they’re going to allow it to happen. You’re talking about the already under-resourced neighborhood where people are really, really struggling. And, like it or not, there are really negative side effects that come from having a homeless camp right next door,” Cannon said.
Questions at a community council meeting
A census data study has shown the Mountain View neighborhood is one of the nation’s most diverse. It also has a high proportion of low-income residents.
During January’s Mountain View community council meeting, a dialogue between mayor’s office officials and housed and homeless residents laid bare the tensions between the groups.
Officials said they don’t want to create a “whack-a-mole” situation or push people into neighborhood streets.
“We understand we’re never going to have enough beds for every single person that wants to come inside. But do we have a warm place to direct them? Do we have outreach and support?” Brown said.
“We’re contending with a situation where individuals have created a home in the spaces that are our greenbelts and our parks. And so I want to acknowledge that I understand the difficulty on both sides of this, and the seriousness that it means for individuals that are going to be displaced during abatements, and what it means for communities that we’ve allowed these camps to grow,” Brown said.
At the meeting, one man from the camp pushed back on Brown’s promise to eventually force homeless residents out, saying, “what about our constitutional rights?”
With abatements occurring in other areas “people have been told to go to Davis Park. That’s why there’s an increase of homeless out there right now,” the man said.
Ron Pickles, a pawn shop owner, said during the meeting his business and the neighborhood have suffered. The area near Mountain View Lions Club, which is just next to Davis, “has been overrun by junk, garbage, needles. Nobody will go there,” Pickles said.
“It’s forcing everybody to Mountain View, even though it’s not an intentional thing that you’ve done, it’s something that when you abate camps somewhere else, they’re going to come here, because you’re not doing anything to avert that. These camps are being abated with people with no place to go,” Pickles said.
‘Where do people go?’
Officials say they’re trying to stand up resources to address the situation at Davis in an effective way.
Davis Park sits on federal land owned by Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson and leased to the city on the northeast edge of Mountain View. It includes a rugby field, two small baseball diamonds and a disc golf course.
When, in the summer of 2022, the municipality forced out unhoused residents from a sprawling encampment in the woods abutting the athletic fields, many people resettled just across Mountain View Drive at the snow dump site. A large camp has remained there.
The city in the summer of 2023 put the snow dump camp on abatement notice, but suspended its plans when the Alaska ACLU sued. Then last summer, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a ruling that had previously protected people’s rights to sleep on public lands when no alternate indoor shelter was available.
Soon after, the LaFrance administration began clearing homeless camps it deemed a public safety problem. Other camps popped up in their place.
Over the last two years, the woods of Davis Park have again become home to people living in tents, makeshift cabins and structures.
Parks and Recreation Director Mike Braniff said the city wants to avoid pushing people out of the park and into neighborhood streets.
“We’re informed by the experiences we’ve had abating Davis in the past, where we have a zone abatement, and that’s enforced, and then people are in alleys. Like, really, where do people go?” Braniff said.
Eric Glatt, a local attorney working with some Davis Park residents on their lawsuit against the municipality, said that shelter offered by the city is often inadequate, and doesn’t meet a person’s minimal needs.
There are many good reasons a person might refuse the offer of shelter during an abatement, he said.
When a person in a camp accepts shelter or is forced out during an abatement, they lose much of their outdoor survival gear and belongings. Homeless residents are frequently kicked out of the city’s shelters for missing curfew or breaking other rules, which can leave them scrambling to survive in the cold.
‘We love all of our neighbors’
On Wednesday, Cannon parked in the lot at Davis Park, where people are living in a dozen or so vehicles and RVs, some broken down.
In the bed of his black truck, Cannon had a couple cases of bottled water, top ramen, black trash bags to pass out. He also brought donated warm clothing — insulated pants, coats, gloves and hats.
Just across Mountain View Drive in the snow dump camp, a fire had broken out the previous night, and Cannon wanted to check on people there.
A thin layer of snow glittered in afternoon sunlight, partially obscuring a mound of trash, discarded clothes, cans, old equipment and parts.
Nearby, a large blackened area of ground was strewn with charred material.
Cannon found Taliilagi Ropati at a tent not far from the fire site. Ropati had been sleeping inside and escaped with a few burns, lucky to have survived, she said.
Kose Tuu, Ropati’s cousin, said he’d been in one of the city’s winter shelters at the Alex Hotel briefly but said he broke rules and was kicked out.
Tuu and Ropati followed Cannon back to his truck, where they filled a black garbage bag with the donations to take back to their site.
Later, Cannon ventured deeper into Davis Park, down trails winding through birch and spruce trees, to drop off water and food to other camp residents.
“It has a negative impact, and we as a neighborhood deserve the city’s actions to do something about that. But we love all of our neighbors, including the people living in Davis Park. And that means that we want the city to do something, but we want the city to do something that respects the dignity of all humans, that doesn’t violate people’s civil rights,” he said.