This week, Anchorage Assembly Chair Christopher Constant and Assembly Member Felix Rivera, Chair of the Assembly Housing & Homelessness Committee, issued a letter to Mayor Bronson outlining questions for the Administration regarding AR 2023-182(S), a proposal to fund the construction of a shelter and navigation center at Tudor and Elmore for $11.3 million.
During a worksession today, the Administration presented their response. Chair Constant issued the following statement after the worksession:
"As we once again take up the Tudor/Elmore Shelter proposal, once again, the Mayor is ill prepared to show the community how this project pencils out.
Mayor Bronson’s proposal today takes funding away from critical municipal services, including wildfire mitigation, to build his shelter. Additionally, he has no funding identified for operations, so what we have before us is a request for a multi-million dollar tent with no plan for how to use it and no staff to run it. Mayor Bronson’s tent is a money pit and is one of the most expensive and least effective ways to solve homelessness.
As we heard this week from the Mayor’s own staff, who are working earnestly to address this crisis, creating new affordable and supportive housing is the best way to help people permanently beat the cycle of homelessness. And yet, the Mayor continues to fixate on a strategy of concentrating and deporting people.
Our community has a plan to solve homelessness – the Anchored Home Plan. While Mayor Bronson works to put people experiencing hardships out of sight and out of mind, the Assembly and its partners are working on humane solutions that uplift our entire community – turning hotels into affordable housing, opening living facilities for people with complex health needs, meeting with people in camps to get them help, and working with HUD to find more money for housing and shelter.
It’s not a quick fix, but it’s proven to work and other cities that have gone this route are seeing results. And we are too – we’re opening over 300 new units of housing and people are moving in, which reduces the number of people who will need shelter this winter.
However, our ability to move forward in the short-term depends on Mayor Bronson. At best, his Tudor Shelter won’t open until at least next year, but our community is counting on him to house people now. The Mayor’s staff have put forward a plan to do so, but lack the funding for it. I urge the Mayor to listen to his staff and move past this tent idea to fund and implement solutions that are humane, cost-effective and known to work."
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Contact
Christopher Constant | Assembly Chair
District 1, North Anchorage
christopher.constant@anchorageak.gov