Winter is approaching, and Juneau’s increasingly large homeless population needs a place to go.
At the request of the City and Borough of Juneau Assembly Task Force on Homelessness, Lands Manager Greg Chaney put together a list of 16 possible areas for a winter campground for the homeless. Many of the areas on the list, which is just a starting point for the task force’s process of finding a campground, have never been publicly considered before, City Manager Rorie Watt said.
With the recent influx of people on the streets, in part due to the city closing the Bergmann Hotel in March and the Gastineau Apartments catching fire again in 2015, Watt said the current state of homelessness needs to be addressed.
“We’ve lost quite a bit of low-income housing in the last couple years with the fire at the Gastineau Apartments and the closure of the Bergmann,” Watt said. “The loss of that housing has really hurt the community.”
The list, which Chaney said didn’t even take him a week to come up with, includes locations such as the Yacht Club, the skate park, Dimond Park, Sixth Street on Douglas and the bus parking lot by the Mount Roberts Tramway among others.
Chaney said he was trying to think as broadly as possible, looking for areas that would be open in the winter, were fairly flat and were close to public transportation. Many of the locations, Chaney said, are not currently zoned for camping. A “rigorous public process,” as Chaney said, would be required to change the zoning in these areas.
The way that city officials approach this search for a campground, Chaney said, will answer a major question in his mind: Is the city willing to treat the rising homeless as an emergency? As he put it, “is the community at war with homelessness?” Or is this going to be treated as just another problem in need of fixing?
“Do we want to attack the problem of homelessness as if we were under attack and had refugees coming into our community?” Chaney said. “You know that if there was a natural disaster in part of our community and we had to move a bunch of people with no notice, anything that was level would be likely as a potential spot for people to camp temporarily.”
Options are dwindling for those on the streets as winter arrives, as the Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority is forcing about 10 or 12 homeless campers off their property located at the Juneau subport. This comes after the city passed an ordinance in February that gives the Juneau Police Department authority to enforce trespassing for sleeping in the doorways of downtown businesses.
Juneau’s homeless population is rising, with data showing that Juneau has the highest per-capita amount of homelessness in the state with 6.6 people out of every 1,000 being homeless.
This list is meant to be a starting point, and will be discussed at the next meeting of the task force. There’s a meeting scheduled for tonight, but both Watt and Committee Chair Debbie White said the meeting is likely to be delayed due to Chief Housing Officer Scott Ciambor’s absence this week.
The first campground on the list is the Thane Campground, which is currently zoned for camping. The campground usually closes in October, but Watt said will be kept open into November this year. He said that five of the 18 camp sites at the campground are occupied.
Chaney, echoing thoughts that multiple people on the streets have expressed, said the Thane Campground isn’t a practical place for a winter campground.
“It’s a really long way to walk to downtown,” Chaney said. “If you don’t have a car, it’s a really long ways away, so it’s not realistic.”
The city’s newest housing project, the Housing First Collaborative, opens up in mid-September and will house 32 of the city’s most vulnerable homeless. Chaney said this will help a little bit, but it would be extremely expensive to expand it anytime soon to bring more people in.
Watt said he thinks the best option for a winter campground would be the old AJ Mill site, an area of land on Mount Roberts that Alaska Electric, Light &Power (AEL&P) currently owns. City officials have been talking with Avista (AEL&P’s parent company) for quite some time about using the land for a campground, but haven’t agreed on anything. Canadian company Hydro One is buying Avista, with the sale expected to close in late 2018.
In other words, Watt said, there aren’t many relatively flat, conveniently located locations to put a campground. The list is a starting point.
“Probably half the reason to show the list,” Watt said, “is to say, ‘Look, we don’t have good options.’”
• Contact reporter Alex McCarthy at alex.mccarthy@juneauempire.com.
In this March 25 photo, Chloe Abbott checks in with a homeless person camping in a business doorway on South Franklin Street. (Michael Penn | Juneau Empire File)
