Eddy Renee Rodriguez says she has a better sense of what living outdoors will be like during Juneau’s second summer without an officially designated campsite for people experiencing homelessness. But she’s also less certain about where she can camp and with what type of gear due to police and other enforcement actions in response to complaints about campers scattered around town during the past year.
Rodriguez, an intermittent Juneau resident for more than 20 years, was among about 35 people packing their belongings early Wednesday morning at the city’s cold-weather emergency shelter in Thane, which is now closed until its scheduled reopening in October. It was the second year the shelter operated at the city-owned warehouse about a mile south of downtown and she said the experience was an improvement compared to the first season.
“This is better than last winter, especially with the bathrooms,” she said, referring to indoor toilets installed after people were forced to use outdoor portable outhouses during the first winter. “I believe that they did run it better. There were fewer police officers, that’s a big thing. Fewer police and there were fewer violent acts.”
As with several other people getting ready to depart the shelter, Rodriguez said she didn’t know where she’d be sleeping Wednesday night.
“This place last year provided me a tarp, a tent and a sleeping bag — a brand-new outfit of stuff, everything — and then they set up some garbage and it all got taken from me at the Glory Hall,” she said.
People pack and prepare to leave the city’s cold-weather emergency shelter in Thane for the last time this spring on Wednesday morning. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire)
Concerns about stolen and confiscated items were expressed by some others departing the shelter. Millard Palmer, who said he moved from Virginia to Juneau last year in part due to childhood memories of growing up in Anchorage, said he had a job as a janitor when he arrived, but multiple thefts of his belongings kept him from being able to show up properly clothed and groomed.
“When you get robbed of all your stuff you can’t even shave, you can’t even get ready for work,” he said. “That’s a problem.”
Palmer said his uncertainty about where to stay Wednesday night — and beyond — is because his understanding is anyone spending the night in the vicinity of the Glory Hall shelter will be banned from the premises during the day, when meals and other services are available for people even if all the beds are taken.
A slim parcel of forested area between the Glory Hall and Juneau International Airport has been a frequently used location by people without housing during the past year, but the Juneau Police Department has dismantled campsites there and at other commonly used areas since last summer.
“It’s going to be really ugly this year,” Palmer said. “A lot of trespassing notices are probably going to be passed out.”
The police department is planning to increase its presence in the airport area and downtown Juneau — two areas where people without housing are frequently staying — but officers won’t be tasked with immediately arresting people if they’re camping on public rather than private land, JPD Chief Derek Bos said Wednesday. The department, among other steps, is planning to distribute 48-hour vacate notices at campsites deemed problematic.
“We’re going to look at a few different things, so tonight you’re probably going to sleep and hopefully stay dry,” he said when asked about JPD’s plans for Wednesday night. “But what we’re looking at is accumulation of trash, accumulation of human waste, are we having other criminal activities in the area that may or may not impact you as a homeless individual? Do you know how many people are there? If we have 75 people there, yeah, we’ll probably tell everybody you need to move along.”
“If somebody is neat and tidy, and they’re all by themselves, we’re probably not going to say anything to them.”
Police will act promptly when people are on private property such as the Glory Hall’s land around its shelter facility, or in “improved” public spaces such as a trail or sidewalk, Bos said. He said that’s a continuation of a policy in place since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year municipalities can penalize sleeping and camping in public places including sidewalks, streets and city parks.
The Glory Hall isn’t implementing any new policies this year to cope with unwanted campers, according to Kaia Quinto, executive director of the Juneau Housing First Collaborative, which operates the Glory Hall. Officials at that shelter and adjacent Teal Street Center did ask city and police officials last summer to establish a “shelter safety zone” due to people inside the facilities feeling threatened.
“We are trying our best to address disrespectful camping including littering and crime,” Quinto wrote in an email Wednesday. “We are working with JPD, CBJ, and our nonprofit partners. However, the situation in the neighborhood needs to be better and we recognize that this community needs a better solution.”
The Juneau Assembly approved a “dispersed camping” policy that went into effect when the warming shelter closed in April of 2024, due to reports of rampant illegal activity such as drug use and vandalism at the officially sanctioned Mill Campground near the warming shelter location the previous summer. Efforts to find another campground were unsuccessful and officials at St. Vincent de Paul Juneau, selected by the city to operate the warming shelter, said they didn’t have the staff or funding to keep the facility open during the warmer months.
While widespread problems involving dispersed campers were reported by businesses, organizations and residents, the policy overall was nonetheless an improvement during its first summer compared to the situation at Mill Campground, Deputy City Manager Robert Barr told the Assembly last November.
Bos said JPD is taking steps beyond the 48-hour notices — which will be handed to campers, or left in visible locations if a site is unoccupied when officers arrive — in an effort to make this summer’s dispersed camping go smoother.
“Step number one is just building a rapport and relationship with the individuals there, and that’s our intention,” he said. “If we can build that relationship we can help them connect with resources in the community. We can find out the individual needs of each person because their needs are different, so based on needs they should be tied in with different resources. From there if we have an encampment that’s getting too large, there’s too much trash, at that point it’s ‘You have 48 hours to move.’ It’s not an immediate ‘We’re arresting you.’”
The weather forecast for Juneau calls for a chance of rain during the next few days with mild winds and temperatures generally in the 40s — a continuation of what was a relatively mild winter. But while the Thane shelter was officially designated for use as an emergency option during periods of unusual cold, St. Vincent de Paul has been keeping it open nightly during the first two years regardless of conditions.
“It was a very mild winter, but it’s the last place that people can go if they don’t have family, if they’ve been in a domestic violence situation, if they have whatever their case may be,” Whitney Gannon, the warming shelter’s manager, said as the last of the people staying there were boarding a departure bus on Wednesday morning. “This is their last place they can go before it’s the actual streets for them.”
Gannon talked with several departing shelter guests about their plans, offering gear and other help in a few instances when she had the limited ability to do so.
“Any resources that I personally have that I’m not using anymore that I can donate I’m giving to people,” she said. “I just bought a couple bags of clothes with warm clothes in the last week, and I have a tent and I have a couple of tarps that I’m going be giving to a couple people. It’s just kind of hard to give it to one person and not everybody else.”
Gannon said she was staying at Mill Campground for a time when it was open, then made persistent efforts to get housing through St. Vincent de Paul and further efforts to get a job with the organization. She said while the indoor bathrooms and some other changes made a difference during the shelter’s second winter, she has further ideas about improvements for next year.
“I brought in a projector this year, so movies every night it was a savior sometimes,” she said. “People could sit down and watch movies all night if they couldn’t sleep, or whatnot. So that will definitely be happening next year. I think it would also be nice to add showers next year. That’s a big one because indoor bathrooms, that was a huge help.”
Palmer, despite the difficulties of being unhoused during his first year in Juneau, said the warming shelter made an immense difference in getting through the winter so he could start thinking about future plans.
“Without it it would have been really, really bad,” he said. “The weather could have been worse without the shelter we would have been facing the streets, we would have been hungry, cold, wet, more hospital visits.”
Palmer said he has family members in the Lower 48 he is hoping to reconnect with, so he may seek help from the Glory Hall which offers plane tickets in some situations to people with stable options elsewhere. Quinto, in her email, stated the offer is possible due to donations of airline miles and funds.
“This has been a great program and has helped over 200 people to get to a better place since 2021,” she wrote. “However, we will definitely not provide a plane ticket to someone to get out of Juneau to be experiencing homelessness in another community or just to get out of town.”
That’s not an option being considered by Daniel Williams, who said he’s a lifelong Juneau resident and full-blooded Tlingit who wants to maintain his community and cultural ties. But like many others departing the shelter Wednesday morning, he wasn’t quite sure how that existence was going to play out for the rest of the day and beyond.
“I don’t really make plans,” he said. “I just go wherever I’m going to go. I might go to Valley. Maybe I’ll go downtown, Maybe I’ll look for family and friends. Worse-case scenario I might have to get a tent.”
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
