The deceased were found all over: In city parks. Tucked behind office buildings. In an encampment alongside one of the busiest roads in Alaska. The youngest was 30. The oldest was 74. A mother of seven. A former chef.
Traffic on Gambell Street flows past a blue shipping container where a woman was found dead nearby on Halloween. Photographed on Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2022.
Still, such deaths serve as an important measure of the city’s efforts, experts say: The most basic goal of sheltering unhoused people is to ensure that they don’t die on the streets. With three weeks left in the calendar year, 2022′s death toll to date is the highest in the past six years, as far back as the data analyzed by the Daily News goes. Last year, 16 people died. The year before, 17.The Bronson administration points to substance use as a driver of the increase in deaths.
When the year began, the main low-barrier homeless shelter was in the Sullivan Arena. Some nights more than 500 people sought shelter there. But on the last day of June, thethe mass shelter, saying pandemic-related funding was running out and the arena was never meant to permanently house the homeless. Lacking another indoor shelter, people were directed to camp at Centennial Park in Muldoon.
“I’m seeing camps where I’ve never seen camps before, in much more public open areas, camps on sidewalks in different areas of town,” he said. “I think it’s because there’s just not adequate housing and shelter room.”Deaths seem to come seasonally, he said: While many deaths this year happened in warmer months — 13 from May to the end of September — fall and winter is when life on the street gets much harder in the cold.
“There’s been this coming together, where we saw that the turmoil wasn’t working,” she said. “I feel now that there’s this big community push from all providers, the municipality, the public of ‘how do we solve this community wide problem that shouldn’t be political?’”
Death Shelter Anchorage City Person Deaths Fentanyl Office Woman Sister Alaska Assembly Heglin Young Street Arena Homelessness Illness Nobody Camp Addiction Capacity Increase Housing
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