The leader of the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness is raising alarm over an “escalating affordable housing emergency” in the municipality.
During a Friday news conference, coalition executive director Meg Zaletel — who is also the Anchorage Assembly’s vice chair — called for the community to take “immediate action.”
“Anchorage is facing an escalating affordable housing emergency, with more than 1,000 households at risk of eviction due to rising rental costs and lack of available affordable housing,” Zaletel said. “This emergency is part of a larger, ongoing housing crisis that our community has been talking about for several years.”
She said the the coalition in February set out to distribute about $500,000 in federal emergency rental assistance money. Zaletel and her staff were shocked when more than 1,300 households applied for help in just 2 1/2 days, she said.
“It was the sheer magnitude that caught us unawares,” she said.
Of those households, 1,008 reported that that they would lose their housing within 14 days, Zaletel said. The other 375 households that applied were already homeless, she said.
More troubling is that the majority of households — 1,085 — are considered extremely low income by federal standards, meaning they make just 30% of the area’s median income or less, she said.
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In total, the households represent 4,171 people, including 2,350 minors, she said.
The rental assistance will be enough to help only about 20 households through September, according to Zaletel.
“It feels like a giant wave of need is about to hit us,” Zaletel said.
A confluence of issues is behind the emergency: unaffordable rents, stagnant wages and the lack of available housing and other supports for families, like the state’s ongoing backlog for food assistance benefits, she said.
[Food and cash assistance for needy Alaskans caught up in ongoing backlog amid staffing shortage]
“This isn’t a new emergency to us,” Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance said in a Friday interview following the press conference. “We know we need more housing and shelter, and our housing challenges are years in the making.”
Rents and home prices in Anchorage have soared in recent years, and in 2023 housing reached its least affordable level in more than two decades.
The issue is a top priority, she said. Her administration’s goal is to see 10,000 units of housing built or rehabilitated over the next 10 years, she said.
“That’s an aggressive plan to make it easier to build, make it easier to renovate housing, and includes doing everything from incentivizing development to cutting red tape and making it easier to get a housing permit,” LaFrance said.
There are at least 3,000 or so people who are homeless in Anchorage, according to the coalition’s data. Emergency shelter beds and transitional housing units are full. About 500 people are unsheltered and sleeping outside.
The city’s emergency winter shelters, which comprise about 332 beds, are slated to close later this spring.
LaFrance said the municipality has pulled together about $5 million in federal funds for emergency rental assistance and housing, and it expects to award the grants to local organizations later this month.
All of the funding might serve up to 500 families, Zaletel said, adding that “probably tens of millions of dollars are needed.”
Data shows homelessness in Anchorage has been rising in recent years. Overall homelessness climbed more than 53% between January 2019 and 2024, and the number of people living and sleeping outside rose more than 256%, according to Anchorage’s point-in-time count data. The count is an annual federal survey conducted by cities and states across the U.S. and attempts to tally everyone experiencing homelessness on a single night each January.
Over the last few years — particularly during the summer months — large encampments have formed in neighborhoods around Anchorage, including former camps downtown near Fairview and in Midtown. One sprawling Mountain View camp has persisted for years.
LaFrance said her administration is “actively working now to move our community to a year-round shelter system with more beds this year so that we avoid that situation of seasonal shelter crisis where folks are just they have nowhere to go in the spring.”
With the shelter and housing system beyond capacity and so many Anchorage families on the brink of homelessness, Zaletel said she is “worried about what might be coming for this summer.”
“Inaction at this time is not an option,” Zaletel said. “We need immediate rental assistance to keep people housed and rapid rehousing resources to help those who have already fallen into homelessness find stability again.”
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