Midtown business owners, community council react to delayed abatement of Cuddy Park

As the number of people living on the streets remains high, municipal Parks and Recreation Director Mike Braniff wonders if the city will be able to abate the Cuddy Park encampment in Midtown. The Midtown Community Council president has concerns about the possibility of Cuddy Park staying open through the winter, as the temperatures are dropping and there is not enough shelter for people seeking it. The ACLU of Alaska responded to a request for comment by Alaska’s News Source about the growing number of homeless people in Anchorage and the limited number of spaces available for shelter. The municipality plans to abate camps before the end of the winter.

Pubblicato : 2 anni fa di Lex Yelverton in Business

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - Some problems with the municipality abating homeless camps became apparent during an Assembly Housing and Homelessness meeting on Wednesday.

According to the city’s Housing and Homeless Coordinator, Alexis Johnson, there’s a total of 764 unique names on a municipal waitlist hoping for shelter or who have already been sheltered in the Anchorage area. The number includes people who are now staying in shelters, but there’s the municipality will not have shelter for everyone.

As the number of people living on the streets remains high, municipal Parks and Recreation Director Mike Braniff wonders if the city will be able to abate the Cuddy Park encampment in Midtown.

“In order to post a camp for abatement, we have to have enough shelter beds — low barrier shelter beds — available for everybody in that camp. So it makes it more challenging to abate a large camp than a small camp,” Braniff said.

Braniff says if the Cuddy Park encampment stays open throughout the winter, the municipality will control the flow of vehicle traffic and add security guards.

Kris Stoehner, the Midtown Community Council president, has concerns about the possibility of Cuddy Park staying open through the winter, especially with what she says has been a “tremendous amount of impact” to the Midtown area.

“The tremendous amount of robberies that have happened, stealing that has happened, desecration of property that has happened. We can document a million dollars worth of damage from April 15th to the first of July,” Stoehner said.

While it is only the third day that the municipality has moved homeless people into shelters in Anchorage, Stoehner wants to give the city two weeks to see if abatement at the Cuddy Park encampment is even possible.

Stoehner also has concerns about homeless individuals as the temperatures are dropping and about there not being enough shelter for people seeking it. Still, its conflicting because she believes that Midtown is getting the reputation of it not being the best place due to the encampment.

“We need to be able to mitigate our businesses and make sure they’re are safe, we need to make sure people are safe when they get off work late at night, we need to make sure midtown is a place people want to come to and visit,” Stoehner said.

She hopes there will eventually be a 24-hour patrol or guard at the camp to prevent problems from occurring.

After talking to multiple store managers with businesses adjacent to Cuddy Park, nobody was able to speak on the camp due to corporate policy, except for the owner of Natural Pantry.

Vikki Solberg, one of the store’s owners, says she’s saddened to see the evolution of the Cuddy Park encampment — which has increased with robberies, thefts and panhandling near Natural Pantry.

“In the last two weeks we’ve caught over 25 people — and those are just the ones we catch. And 80-85% of them were people from over here at Cuddy Park,” Solberg said.

Solberg describes her store as a mom and pop store, which can’t afford to lose the money.

“We do, we have to stop them and because we are a single family that owns this, it’s important to us — I mean that’s the paychecks for all of our employees,” Solberg said.

She believes its adversely impacting businesses all around Cuddy Park, not just her own.

The ACLU of Alaska responded to a request for comment by Alaska’s News Source about the growing number of homeless people in Anchorage and the limited number of spaces available for shelter.

“We are closely monitoring abatement notices that the Municipality recently announced,” said Meghan Barker, the Communication Director for the ALCU of Alaska. “Municipal officials have a constitutional obligation to protect basic health and safety for residents. The Municipality plans to abate camps before adequate emergency shelter is available for the more than 760 unhoused people across the city. The implications are deadly and unconscionable. Forty-three Alaskans have died outdoors so far this year. And the burden for the failure to protect public safety falls on neighborhoods and community resources to meet the direct and most basic needs of our unhoused neighbors.”

The municipality’s focus is still on the Third and Ingra encampment, but they will continue to use outreach with the coalition to end homelessness as winter approaches to ensure people are staying warm and have the resources they need.

For more information on housing resources, contact the city’s shelter hotline at 907-865-5329 or visit the city website with housing resources.

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