Jun. 18—The city of Anchorage began clearing its largest and longest-standing homeless encampment Tuesday, following weeks of preparation by municipal agencies.
Despite the plans, warnings, and intensive outreach to campers, the process was far from smooth.
By late morning, the parking lot by Davis Park in Northeast Anchorage’s Mountain View neighborhood was filled with an array of municipal equipment: police cruisers, parks department trucks, small front-end loaders, vans to bring the willing to shelters, animal control units and a garbage truck.
When fires started exploding in the woods, engulfing big makeshift shanties, fire engines sped past a ball field to extinguish the blazes within minutes.
The park has hosted a large and sprawling collection of homeless encampments for years, to the consternation of community groups, residents and elected officials. Weeks ago, Mayor Suzanne LaFrance set June 17 as the deadline for people to leave, stepping up outreach to connect campers with treatment resources and homeless services. Some accepted.
By Tuesday morning, those who weren’t interested in moving elsewhere were putting up something of a last stand.
Barricades were set up in front of the worn footpaths snaking into the densest of the encampments, next to a winter snow dump site on the south side of Mountain View Drive. Some people have lived there for years, in rambling warrens of tents and tarps surrounded by trash, debris, waste, spare parts and supplies. The barriers were made of fence segments, metal bike frames, a box spring, shopping cart and waterlogged plywood spray-painted with messages:
“We are all the same kind of people,” read one.
“Coming to a neighborhood near you,” read another.
“It doesn’t become real for some people until we’re actually here and we’re abating,” said Farina Brown, a special assistant to the mayor in charge of housing and homelessness, while the abatement unfolded Tuesday.
As Anchorage Police Department officers gathered in a parking lot, a man in a black vest manned one of the barricades, swaying from foot to foot with a yellow-handled axe in one hand, a machete in the other, lifting up and down the bar serving as a gate whenever inhabitants needed to pass.
The city estimates more than 100 people have been living in and around Davis recently, although the numbers fluctuate dramatically based on the season or whether other camps have recently been abated.
Davis is regarded as the municipality’s longest-running encampment, a constellation of different sub-groups, some transient, others dug-in. In the woods on the park’s north side were more than a dozen structures resembling cabins cobbled together from logs and salvaged construction material, a few of them two stories tall with working stove pipes. Near the parking lot were shambolic compounds of tarps and clutter out in the open, fueled by propane tanks or connected by extension cords to inert beaters.
A hardcore group that has lived in the woods beside the snow dump has persistently rebuffed city offers to move into shelters, supportive housing, or treatment.
“We’re just trying to save our homes,” said Brian Vaughan, who has been living in the snow dump woods for three years. “I’m gonna stay here, and I’m gonna defend my house.”
Vaughan spoke Tuesday morning as police officers and outreach workers combed through the site. They warned campers about the fast-approaching deadline. Or they tried cajoling them into an alternative living arrangement. Three workers in neon vests knelt beside a woman in dirt-smeared pink sweatpants, rattling off various programs and housing options where they said they could install her that day. She mostly stayed silent as she strapped bags to a plastic sled to pull somewhere else.
“They got no place for us to go,” said Vaughan, who is enough of an organizing presence at Davis that many other campers refer to him as its mayor.
He and other longtime inhabitants have reasons for not wanting to leave, even if it might mean a clean bed on the other side of town.
“It’s a family thing,” said Greg Smith, 53, who has lived around Davis for three years. “Nobody here wants to move. We have a right to be here.”
Smith was not being sentimental. Many of the campers, he said, have been together long enough, and in harsh enough circumstances like frigid winter nights or personal catastrophes, that they have bound together and rely deeply on one another. Even if some people were quarrelsome or had problems, he said, they are kin.
Shelters are way too confining, Smith said. Even the non-congregate ones in converted hotels have a lot of rules for residents, many of which he finds unreasonable and invasive.
“It feels like a halfway house,” said Smith. “I still have an expectation of privacy.”
Living out in the encampments is “freedom,” he said, and not worth trading for the securities that come along with moving indoors. As he spoke, within a few feet from his tent, an older man wobbled silently on his feet steering two broken crutches through the air as if practicing martial arts.
Smith was one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the city that has ricocheted through state courts over whether the municipality’s abatement procedures violate residents’ civil rights.
“Abatements like this are unconstitutional,” said Eric Glatt, an attorney who worked with the ACLU of Alaska on a previous court challenge to city abatement at Davis, and now represents clients in Davis Park camps through a different practice. “People’s due process rights are being violated.”
For the last several years, Anchorage and cities all over the West Coast, have been grappling with a complicated legal landscape when it comes to clearing homeless people, their possessions, and camps from public lands. On the one hand are the civil rights of the people who need somewhere to simply exist, be it a park bench of a homeless shelter. On the other are the rights of other residents who expect public resources like parks, sidewalks and trails to remain usable, safe public resources. Several big court cases on the matter culminated in a Supreme Court decision last summer overturning a lower-court ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson. Many local governments, including Anchorage, interpreted the ruling as granting municipalities greater latitude at enforcing bans on long-term camping on public land. The city has abated 27 camps since LaFrance took office last July, not including Tuesday’s action at Davis.
Glatt says the the Grants Pass decision is narrower than many have taken it to mean, and cities like Anchorage are taking too aggressive an approach to clearing encampments.
Echoing that sentiment Tuesday was a group of a half-dozen protestors who marched up and down a sidewalk carrying a black flag, cardboard signs and a bullhorn, taking turns belting out slogans and criticism of local officials.
As the protestors were chanting “No justice, no peace,” just across the road, a massive tongue of fire swelled out of a camp built into a tree. The fire raged, devouring spruce trees, dry lumber and all the nearby combustible detritus: blankets, car batteries, tarps, tin cans, tires, bicycle frames in every state of deconstruction.
Anchorage Fire Department trucks pulled up and doused the blaze before it spread very far. About 10 minutes later, a second fire broke out, this time a few hundred yards north. Three standalone structures, each built like a rectangular cabin from salvaged material, all went up in flames at almost the exact same time, the fires merging together among the trees as a few men wheeled out trailer contraptions piled with possessions and bike parts. Exploding propane tanks popped periodically. That fire, too, was gradually subdued, leaving the park bathed in the heavy tang of woodsmoke. An AFD spokesperson on Tuesday afternoon said that the total of five fires at the site on Tuesday were deemed “suspicious/human caused.”
By noon, city work crews were using compact front-end loaders to heap mounds of discarded material into garbage trucks. Since January, according to the mayor’s office, more than a million pounds of trash has been hauled away from homeless encampments around the city.
Brown and others contend that the encampment at Davis had become too unsafe to be sustainable any longer.
“The people that hang around are not necessarily living here,” Brown said. “There’s a significant amount of foot traffic that comes in for illegal drug use, drug dealing, drug using, and they prey upon the vulnerable individuals.”
The night before the abatement started, recounted Vaughan, there’d been sporadic handgun fire from various parts of the camp.
Earlier this year, two women died from gunshots in separate incidents at the park, one in February, and another in April. A shrine commemorating the second victim, Haily Ibarra, was set up between camps in the snow dump, marked by plastic flowers, an empty Jameson whiskey bottle and a wooden cross draped in a pristine white sheet.
Sometimes people trying to hide from police, avoid jail, or engage in crime will end up on the peripheries of the Davis encampment, said Larry Tunley, 50, who has lived there for several years. But at the core are a group of campers who function as “a happy, dysfunctional family.”
“This is family, from this end to that end,” Tunley said, gesturing up and down the woods by the snow dump. “It’s home.”
Tunley grew up in Anchorage, this same neighborhood, and did not intend to go very far, despite the abatement.
“I’m Mountain View, born and raised here. I tell everybody: Mountain View calls its people home…Even if we get kicked out of here,” Tunley said, nodding to the surrounding woods, “I will be here regardless.”
Moving indoors is not appealing, he said, because he has very little trust or faith in city officials, police and nonprofits to deliver on the promises they make to people in the camps.
By noon, in spite of the fires, the city’s abatement was progressing. Camps that had been divested of their most valuable possessions were collapsing into rubbish heaps and being disposed of by work crews. The former tenants were clustered on the sidewalk with wagons, suitcases, carts — anything that could carry everything.
According to Brown, it will take a minimum of two weeks of cleaning and coordinating with local community groups before Davis Park could begin being reintegrated into normal neighborhood activities. The snow dump side will take longer and involve a “phased effort, given how entrenched that location was.” To prevent “re-encampment” in the area the city plans to increase the police presence in the days to come.
The abatement encouraged some people to get off the streets, at least for now. A longtime social service worker who helps coordinate with the city pushed an elderly woman out of the woods in a wheelchair. The woman had lived in encampments for the last five years, the outreach worker said as she helped load her onto a shuttle bound for a transitional shelter.
Forty-three-year-old Art Smith, by contrast, had no plans to move indoors, even if the Davis camps were cleared away.
“The plan is not to leave, truthfully,” said Smith, wearing a face mask and a camouflage jacket. “They’re gonna come through and tell us we have to do this and have to do that. We know what happens when there’s an abatement. Abatement means ‘pick up the trash.'”
He planned to find a new spot in the area and stay close to Davis’s other hardcore campers.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described Eric Glatt’s affiliation. He does not currently work for the ACLU of Alaska.