The city of Anchorage is looking for contractors to operate emergency homeless shelters during winter cold spells. Thea Agnew Bemben, with the mayor’s office, said the demand for shelter beds increases when it gets colder.
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“We really need to make sure we have some type of indoor location for pretty much everyone, because otherwise we see a lot of cold weather injury,” she said.
Last winter saw record-breaking snowfall in January and multiple cold weather advisories, and shelters around the city were at capacity for months.
The new emergency shelters would be nighttime-only. The idea is to supplement what’s available with something very basic, until people can get into municipally-run year-round shelters, Agnew Bemben said. There, guests get three meals a day, case management and on-site behavioral health support.
The city started playing a more active role in the city’s homeless shelters in 2020 when it used federal funding to create emergency shelters at the Sullivan and Boeke arenas, and when voters passed an alcohol tax, which the city uses to fund homeless services.
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Funding for the nighttime shelters will come out of money designated for cold weather emergency shelters in the 2026 budget, Agnew Bemben said. Funding at the end of the winter depends on the 2027 budget, which the municipality is working on now. Agnew Bemben said she doesn’t expect the budget to include a major funding increase for municipal homeless shelters, since money is tight. But increasing year-round shelter has resulted in fewer people sleeping outdoors, she said.
“We had an almost 30 percent reduction in unsheltered homelessness this year, and it’s partly because we have more shelter available,” she said. “If we want to see fewer people unsheltered, we probably need to continue to invest in shelter.”
The city doesn’t have locations for the nighttime shelters, Agnew Bemben said, since that depends on the proposals. But she said she’d like to see a wide variety of contractors scattered across the city, serving different types of people.
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The proposals are due August 11.