Housing and Homeless Committee Meeting Summary - Dec 17, 2025
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Anchorage Housing and Homeless Committee Meeting Summary - December 17, 2025
The Anchorage Housing and Homeless Committee convened on Wednesday, December 17, 2025, to review the outcomes of the third tranche of Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA), receive an updates on the city's shelter system, and hear reports from the multidisciplinary outreach (Hope) team. While committee members expressed deep disappointment over the return of unused ERA funds to the treasury, they also acknowledged the successful immediate housing of over 700 households. The meeting highlighted a significant shift in service integration since previous years, though concerns were raised regarding the sustainability of long-term housing retention and the visibility of unsheltered individuals who remain outside the current system.
Consent Calendar
- [None; all items were presented for discussion and report]
Public Comments & Testimony
- Jamie Lopez (East Anchorage, formerly Coalition, formerly homeless):
- Expressed opposition to the current displacement policy and the use of law enforcement in outreach, stating that leading with law enforcement creates a barrier for traumatized individuals to accept services and may lead to frostbite or death.
- Critiqued the effectiveness of short-term housing solutions without long-term support, arguing that individuals with significant PTSD cannot become fully functioning members of society immediately upon placement and are likely to return to the streets.
- Noted that the anti-camping strategy yielded less than a 10% service acceptance rate (29 out of 300 compliant/arrested individuals), indicating the policy fails to engage the "shadow population" of unsheltered people.
- Asserted that the current system works for those already connected but fails to reach the hundreds of people outside who require daily, nightly, and 24/7 proactive engagement rather than reactive enforcement.
Discussion Items
- ERA Two Tranche Three Outcomes (Presentation by Jed Drolle & Kimberly Rash, Anchorage Health Department):
- Status: The program received approximately $4 million, spent $3.2 million, and is returning the remaining funds to the treasury.
- Achievement: Served 717 unique households, exceeding the projected goal of 600.
- Grantee Performance: Three grantees (Henning, New Life Development, United Way) spent all their funding (with Henning and New Life Development receiving reallocated funds after United Way notified them they could not spend theirs); three grantees (Coalition for Homelessness, Choosing Our Roots, NeighborWorks) underspent.
- Barriers to Spending:
- Extremely compressed timeline (funds accessed in March with a September 30th hard deadline).
- Bottleneck in eligibility checks regarding prior ERA usage through the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation (AHFC).
- Difficulty securing landlords willing to accept short-term rental assistance (1-2 months) without long-term guarantees.
- Complex, decentralized application intake across multiple grantees.
- Future Commitments: Health Department committed to increased on-site oversight, more transparent reporting, and exploring a single central intake point for future programs.
- Mayor's Office & Shelter System Update (Presentation by Agnew Benben, Kathleen McLaughlin, and Hope Team):
- Shelter Capacity: Municipally contracted 300 year-round beds (East 56, Linda's Place, Alex Hotel); surged to capacity (150 beds at East 56 and 150 at Linda's Place) due to cold weather, with an additional 25 beds added at East 56 via emergency declaration.
- System Integration: The Mayor's office and Health Department emphasized a dramatic improvement in real-time coordination compared to previous years.
- Good Neighbor Fund: Utilized to purchase short-term hotel rooms as "overflow" beds when shelter capacity is full (e.g., housing an individual on the street for 10 years by buying a hotel room for one night to facilitate entry into a shelter).
- Safety Center Operations: Described as a low-barrier entry point. The model involves triaging individuals at night to move them into shelter beds the next morning to decompress the center.
- Future Infrastructure: Announced upcoming crisis stabilization centers: South Central Foundation (June 2026) with 16 chairs and 16 beds; Providence (October 2026) with 12 chairs and 12 beds.
- Hope Team (MDOT) Operations: Implemented daily morning coordination meetings with all outreach partners to enable real-time problem-solving, resource sharing, and immediate placement of individuals into shelter, detox, or medical care.
- Housing Rehab Fund: Planned to be presented to the Assembly via substantial amendment to use CDBG/Home funds.
- Microunits: Ribbon cutting held; 24 units constructed on site, with 8 additional units to be built and ADA ramps installed by end of December.
- Member Inquiries and Concerns:
- Member Rivera: Expressed curiosity regarding the long-term data on housing retention for the ERA cohort and the optimal length of stay at the Safety Center.
- Member Baldwin Day: Inquired about the complexity of the application process and the lack of available data on who remained housed post-september; requested clarification on AHFC's involvement in the approval bottlenecks.
- Chair (Tara): Expressed concern regarding the number of unsheltered individuals still outside during cold nights, emphasizing the need to know everyone in the community and ensure their safety.
- Agreement: All members agreed to provide a follow-up on long-term outcomes and data around January/February 2026.
Key Outcomes
- Decision: The committee acknowledged the return of unspent ERA funds to the treasury but commended the Health Department and Mayor's office for the rapid deployment of services.
- Directive: The Health Department is tasked with providing a detailed snapshot of current housing retention data and a long-term outcomes report by the March or April meeting, with final close-out reporting due January 28, 2026.
- Action: The municipality secured an emergency declaration to expand shelter capacity at East 56 by 25 beds.
- Future Planning: The committee noted the upcoming opening of crisis stabilization centers in 2026 and the imminent start of the Microunits program in January 2026 as critical components of the long-term strategy.
- Administrative: The Housing Rehab Fund will be brought forward for Assembly review via a substantial amendment, followed by a full concept presentation after a 30-day comment period.
Meeting Transcript
How about now? Okay. I'll start over. Welcome. Um calling to move calling to order this meeting of the assembly housing and homeless committee. It is Wednesday, December 17th. It is 1049 a.m. Um we are we're gonna get started. I know there's a few members that are running late, but we're gonna go ahead and start. Um so uh we'll we'll do roll um just on on the phone, Mr. Johnson. Are you there? Yes, I'm here, thank you. And Miss Baldwin Day, are you there? Yes, I am. Thank you. Um Jared Gerker, right? And this is Cameron Perez Rodia. Um okay, so we're gonna get started. Uh we have um uh our first item on the agenda is the Anchorage Health Department. If you'd like to go ahead and come up. Um and actually, folks from from the mayor's office and others, there's plenty of space up here. Why don't you just come come on up? Um that way we don't have to wait for you in the transition. And uh introduce yourself for the record, and whenever you're ready, you can get started. This is Jed Drolle, uh community systems program manager for Anchor Chalk Department. Kimberly Rash, Anchorage Health Department. Okay. Uh so yeah, we'll go ahead and get started with this presentation about uh emergency rental assistance outcomes and performance. Um have the next slide, please. Okay. Um so for this uh presentation, I'm gonna give a brief overview of the um ERA program, um, then look at the spending and outcomes uh actually both collectively for the program and by grantee, um, some of the feedback that we got from grantees um and then the commitments that our program is making um based on lessons learned from uh how we've done this program. Next slide. So um just high level overview, and this is um to to be clear, and this is on the um uh agenda here uh as well, but just want to emphasize this is the ERA two tranche three funding only. There are there's previous funding, there was ERA one and then ERA two. Um ERA uh two was split into three different tranches, and our program only managed the third of those. So this doesn't um take into consideration the uh previous funds um from ERA, um just that tranch three. So tranch three, um, we got four about four million dollars total. Um, and we ended up spending uh about three point two million dollars. So we just you know um fair fair warning, fair notice. We we will be returning some money to the treasury. Um the and I'll go into uh some of the reasons for that um later in the program. But um we did spend most of it. Um tranch three, we uh had a very compressed time frame because we couldn't access uh tranch three until we met a certain spending um threshold of tranch two. Um and by the time we we hit that, it was uh March of about March of this year, and then there was a very hard deadline for all ERA funding of September 30th of this year that we had to spend it before. And so that was kind of a major constraint on how we set up the program. Um and that is one of the reasons that um some of the money did end up not being spent. Next slide, please. So client served. Um, in in this case, we actually uh uh exceeded expectations.
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