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As I was driving by a Walmart in Midtown recently, I saw a woman curled up in a corner where shoppers were entering. She probably weighed 90 pounds and had her face turned toward heaven, her jaw slack, and her eyes closed. At other points, someone might have stopped to check her pulse or call an ambulance. We don't live in such a town now. In Midtown, the human body is also part of the landscape.
Driving through our city's central business district is like a sermon, a format that leads people to moral themes and makes them think about their responsibilities in a broken world. Every corner depicts plastic bottles, dirty sleeping bags, and suffering, ethical knots that must be untied. To look away is to fall into delusion; to witness is to despair and become helpless. I pray all the time in my car, but it's not enough.
Midtown is unlike any other neighborhood in Anchorage because most of the indoor spaces are owned by businesses and landlords — people who don't live there. The people who live there are mostly renters, some of the poorest in the city. In that sense, we all have a kind of ephemeral existence that will pass. Perhaps that is why no one feels responsible for what is happening there.
At the Aurora Bingo stoplight, I often think about how we confuse luck with what feels like a win. There was a man who used to stand on the corner all winter long when I took his son to soccer practice. He was young, barehanded, mumbling in another dimension, holding up illegible signs on yellow legal papers. He was looking into my son's eyes through the window. My son became afraid of that road. He told me that the man made him feel afraid.
What do you say to your child about it? Tell him that what he's feeling isn't actually fear, but a sheer coincidence of his own luck? Do you tell him that guy wouldn't be there if he wasn't drugged, drunk, or lazy? Say something about choice? I was embarrassed but couldn't say much. In this way, I taught my child by example to be insensitive to suffering. I know from history that this kind of self-deception occurs when atrocities are committed, especially when committed across a community, but I didn't know what else to do.
Once, when I entered a Walmart in the middle of winter, I saw a woman lying against the wall outside, bleeding from the head. In her head, I knew she was screaming too, but somehow she couldn't hear it when her automatic door opened and swallowed me, along with my shopping list, inside. I bought the funfetti flavored cake mix. In the produce section, I pass an older couple arguing in Korean and a not-so-young couple wearing matching fleece dragon costumes and holding hands.
Walmart is American through and through. That place has everything – insulin, papaya, ammunition, thong underwear, diamond rings, flyers – but so many people in its orbit stand on the brink of having absolutely nothing. It has been. Outside the store, a full moon appeared above her as paramedics loaded the bleeding woman into an ambulance. A pregnant woman led a crowd of children past, all licking ring pops. At that moment, the parking lot felt like the center of a city, or even the universe. Ingenuity and filth, strangeness and convention, humanity and darkness. You can walk through Midtown, but you can't leave behind its complicated truths.
Years ago, when I worked at the Anchorage Daily News, I wrote dozens of articles about people living in shelters, cars, and camps. I attended public meetings and spoke with clergy, politicians, advocates, economists, and national experts. Iteratively reproduces proven but imperfect solutions. Somehow, our city is still scratching its head 10 years later. The truth is, there is no cure for homelessness. Because there will always be people who have more than they need or who will never be able to overcome what is thrown at them no matter how hard they work. That, too, is very American.
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The tools Anchorage has to deal with the streets of Midtown can be divided into categories: more expensive and less expensive, more humane and less humane. It's cheaper and more humane to provide modest housing that doesn't require people to be sober or sane and provides quiet and privacy. It is cheaper and more humane to have access to drug and mental health treatment. Functional safety net systems such as food stamp programs can help. Affordable housing helps. The same goes for programs that help people get out of prison. While large-scale emergency shelters are more humane than no shelter, they do little to move people off the streets in the long term.
A few years ago, before we committed ourselves to more expensive and inhumane policies, we spent a summer handing out tents and forcing the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, and people with children to live in muddy campsites. before the fiasco of. I sat next to Mayor Dave Bronson on a flight from Juneau during a winter of bears and more people dying on the streets than anyone can remember. It was early in his term, in the middle of a pandemic, and neither of us were interested in talking about politics. We talked about food and I told him how precious Anchorage was to me. We asked him what he was most concerned about during his term as mayor. He said he wants to solve the homeless problem.
He thought there might be a way to get to the root of it, specifically addiction. I told him what I knew. Temperance comes from within and the government cannot touch it. No one writes laws to deal with heartache, but in many cases, that heartache goes back generations, and is brought into contact with reality in ways that cause people to drink, shoot guns, or fail to pay rent. I said it was causing us to lose contact. He told me that his plans weren't set in stone, but he thought he might come up with something.
Some of the wisest people I've met in the years I've covered homelessness have been people of faith. Until recent years, faith-based organizations provided the majority of shelters in Anchorage. Their politics were widely known, but they were invested in reducing costs and harm. Critically, they accepted that some clients will never get better, regardless of the punishment or reward system. In fact, some may become incorrigibly dishonest, dysfunctional, insane, addicted, criminal, and live and die in intolerable conditions. They took care of them anyway. Because we believed that even the most broken among us should eat and sleep inside. The concept can be summed up in one word: compassion. I admired Bronson's optimism and confidence, but as he spoke I didn't get the sense that he understood it at all.
Last summer, I saw a man with no legs constantly struggling to push his wheelchair up the hill on A Street. He spent his days begging on Fireweed Lane. I kept thinking about how that man came to live in a town where there was no better place for him. My mom says we've got a voting community. I thought I might be in the minority. You think you understand this place when you grow up here, but Anchorage is always changing. Maybe Midtown is what most people think it should be.
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One day I was hanging out at Fireweed and That Guy's Corner on C Street and I happened to have a dollar in my pocket. I rolled down the window and held it out to him. I didn't realize until then that his wheelchair couldn't go over the curb without causing him to fall onto the road. He reached out and tried to grab my bill when I let go and the wind caught it. It floated into the street. His face crumpled with disappointment. The light turned green. A feeling of helplessness froze me from within. Someone honked the horn. I had to go. So I stepped on the gas and left him there, just as I was passing through Midtown.
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