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A plan backed by the mayor to buy homeless people in Anchorage one-way plane tickets out of town could be effective for some people — but it’s far from a universal fix and would not eliminate the need for winter shelter, providers say.
Mayor Dave Bronson floated the idea in an extended interview with the Daily News earlier this week, saying offering people a chance to relocate could help prevent outdoor deaths.
“We set a record this last year on how many people died unsheltered in the city,” Bronson said. “If something doesn’t happen, we’re going to beat that record this next winter. And so, with that moral impetus for me, we’re going to start giving airline tickets for people to go where they want to go.”
At the time, Bronson was not aware that Anchorage has already exceeded the grim record: As of Thursday, 29 people believed to be homeless had died outdoors in Anchorage this year. Six of those people died just between July 18 and 21, according to Anchorage Police Department data.
[Anchorage outdoor deaths surge to a record since closure of Sullivan Arena shelter]
A plan to offer plane tickets to unhoused people in Anchorage would be a choice offered in addition to winter shelter, not a replacement for it, said Alexis Johnson, the city’s homeless coordinator. That point may not have been communicated clearly, she said.
“I want it to be supplemental,” she said.
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The administration will likely ask for about $50,000 to expand travel assistance programs already offered by the Salvation Army and other organizations, Johnson said.
Tickets purchased usually cost $600 to $1,000, equal to a six- to 10-day stay at a shelter, city spokesman Corey Allen Young said in an email.
“I don’t think this is the end-all, be-all for homelessness,” Johnson said. “This is just one more choice.”
Other cities, including geographically isolated places like Hawaii, have paid to fly homeless residents out. But the practice has been criticized for transferring homelessness to a new physical place without solving the underlying causes.
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In Anchorage, the practice of sending away people considered troublesome has a long history. As early as 1920, Anchorage newspapers mention accused thieves being given the “blue ticket” out of town. By 1945, a “public fund clean up plan” paid for “vagrancy fund” beneficiaries to be sent to Seattle via steamship, according to newspaper archives.
Cathleen McLaughlin runs her own consulting business and was hired by the city to help with the transition closing the Sullivan Arena mass shelter. She ended up helping a handful of shelter residents relocate via plane tickets, and she cautions it’s a solution for only a small percentage of people.
Those people often have less complicated life scenarios — people who have come to Alaska to work a fisheries job or seasonal labor that didn’t pan out and are stranded, but have a supportive home to return to elsewhere. McLaughlin estimates people whose homelessness can be ended with relocation account for maybe 10% of the overall homeless population.
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McLaughlin used community donations to help some of the last people remaining at Sullivan Arena this spring return to their hometowns. One was a 25-year-old with substance abuse issues who went to live with his mother on the Kenai Peninsula. Another person with serious mental health issues returned to his dad in Spokane, Washington.
“It wasn’t just giving him a plane ticket and saying ‘best of luck’ — there was a plan,” she said.
What has “failed miserably,” McLaughlin said, is when people say they want to go to a new city without any reason or structure in place. That happened a few years ago at the shelter, when a resident said he wanted to start a new life in Seattle and staff scraped together funds for a ticket.
“A month later he was back,” she said.
Some people also have legal barriers to returning home. For people from remote Alaska communities, McLaughlin said, she has always called the village tribal council to talk through the decision. Sometimes people are not welcome back in the village because they’ve victimized people living there.
In order to fly people home, they first need IDs — and many unsheltered people in Anchorage don’t have them, she said. Others are tethered to Anchorage by court-ordered terms of their probation or parole. However you look at it, plane tickets do help some people but aren’t a substitute for shelter, she said.
“I mean, everyone’s trying to dodge the elephant in the room, which is, we need a cold-weather place to rest,” McLaughlin said.
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Denice Delgado runs the Salvation Army’s social services division in Anchorage. She’s sent unhoused people to Sand Point, Texas, North Carolina, Minnesota and elsewhere as part of the organization’s travel assistance program. She always makes sure there’s a plan for the person on the other end of the flight — and requires proof.
“If they don’t have a stable life plan in place, we’re not getting a ticket to go and be homeless somewhere else,” she said.
What makes it work — and makes it different from criticized programs that have bused people en masse out of other Lower 48 cities — is getting to know the person and “assisting them holistically.”
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“We won’t pass on our homeless issues to somebody else,” she said. “We’re all facing that same thing across the United States.”
The Salvation Army has received grants from the city to continue the program, she said.
Johnson, the city homeless coordinator, said a mass shelter for winter is not a likely option at this point. But she thinks that a surge of newly available hotel room conversions will lessen the need for a congregate winter shelter.
“We think with four hotel conversions going into housing — there will be about 350 (people seeking shelter) instead of the 600 we had last winter,” she said. “And we think we’ll be able to cover it with non-congregate.”
Plans on “warming centers” and how unhoused people would get access to those non-congregate shelter rooms are not yet clear.
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The idea of buying one-way plane tickets for homeless people in Anchorage isn't new. But the realities are complicated. - Anchorage Daily News
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