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Allan Lamprey was homeless for most of his adult life. He struggled through the country from his home state of Virginia, Maryland, and California to addiction and alcohol problems. Eventually, he made his way up to Alaska in 2008.
The lamprey has been found at Fairbanks, the inland hub of Alaska with a population of just over 30,000, where the average minimum of January is under 19 years old. The winter hit hard.
"It was something I had never experienced before," said Lamprey, 60. "It's hard to live when he's 40 years old."
An employee of a 12-step program found the lamprey in the woods with a pack of beer in his hand and asked him if he needed help. Finally, he became sober and approached the Fairbanks Rescue Mission, a local organization for the homeless, to shelter and find work.
Lamprey began as a cook, became a shelter manager, and now runs the recycling center, which mission is to help homeless people gain work experience.
"If it was not for the mission, I would be dead," he said.
But stories of rehabilitation and success, like that of Lamprey, may soon become rare in Alaska, warn the defenders of the homeless.
In a vast state smaller than California and freezing death is a real threat, Alaska faces unique challenges in tackling homelessness. In its few cities, more frequent roaming problems are exacerbated by the weather and the lack of infrastructure at the state level. But with the massive budget cuts made this summer by Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy, resources for homelessness services have been further reduced to nothing. This summer, the Anchorage shelters had to close during the day, leaving mothers on the street with their children at 8 am, the operators having to make the difficult decision of who could stay and who was to leave.
In rural areas, housing is so expensive that the only way to fight homelessness is to live in overcrowded housing. In the most remote areas of the state, 15 people who sleep in a 700-square-foot house are not uncommon, which often results in health problems.
Lawyers and non-profit organizations have spent years studying and trying to tackle what they call the two-part Alaska homelessness crisis. In simple terms, they need more money. But as the state cuts spending, they are afraid they will not be able to hang on to the services they provide and keep the people they serve warm.
"A war with not enough weapons"
As the country started coming out of the 2008 recession, Alaska suffered an economic shock when oil prices fell in 2014. Faced with a growing deficit and a declining economy, Senator Dunleavy led a governor campaign in 2018 stating that it would curb spending. He also promised to "pay back" the residents to the money he had had after a few years of annual dividend reduction that each Alaska was receiving from the state's oil wealth under the authority of the government. 39, a law promulgated in 1980.
Dunleavy won the contentious elections last November: a few weeks before the citizens of Alaska go to the polls, Governor Walker, an independent, resigned and endorsed Democrat Senator and former US Senator Mark Begich, but in vain.
Dunleavy has since tried to keep his promise. This year, he unveiled unprecedented and unprecedented budget cuts in the areas of education, Medicaid, seniors' services, heating assistance and homelessness services needed to redress the crisis. state budget. According to the governor's office, Alaska has exhausted its savings since the fall in the price of oil.
Initially, Dunleavy had proposed to reduce the homelessness program by $ 7.2 million, which was later reduced to $ 3.6 million, but advocates fear that these cuts will not be enough. not only affect current services, but also reverse the progress made in vulnerable infrastructure for homeless people in Alaska.
"It feels like we're in a war with not enough weapons," said Rodney Gaskins, who heads Fairbanks' rescue mission, at NBC News.
Twelve beds for young people in an area the size of Texas
Gaskins describes the fact of being homeless in Fairbanks as "almost a death sentence".
In winter or when the snow has finally melted, the inhabitants of Alaska begin to find corpses: a teenager walking without shoes who died in the night, a person in a tent that was not hot enough. In Fairbanks, there are three accommodation centers: the Rescue Mission, the Youth Advocates and the Interior Center for Nonviolent Life in Alaska. The three organizations are careful not to duplicate services and strive to fill as many gaps as possible. But they say the problem is too important to be solved by themselves while serving the interior of the country, a region about the size of Texas, often snowy from September to May.
Marylee Bates founded and directs the Fairbanks Youth Advocates. At his youth shelter The Door, Bates has 12 beds and a small budget, but will want to help as many children as possible.
Teenagers come to The Door for a variety of reasons. Some are homeless and others are looking to leave a dangerous life situation. But in an area that has cities like Fort Yukon, with a population of about 540, where the only way to get to Fairbanks is a one-way flight, which costs about $ 140, it's hard to get access to help.
"In the winter, kids often go to hell with what's going on," Bates said.
Before opening the shelter, the interior of Alaska had spent a decade without any place to house its young homeless. According to Bates, the opening of the shelter took "a series of miracles". She now says it's a miracle every time a young person goes to The Door, looking for a place to stay, hoping to get out of danger, from the cold or both.
When Fairbanks homelessness providers learned earlier this summer of the Governor's proposed budget cuts, they were not sure how they were going to continue. Ultimately, providers will lose 20% of their public funding – a figure that Bates and Gaskins said is more serious than it appears.
Since the opening of The Door, five years ago, Bates has received almost all the supplies and food needed for the some 125 young people she helps every year through donations.
"I do not know how much the community can still get into its pockets," she said. "We can not cut bread and milk."
Bates will lose about $ 37,000 in funding and will have to cut his staff by half, his main expense. But the requirements impose a ratio of 1 to 6 employees to stay open during waking hours.
"We have two paid employees on three shifts a day, seven days a week," Bates explained. "Losing a position and a half is important."
Gaskins feels the budget cuts too. His organization welcomed more than 900 people last year, served more than 50,000 meals and helped host some fifty veterans. Now he has to fire a transitional program staff member, who helps people out of homelessness, and find another way to fill the gap while remaining as efficient as possible.
"Alaska is turning its back on the most vulnerable," Gaskins said. "There is already not enough treatment at Fairbanks."
An emergency city
In Anchorage, a similar situation takes place on a much larger scale.
In the face of Dunleavy's initial budget cuts in June and July, homelessness services in Anchorage, which are home to nearly half of Alaska's population, have had to downsize. . Hundreds of people living in shelters had to leave and shelters open 24 hours a day during the day. And the governor was not only proposing to reduce funding for homeless services, but also free legal services for evicted persons, Medicaid, the elderly, mental health services and food banks.
Jasmine Boyle, Executive Director of the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness, said many residents of the city were convinced that with the reduction of government services, more people would become homeless.
Anchorage saw the cuts as a public health and safety crisis and declared a civil emergency in July, liquidating funds to help homeless people in the city. But the funds used were those that were generally used to finance homeless services during the winter, when the needs were greater. "The money needed for extra shelter in winter is no longer there," Boyle said of the short-term effects.
A total of $ 3.6 million has been removed from the homelessness program, but the government's housing subsidy program has mobilized and allocated $ 2 million to fill a portion of the program. the difference. Even with this extra help, Anchorage has again seen its funding reduced by 20%.
Long-term and homeless service providers do not know what their already delicate future will look like. The Anchorage Coalition Against Homelessness reported that of the 1,111 people who were homeless in the city earlier this year, 1,014 were accommodated and 7,300 others were removed from the streets in Anchorage , thanks to the city's housing and transition services.
Lisa Aquino, who runs the city's Catholic Social Services, says those she serves come from all over Alaska. Anchorage is the only place in the state where some mental health services are provided, and people seeking treatment often end up with Brother Francis Shelter, led by the Aquino organization. The shelter is also home to many formerly incarcerated people. "People are coming out of prison in Anchorage and going directly to Brother Francis," she said.
Then there are people who want to leave Anchorage but can not do it – the weak state road network is less miles than Connecticut. "People come to work in a cannery and get stuck," said Aquino. "They do not have enough money to go home."
When she learned the initial cuts, Aquino said she was "wrecked." Brother Francis planned to reduce the number of his shelters from 240 to 100 people. "We were trying to figure out who would live and die," she said.
Greet your neighbors, at a cost
While a public battle for adequate funding for homeless services is taking place in Anchorage, an invisible housing crisis is occurring outside of Alaska's cities.
"In rural Alaska, homelessness does not manifest as a person on the street," said Chris Kolerok, former president and CEO of the Bering Straits Regional Housing Authority. "In Arctic communities, instead of letting your cousins die, people will bring in other people who have nowhere to go."
Kolerok says that while this act of goodwill saves lives, it also has devastating effects on communities and disproportionately hurts Native Americans in Alaska.
In the United States, about 3% of homes are overcrowded as defined by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but in parts of Alaska rates can reach 50%.
For those who live in houses of 200 square meters with 15 other people, it is difficult to sleep and be in good health.
"In a very overcrowded house, like 20 people in a house, people have to sleep on a rotating basis because there are not enough surfaces," Kolerok said of the inhabitants of the Bering Strait on the northwest coast of Alaska.
Overcrowding can also create health risks, such as breathing problems, explained Kolerok, accounting for about two-thirds of youth hospitalizations in rural Alaska. According to the Alaska Housing Authorities Association, overcrowding in the Calista region in the south-west of the country is causing residents to contract invasive pneumococcus at the highest in the world.
According to one authority, a house without a bedroom without a running water system or sewer system with four times more people than it lives inside. Even more, if a person in a house that houses 20 has a substance abuse problem, 19 people will feel the effects.
Brian Wilson, executive director of the Alaska Coalition on Housing and Homelessness, said overcrowding is rampant in rural Alaska.
"You see it house to house," Wilson said. "Overcrowding does not really exist elsewhere in the United States on this scale."
And even though overcrowding can provide a seemingly simple solution – build more houses – it's not cheap, and the governor's recent cuts will make the task more difficult to solve.
"We have areas where HUD estimates that $ 500 million is needed to mitigate the problem," Wilson said. It is only a rural area of Alaska. "It's almost a type of investment that builds a nation to fix it."
The areas of Alaska where overcrowding is the worst are usually the most remote, where a gallon of milk can cost $ 10 and nothing to offer residents is exorbitant. Often, transportation of materials costs as much as materials, and according to the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation for 2018, it would take 16,100 units to mitigate overcrowding. Governor's cuts to Alaska's marine road network will make building materials, groceries and necessities even more expensive to ship to rural areas as ferry routes become less frequent .
The little money that used to help overcrowded houses – or at least maintain them – was also reduced in the new budget. Dunleavy's $ 5 million cut in the weather protection program that helps rural homes be renovated or repaired to keep them warm means homes will no longer need money for repairs.
Some suggest that overcrowded people should relocate – and others do, what homeless service providers in Fairbanks and Anchorage can attest to – but Wilson says it's not so simple.
"We are talking about cultures and people who have lived in these areas for centuries, who are fishing and land-related, and who speak languages that are spoken only in those areas," Wilson said of Native communities of Alaska suffering from overcrowding. "When you take a" It's much easier to move people to an urban center "approach, we're talking about destruction of culture."
Even if people move, the cities of Alaska are not necessarily ready to absorb the impact.
More cuts to come
Dunleavy maintains his position that cuts are necessary. "Our current fiscal outlook – a deficit of $ 1.6 billion and declining government revenues – also forces us to prioritize each area of spending and review projects with an additional level of control that has not occurred. always produced before, "wrote his office in a statement. at NBC News. "Note that the state of Alaska has exhausted more than $ 14 billion in savings over the last four years."
The governor promised to make more cuts. Anchorage Daily News recently reported that internal memos were showing the state agencies to prepare for a new round of massive cuts next summer.
Aquino knows what lies ahead. "I hope we will be in the same situation on July 1, 2020," she said. "It was his platform, so that's what I thought."
The only difference between this year and the next is that Aquino and his colleagues will have time to prepare. "We must now think about how we are going to reduce services in a humane way," she said.
For Lamprey, of Fairbanks, the cuts do not seem logical. He thinks that a lack of appropriate investments in homelessness and housing services will only further damage the state.
"They have always cut money for the homeless," he said. "But putting someone in jail is more expensive than rehabilitating him."
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