When Compassion Creates the Crisis: A Hard Truth About Homelessness
Contributed by Dana Raffaniello
A thought experiment. Imagine you see someone freezing on the street. Your first instinct is to help—give them shelter, warmth, a meal. That’s human decency. Now imagine you do this so well that word spreads. More people come. You get more resources. You help more people. You’re doing good work, right?
But then ask yourself: Where are these new people coming from? Why are they coming here instead of somewhere else? And what happens when the resources run out? This is exactly what happened in Anchorage.
The Suffering Is Real
Nobody disputes that people are suffering. People are sleeping in cars and tents. They’re cold, hungry, and afraid. Some have died, and those deaths matter. Nobody wants to see anyone freeze. But here’s the hard question: Are we willing to learn from what just happened in Anchorage, or will we repeat the exact same mistake because it feels compassionate in the moment? Anchorage tried exactly what the “just build beds” advocates are demanding. They built capacity. They removed barriers. They attracted people from across the country. And when the federal money ran out, those same people were forced onto the streets in a state with lethal winters. Now they’re sleeping in tents in Palmer. The advocates created the exact suffering they claim to want to prevent.
The Road Paved with Good Intentions
Between 2019 and 2024, Anchorage activists and the Assembly genuinely wanted to help. They secured millions in federal COVID emergency funds. They converted hotels into shelters. They expanded services. They counted every homeless person meticulously because—and here’s the key—the more people they counted, the more federal money they received. The formula was simple: Higher homeless numbers meant more funding. More shelter beds filled meant more reimbursement. More service utilization meant more future grants. Nobody set out to create a problem. But they built a system where success was measured by how many homeless people they could document, not how many they could help leave homelessness behind.
The Magnet Effect
Before 2019, Anchorage’s homeless population was mostly Alaska Native individuals, often displaced from dry villages. After the funding surge, demographics shifted dramatically. More people from the Lower 48 with no Alaska ties, many arriving in summer without winter gear or understanding of Alaska’s climate. Social workers reported increased interactions with individuals who had never experienced temperatures below freezing. Why? Because Anchorage had become a known service hub—hotels with beds, programs with funding, services available. When Mayor Bronson proposed helping people voluntarily return to the Lower 48, especially those who’d recently arrived and were unprepared for Alaska winters, the Assembly blocked it—not because it wouldn’t work, but because every person who left was one less to count, one less justification for federal dollars. The system financially rewarded keeping the problem large.
When the Money Dried Up
By 2023 and 2024, federal emergency funds dried up. Hotel reimbursements ended. Programs downsized. Encampments were cleared. The people didn’t vanish. They moved outward to the Mat-Su Valley. The very people the advocates claimed to be helping are now suffering in our communities because the federal funding model collapsed.
The Legal Reality Nobody Wants to Acknowledge
Here’s where it gets truly frustrating. The same activists who supported the policies that created Anchorage’s crisis are now attacking our borough mayor for not “doing enough” to fix the problem they caused. Let me be very clear: The Mat-Su Borough is a second-class borough under Alaska statute. That’s not an insult or an excuse. That’s a legal classification with specific constraints that cannot be ignored. Under Alaska law, a second-class borough cannot operate public housing, cannot run homeless shelters, cannot create a housing authority without voter approval, cannot assume areawide social service authority without a public vote, and cannot duplicate powers that belong to cities like Palmer and Wasilla. When activists demand that the borough “just build beds” or “just make shelters,” they are literally asking our borough government to violate state law.
The borough does not have the legal authority to do what they’re demanding—not because the mayor doesn’t care, not because we’re making excuses, but because Alaska statute prohibits it. When they accuse the mayor of “insulting the community” by correctly stating we’re a second-class borough, they reveal they either don’t understand Alaska’s municipal governance structure or are deliberately ignoring it because the legal reality is politically inconvenient.
Think about the absurdity. The same people who built a system in Anchorage dependent on high homeless counts and federal dollars, who blocked solutions that might have prevented this spillover, are now demanding that a legally constrained borough solve the crisis resulting from their choices. They created a problem the Mat-Su is legally prohibited from solving in the way they’re demanding.
The Question We Need to Ask
Are we helping people exit homelessness, or building infrastructure that needs homelessness to justify itself? This isn’t about compassion versus callousness. Everyone involved cares deeply. But caring isn’t enough if the system you build makes the problem worse. If you build a shelter, will it empty out or stay full? If it stays full, is that success or failure? When funding decreases—and it always does eventually—what happens to those people?
The Choice Before Us
We can learn from Anchorage’s mistakes or repeat them. We can respond to immediate crisis without building permanent infrastructure that attracts more people than we can sustainably serve. We can support Palmer and Wasilla, the cities that have legal authority to act, rather than demanding the borough exceed its statutory powers. We can demand that organizations using public funds prove they’re helping people leave homelessness, not just documenting them in it.
Sometimes good intentions fail when they ignore how systems work. Sometimes compassion without accountability creates exactly what it’s trying to prevent. The kindest thing is being honest about what works and what doesn’t, even when that honesty is uncomfortable.
Our Valley has always taken care of our own. But we’ve never had to deal with a crisis imported from policy decisions we didn’t make and funding formulas we didn’t create. We shouldn’t be attacked for refusing to repeat the mistakes that created this mess. The Mat-Su didn’t create this crisis. Our local charities handled our baseline situation effectively for decades.
But we’re dealing with consequences of decisions made elsewhere, driven by federal funding formulas and political battles we weren’t part of. We can either learn from Anchorage’s documented failure or repeat it and pretend to be surprised when we get the same results.
The choice is ours.