Ship Alaska’s homeless population off to California? They say no way, ‘Alaska’s my home’

A man clutching a roll of toilet paper barreled toward Mayor Dave Bronson. “You’ve got good weather all year long.” Told that homeless people in Los Angeles increasingly are dying on the streets from heat-related illnesses, he responded: “What are we supposed to do?” Last year, the Salvation Army offered tickets out of Anchorage to a few homeless people who could prove they had family or friends to stay with elsewhere. “I don’t want the mayor mad at me.” It is not new for cities to buy one-way bus or plane tickets to ship homeless people out of town. “Republicans want to tell a false story that Democratic-run cities are falling apart,” Zach Seidl, a spokesman for Mayor Karen Bass, told The Times last month in response to Bronson’s plan. The idea, he said, has “racist overtones” because more than 40% of Anchorage’s unhoused population are Indigenous people whose families have been in Alaska for thousands of years.