Anchorage opens new homeless program that pairs tiny homes with addiction treatment

Homeless numbers have remained roughly the same in Anchorage for the last few years and city officials say many people who have been homeless for a long time need addiction treatment or behavioral health care. Now a new muni-owned treatment center is getting some people that care, while housing them in their own individual microunits. The transitional living program is a new municipal approach to solving long-term homelessness in the city.

Summer Bond is in charge of getting people settled in at the addiction treatment program, called Willow Commons. On a sunny spring day in early April, just a week after the program launched, Bond showed off a roughly 100-square-foot home. It was the last empty unit, and Bond said someone was moving in the next day.

“You get a bed, towel, set, hygiene kit, a fridge, a microwave, and then it’s not in here yet, but we plan to add a TV,” she said.

City officials say if you’re homeless, it can be hard to consistently show up for outpatient care. But now, people without housing can live in one of the units and get behavioral health care during the day.

Thea Agnew Bemben is excited about the program. She’s a special assistant to Anchorage mayor Suzanne LaFrance, and has been working on the program for more than a year. Behavioral health care is a key piece of the city’s homeless response, Agnew Bemben said.

“What we find is that when people remain unsheltered for a very extended period, oftentimes having a behavioral health issue is part of what’s keeping them unsheltered,” she said.

Bond is with Anchorage Recovery Center, a drug and alcohol rehab organization that is contracting with the municipality to run the program. The program isn’t hard to get into, she said. Participants must be unhoused and need addiction treatment. If there are units available, people get in the same day. When the program opened in late March, Bond said all 32 units were spoken for almost immediately, but right now, there’s only one person on the waitlist.

Each participant goes to individual and group therapy, is assigned a caseworker and gets life skills lessons.

There are fewer rules than a residential treatment center, Bond said. For instance, there’s no curfew. But Willow Commons is a closed campus, which means residents can’t leave until a certain stage in their treatment. No visitors are allowed either, and the same goes for drugs and alcohol.

The site is staffed 24 hours a day. That’s partly because when people all live together in close proximity, sometimes things can get a little complicated, Bond said. That happens at the other programs Anchorage Recovery Center runs too.

“We’ve been able to solve most of the issues and it just comes with the new territory,” she said. “Change is hard. Recovery is hard.”

The program is voluntary, and the timeline depends on the needs of each resident. Once someone is ready to graduate from the program Anchorage Recovery Center makes sure they transition into safe housing and have stable income. But it doesn’t stop there, Bond said.

“We check in on them after they’ve discharged,” she said. ‘How are you doing? Where are you at?’ Relapse is a part of recovery, so we always have our doors open.”

The city funded the development of the project with more than a million dollars left over from an opioid settlement, which it used to build the first two dozen microunits. The city received grant funding to build the final eight.

Anchorage Recovery Center will also contract with the municipality to provide outpatient services at the recently renamed Golden Lion Hotel, now called “Alder Place.” That will open once the city completes renovations. The city’s contract with Anchorage Recovery Center allows for the possibility of care at other city facilities as well.

The microunits are built to city code, so Agnew Bemben said they should be warm enough in the winter. But she said there will be a lot to keep tabs on, like how well the microunit designs function and whether there needs to be tweaks to the site, with its shared bathrooms and showers, and large common area.

“From the human dimension, we’ll be learning (about) client satisfaction, how well is treatment going? Are people graduating? All those kinds of things,” Agnew Bemben said.

It’s a test case, Agnew Bemben said. They’ll be learning from the project. She hopes other organizations learn from it too, and then build their own version.

“I would love lots of different types of organizations here in Anchorage to decide, ‘Hey, we could chip in and this is doable, and we’ll take the plunge,”’ she said.

To help house and support Anchorage’s homeless population, it’s going to take all different approaches from the community – not just the mayor’s office, Agnew Bemben said.

This story was originally published by Alaska Public Media and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.