Zack Gottshall: Anchorage’s homes-first strategy has failed. The cost is seen in lives and taxpayer dollars

By ZACK GOTTSHALL

For more than a decade, Anchorage has pursued a homelessness strategy centered on a “homes-first” approach, closely mirroring the national Housing First model. The premise has been simple: Provide housing without prerequisites, offer voluntary services, and stability will follow.

That premise has now been tested extensively, and it has failed.

Since roughly 2014, the Anchorage Assembly and its partners have directed well over $120 million toward homelessness response efforts, including emergency shelter operations, permanent supportive housing, service contracts, and related infrastructure. Despite this extraordinary level of public spending over more than a decade, the city has not achieved meaningful reductions in chronic homelessness. At some point, continued investment without results ceases to be persistence and becomes negligence.

The evidence of failure has been visible for years, yet the strategy remained largely unchanged—at significant and unnecessary cost to taxpayers.

Unsheltered encampments remain widespread. Emergency shelters are consistently over capacity. Public safety, sanitation, and emergency response costs continue to rise. Most concerning, the same individuals cycle repeatedly through shelters, hospitals, jails, and housing placements without achieving durable stability.

The consequences of this failure are immediate, visible, and measurable.

Even as the city debates long-term strategies, existing housing resources sit unused. The micro-unit transitional housing constructed for immediate deployment has remained empty because the Municipality continues to argue over insurance and liability requirements with an overpaid service provider. While bureaucratic disputes drag on, beds remain vacant and people remain outdoors in sub-zero temperatures. And it’s now nearing the end of January.

This winter alone, Anchorage has lost more than 50 people to cold-weather exposure. Many of them were preventable deaths occurring in a city that has already spent extraordinary sums on homelessness response. At this point, the problem Anchorage faces is no longer a lack of funding or professional services. It is the strategy that has failed.

Anchorage’s experience demonstrates the limits of a government-centered response. Housing is necessary, but insufficient for people experiencing long-term or chronic homelessness. What housing alone does not restore is what many have lost over years on the streets: family, community, trust, identity, and belonging. A housing unit can provide shelter, but it cannot rebuild a life fractured by prolonged isolation. Government systems and professional services are designed to administer programs—not to replace family, restore community, or walk alongside people through long-term recovery.

For this reason, chronic homelessness is not primarily a technical problem; it is a relational one. Yet Anchorage’s response has remained overwhelmingly bureaucratic and service-driven, even as outcomes stagnated.

At the same time, restrictive zoning, burdensome permitting, and rigid ordinances have made it unnecessarily difficult for churches to step forward. Faith communities with land, volunteers, and long-term commitment are often delayed or blocked by regulatory barriers, leaving the institutions best suited to address the relational roots of chronic homelessness constrained by the very systems claiming to solve it.

If Anchorage wants different results, it must pursue a different approach—one that treats housing as the foundation, not the finish line. A growing body of national research and real-world experience points toward a community-first model for addressing chronic homelessness. This approach pairs permanent housing with intentional community structures that restore belonging, accountability, and purpose—factors largely absent from housing-only strategies.

Homes of Hope is a locally driven effort being developed around this community-first model, with the goal of launching its first community in the fall of 2026. Rather than dispersing individuals into isolated units or cycling them through programs, the model envisions small, permanent residential communities located on church property, where long-term presence, shared values, and stewardship provide stability.

The proposed model emphasizes relational support alongside professional services, drawing on volunteers, church staff members, healthcare professionals, and others willing to walk alongside residents over time. Meaningful work and contribution are treated as central, reinforcing dignity and long-term stability.

Homes of Hope is not presented as a quick fix, but as a deliberate shift toward solutions that address the full reality of chronic homelessness—housing, community, and belonging together.

The Church is uniquely positioned to address chronic homelessness because it operates in ways government systems cannot.

Faith communities are relational by design. They are rooted in neighborhoods over generations, built on shared values, moral accountability, and long-term presence. They mobilize volunteers motivated by commitment rather than contracts, and they remain engaged long after programs end. Unlike institutional systems, churches do not cycle people through services; they walk alongside them.

Chronic homelessness will not be solved by additional contracts, reporting requirements, or funding streams alone. It will be addressed when people are restored to community, given a stable place to belong, and surrounded by relationships that endure beyond formal interventions.

Anchorage has demonstrated a willingness to spend significant public resources. What it has not yet done is align its strategy with the relational realities of chronic homelessness. Until barriers to church-led solutions are reduced, and until community is treated as essential rather than incidental, the city is likely to continue investing heavily while achieving little.

The evidence of failure is clear. The path forward is equally clear. The remaining question is whether Anchorage is willing to change course.

Zack Gottshall is a retired U.S. Army Intelligence Officer, former Vice Chairman of the Alaska Republican Party, a Commissioner on the Alaska State Commission for Human Rights, and a small business owner in Anchorage, Alaska.