If not Felony Flats, where?

Should we applaud or mourn the impending destruction (or possible dismantling) of the Mile 49 cabins, known colloquially as Felony Flats?

The obvious answer is “applaud,” right? Finally, someone is cleaning up that crime-prone eyesore.

For years the location has been notorious as a dangerous place full of ne’er-do-wells. A place where people are shot, stabbed and bludgeoned to death. Where troopers are forever arresting people wanted on outstanding warrants.

So good riddance to Felony Flats, right?

Not so fast. Where are all of these people going to live when these cabins are moved to make way for the widening of the Parks Highway?

Residents of at least one neighborhood — a nice Big Lake neighborhood, we can attest, one with families and children and people who value their quiet — are worried about the possibility of new neighbors.

If these cabins with no running water move there, the Big Lake residents worry, so will their tenants. And then, as the saying goes, there goes the neighborhood.

But what if the cabins are just torn down and hauled off?

We happen to know — and, in fact, have reported in these pages — that those cabins are some of the only places in the Valley people fresh out of prison can get housing. For a lot of people, these cabins provide temporary housing, a stop along the way to getting their lives back on track.

For others, it’s clearly a stop on the road toward continued criminality.

Either way, the poorest among us must live somewhere. Maybe it has been a good thing that this trouble-prone spot also is just across the railroad tracks from the Alaska State Troopers post on Pittman Road.

We also know that housing for the recently paroled is non-existent in the Valley. It’s a real — and growing — problem, one a task force is working to remedy.

But it’s a problem that is only going to get worse. The state is, after all, on the verge of making fully operational its Goose Creek Correctional Center at Point MacKenzie.

Where are the prisoners discharged from there going to live after they are released? Likely, here in the Mat-Su somewhere. But nobody actually knows where right now, and that prospect is troubling.

Until we have a good answer to the question of where newly released people will be housed, we can’t applaud the removal of one of the few options for transitional housing available here. Where else are the poorest, the least among us, to go?

Cabin owner Mike Stephan told our reporter that, in his opinion, there will always be a need for places like the Mile 49 cabins. Would that it were not true.