Wasilla to close homeless camps

WASILLA — If community groups have their way, chaotic urban camps housing large numbers of homeless and unsupervised youth will be a relic of summers past.

The encampments reached a crisis point last year, when tents set up in a public utility easement under power lines were discovered to contain about 30 children and adults living together. Parents would sometimes drop children off for “camping trips” that were, in reality, entry points for drug use, alcohol consumption, and sex trafficking, and a breeding ground for sexual assault and sexually transmitted diseases, advocacy groups say.

Children as young as 12 who sought help from MY House were discovered sharing tents with 30-year-old felons previously convicted of crimes against children, ranging from domestic violence to sexual assault of a minor, said director Michelle Overstreet.

“We reached a situation where we needed help keeping the younger kids out of the camps, and the older guys that were there were recruiting,” she said. “We just asked the city to help us, and their response was to say ‘We gotta get rid of these camps.’”

City officials have obtained agreements this year from some property owners to eliminate mass camping, and received permission from public utilities to cross onto their land and remove mass encampments. They will attempt to push the camps outside the city limits, Wasilla city officials said.

The overall strategy is to prevent “camp bosses” — the leaders and sometimes founders of the mass camps — from interfering with campers’ who seek services, officials said.

The effort to get the camps deconstructed and cleaned up is perennial, said Wasilla Mayor Bert Cottle. This is essentially an effort to make sure campers know about other, safer options for different age ranges, he said.

“I’m trying to come up with a one, two-page informational sheet that I can hand to the police officers and say ‘OK, if they’re under 18, here’s your options,’” he said.

Cottle says he asked advocacy officials to notify police when they spot a camp. That’s a significant change from how homeless camps in Wasilla have been handled in the past, said MY House outreach coordinator Jay Dagenhart.

“It had been tolerated. And last summer, things just kind of got out of control with the camps,” he said.

Dagenhart oversees the efforts to make contact with those living in the camps. Last summer, he watched as smaller groups of two and three teens combined into two large-scale camps, and the familiar structure of street gangs emerged.

“There was a hierarchy of kind of … almost like soldiers … under the camp boss. And then you had people go out and steal things and bring it back to camp,” he said. “It was this whole Robin Hood mentality. It was the strangest thing. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Teens seeking an unsupervised haven have turned it into something of a counterculture, Dagenhart said.

“They just call it camping,” he said.

The campers aren’t just homeless, but also more affluent youths whose parents unwittingly hand them over to a potentially dangerous situation, Overstreet said. Outreach workers with the group watched helplessly as parents dropped off a 16-year-old girl with a backpack adorned with a stuffed animal at the site of one camp, Overstreet said.

“She was going to camp with the homeless people for the weekend,” she said. “That is not safe.”

Overstreet said there are better options for housing in the Valley than these camps. She said human bodily waste and garbage also accumulates in these camps, adding to the health risk.

“The human waste that was left in the wake of those camps was frightening,” she said. “When you have 30 people in a camp for six weeks at a time and no toilet facilities … I want people to get the idea that this is nasty business.”

She said the camps pose a wide range of risks including environmental and public health risks.

“It’s not just the sex trafficking and the crimes against children that we’re preventing,” Overstreet said.

In some cases, the camps are specifically chosen to hide illicit drug use and sexual activity from sight, officials said.

The effort is intended to counteract a long-term perception of the Valley as a safe haven for sex offenders, Overstreet said.

For example, the teenage victim of a January sexual assault in Anchorage was deposited in the parking lot of Wasilla Fred Meyer, where case workers discovered her. This was part of an intentional strategy to prevent a rape kit from being administered within the first 24 hours of an assault, Overstreet said.

“I want to put a sign out on the Glenn Highway that says ‘Welcome to Wasilla. If you harm our youth, we will hunt you down,’” she said.