Anchorage welcomed a new mayor on July 1. This little animal (along with a majority of the city’s voting public) breathed a long-awaited sigh of relief. But now that the champagne has gone still and the gritty business of running the city is at hand, it’s as good a time as any to call attention to pitfalls that could derail the new administration. Chief among them, in this little animal’s view, are the quiet (or not so quiet) voices pushing what we might call “performative helplessness” when it comes to solving a couple of the city’s most serious problems.

What is performative helplessness? Let’s describe it as the practice of “addressing” a real problem by moving the goalposts, redefining the problem as inherently unsolvable, and engaging in actions designed to showcase the virtuous intentions of the actor, rather than produce real results. In short, it’s the art of trying to look good while accomplishing nothing (or next to it).

A May 9 ADN article by Julia O’Malley, “You can pass through Midtown Anchorage, but you can’t leave its complicated truths behind” provides a textbook example of this phenomenon here in Anchorage. On its face, the article is a tragic and sympathetic portrait of a city rocked by homelessness. But it advances a number of ideas about homelessness that, though masked behind a patina of empathy, are every bit as insidious as those ascribed to members of the last administration. The article was very popular among the political left (aka the new admin’s base), which makes critiquing it feel all the more urgent.

O’Malley starts the article by describing scenes familiar to anyone in Anchorage: intoxicated people lying on street corners, liquor bottles, sleeping bags on sidewalks. “I pray in the car all the time,” O’Malley writes, “but it’s not enough.”

Well, why would it be enough? We all know that “thoughts and prayers” are not solutions to public crises. O’Malley is entitled to her religious beliefs, of course. There’s nothing wrong with praying. But in the context of an op-ed, telling readers about her private prayers only serves one function: illustrating the virtue of the author. This is what we might call a red flag.

And then things start getting a little weird. O’Malley explains that a homeless man at an intersection frequently stares her son while she drives him to soccer practice, frightening him:

“…mumbling into another dimension, he held an unreadable sign on a piece of yellow legal paper. He’d stare right into my son’s eyes through the window. My son began to dread that stretch of road. He told me the man made him feel afraid.”

O’Malley’s reaction to these encounters is to feel shame and upset because… she isn’t doing enough to correct her son’s fearful response. She asks whether she should tell him “it’s not really fear he’s feeling but instead the stark randomness of his own luck.”

Julia: no, it’s really fear. Your child is abso-fucking-lutely right to feel fearful of a disturbed adult regularly leering at him in public. An entire generation of Anchorage children have now grown up associating our city’s public spaces — our streets, sidewalks, trails, and parks — with squalor and unpredictable, intoxicated, unwell people that they need to avoid to keep themselves safe. Yes, of course, context and compassion need to be taught and encouraged. But the fear your son is communicating to you isn’t some four-alarm abandonment of liberal values, it’s survival instinct working as designed in the unsafe world that adults created for him.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” O’Malley says regarding the man frightening her son. The implication here is that nothing else can be done. We — along with O’Malley’s son, apparently — must just accept the unwanted interaction, directing any critique inward at ourselves.

A bit later, O’Malley describes finding herself seated next to then-mayor Dave Bronson on an airplane flight. Bronson, she recounts, says that he wants to solve homelessness, and particularly homelessness that arises from substance abuse. O’Malley writes:

“I told him what I knew: Sobriety comes from inside and the government can’t touch it. Nobody’s written a statute to address heartache, which in many cases goes back generations, and leads people to drink or shoot up or lose touch with reality in a way that keeps them from paying rent, I said.”

Note how O’Malley is siting the goalposts here: homelessness is caused by substance abuse, but the government, she declares, “can’t touch” someone’s sobriety. Homelessness is caused by “heartache” and intergenerational trauma, which the government presumably also isn’t permitted to touch. In other words, homelessness isn’t homelessness, it’s actually a set of conditions that are inherently unfixable.

Is this true? O’Malley is right that these factors contribute to homelessness, but her analysis falls flat when we consider history and context. For example, Anchorage had dramatically fewer people on street corners and virtually zero campers in public parks two decades ago. East Coast cities have far lower rates of visible homelessness than West Coast cities. Alcoholism, heartache, and trauma are neither new nor exclusive to one coast.

There are two big things going on here. First, in Martin v. Boise, the Ninth Circuit (which has jurisdiction over the western US, including Alaska) created substantial confusion about the conditions under which cities could abate homeless encampments. ADN and Alaska’s News Source have repeatedly reported that when camps are abated in Anchorage, homeless individuals often simply refuse shelter. Anchorage policy makers and officials have long warred over how to increase shelter capacity, while maintaining that until they do so, Boise has effectively tied their hands when it comes to broader camp abatement.

Screenshot from an April 30, 2024 ADN article

Second, Anchorage, like many West Coast cities, has deliberately sabotaged its housing market. Anchorage historian and former Assembly member Charles Wohlforth recently explained that limiting housing in Anchorage was a goal of “progressive” city planners in the 1970s. This mission was enthusiastically and successfully pursued by many of the individuals who shaped the Anchorage we live in today.

Take, for example, influential city planner and former Anchorage Assembly member Shelia Selkregg, who has campaigned for decades against denser multifamily housing. As the director of Community Planning and Development, Selkregg led the effort to create Anchorage’s 2020 Comp Plan, which all but halted the construction of new multifamily housing in Anchorage. At a 2015 Anchorage Assembly meeting, she praised the demolition of the city’s four-plexes (which she blamed for “destabilizing” neighborhoods), argued for the extension of South Addition’s low-density and high-cost land use patterns into Fairview, and sharply criticized “big buildings” over a few stories (quick, someone tell Stockholm that that they’ve destroyed their subarctic city by building “big buildings!“).

Selkregg even made opposition to high-density housing a centerpiece of her failed 2009 mayoral campaign, saying that our city’s dense housing “doesn’t create a sense of neighborhood.”

Thanks in part to Selkregg (among many others, of course), Anchorage is missing thousands of units of affordable housing that were either torn down or went unbuilt. A cruel fact of Anchorage’s homelessness crisis is that even if all of our homeless residents were suddenly mentally stable and wanted to fix their lives, they simply don’t have housing to go to. It doesn’t exist.

O’Malley is surely familiar with Selkregg’s work. Selkregg is O’Malley’s mother. And while O’Malley isn’t responsible for her mom’s behavior, if there is any poetry in O’Malley’s piece it is the unwritten backstory of a mother who helped devastate Anchorage’s affordable housing market, only to find her daughter driving around decades later, consumed by ennui and trying to figure out why there are just so many homeless people now.

O’Malley writes in her article, “My mom says that we get the community we vote for.” The comment is presumably directed at then-mayor Dave Bronson, but this little animal desperately wishes that it were accompanied by some long-overdue self-reflection.

O’Malley closes by recounting an incident in which the wind snatches away a dollar bill she is attempting to hand through her car window to a homeless person on a street corner. She drives off, dejected. This story, obviously intended to be a metaphor for the tragic intractability of homelessness despite our best intentions, is in fact just an example of an attempt to address a big problem with a small and largely symbolic effort, failing, and then giving up.

O’Malley could have put on her hazards, pulled over, and retrieved the bill. She could have driven around the block again. She could have come back later. Even better, she could have donated to one of the many organizations (such as Food Bank of Alaska or the Brother Francis Shelter) that have been at this a long time and know how to use money effectively. Instead, she does nothing except use the event as a (both literally and figuratively) cheap literary device for an op-ed.

It’s hard not to feel that this is a decisive moment for Anchorage. But will it be a turning point or just one more waypoint on a descent into deeper dysfunction? One has only to log onto Alaska Twitter to see a flood of posts declaring that to abate a homeless encampment is to “deny the right of homeless people to exist,” as if anyone’s existence is predicated on living in a squalid environment rife with rape, grotesque violence, gunshots, theft, substance abuse, and death.

The new administration will be told endlessly that it may not, must not, cannot decisively act to solve problems until an unmeetable list of conditions are met. The administration will be encouraged to take meandering and symbolic actions, to throw a few dollars out of the Anchorage treasury and claim that they are “doing everything they can.” They will be told that being empathetic means continuing to tolerate the horror show playing out in our public spaces, that the correct response to seeing a person passed out naked on a midtown sidewalk or injecting fentanyl in town square park is to reflect on ones privilege and continue on with a stiff upper lip.

This is backwards. The inhumane course is the one we’re on now.

Just as O’Malley could have turned her car around, a new admin could turn Anchorage around. The Assembly and mayor’s office are aligned. Boise was recently overturned by the US Supreme Court. Voters have identified homelessness as a top issue and are eager for solutions. Not hollow displays of virtue — solutions. That will probably mean more shelters, more housing, more services, enforcement of our existing laws, institutional care for severely unwell or dangerous individuals, and rigorous, permanent abatement of all encampments in public land. Yes, this would all be difficult, but it’s possible.

As they say, the best time to act was yesterday… the second-best time is today. This little animal hopes for the best.