Their small enclave -- Wright Street -- is a dead-end street built at least 40 years ago. The neighborhood around Wright Street has been changing for years. With Tudor Road to the south, Lake Otis Parkway to the west and the hospital and university campuses to the north, the once-quiet residential area is being squeezed by new medical offices and commercial buildings, and the traffic they bring.
This spring, the city is pushing forward with a $20 million project creating a new road to divert some rush-hour traffic off Tudor. As a side effect, the project would eradicate Wright Street's dead end and tear down the big chain-link fence that separates the neighborhood from medical offices and the psychiatric hospital.
That has the Wright Street residents angry and scared. Their concern is that they'll see a major increase in foot traffic between a nearby homeless shelter on Tudor Road and the psychiatric hospital. Their street already gets too much foot traffic from transients and public inebriates, they say.
Seater, a speech pathologist, and her neighbors want the city's traffic department to stop or revise the project.
"It's like opening up Pandora's box," she says.
People who spend time at the homeless shelter and the Alaska Psychiatric Institute will begin using Wright Street on a routine basis to walk between the two locations, Seater says. API staff installed the chain-link fence at the dead end to stem such traffic in the past, she said.
The Wright Street residents are getting some sympathy from some elected leaders, who said they are trying to find a compromise between the residents and the city's traffic department.
The city should not "wreck a neighborhood in the name of calming traffic," said Dan Coffey, who represents the neighborhood on the Anchorage Assembly.
But that doesn't mean that the road shouldn't be connected eventually. "The reality is we have a neighborhood in transition. It will change in ways that people won't find to their liking," he said.
He suggested building the new road but not connecting it to Wright Street, at least for now.
A NEW ROAD
The source of Wright Street residents' anxiety is the city's plan this summer to build a new east-west road segment several blocks north of Tudor that will extend 40th Avenue from Piper Street to Lake Otis Parkway.
The plan involves transforming several dead-end streets, including Wright, into fully connected streets. The city's goal is to reduce the rush-hour congestion on 42nd Avenue -- a residential street that many motorists use to bypass the busy Tudor and Lake Otis intersection -- by diverting some vehicles onto 40th.
"We are trying to build connectivity in the area," said Bob Kniefel, the city's traffic engineer.
The city doesn't support barriers to pedestrian access, he said.
But by eliminating Wright Street's dead end and tearing down its big fence, the city will create a direct pedestrian link through the neighborhood between the Anchorage Gospel Rescue Mission's homeless shelter on Tudor and the Alaska Psychiatric Institute, as well as Providence Alaska Medical Center. The hospital and medical offices are both several blocks to the north of the shelter. People tend to use Piper Street to the east of Wright for that walk now.
But Wright Street is a shorter route, and already some people tear through the chain-link fence at the end of the street instead of diverting to Piper. The neighborhood gets littered with beer cans and used condoms, residents say.
API installed the fence in the early 1990s to alleviate problems that residents were having with transients at the time, said Michael Stoianoff, an engineer who lives in the neighborhood.
The rescue mission says it hasn't taken a position on the Wright Street matter, but its program director said he lives near the affected area.
"I've noticed that the city's attempt to relieve traffic always increases it somewhere else," said the program director, David Williams.
It seems that anything bad that happens in the area near the rescue mission gets blamed on the people being assisted there, he said.
Williams said the type-casting of homeless people is wrong: While many of its clients struggle with alcohol abuse, the average use of the mission is two and a half weeks. "That's what it takes to get on your feet," he said, adding that the people who come there are coached to tread lightly in the neighborhoods.
"We orientate the men and women that they have to be on their best behavior because they are going to get blamed for what they do not do," he said.
The rescue mission does not refuse assistance to people who have drinking problems or a criminal record, he said.
A SECOND LOOK
At a recent meeting at the city's planning office, roughly 20 residents complained about the 40th Avenue extension, including some worried about the safety of children who play in Wright Street yards after school.
But the project has already made it through the public-comment period and it has been approved by the Planning and Zoning Commission. Work is set to begin in spring and finish next year. At the meeting with residents, traffic engineers were adamant that they need the 40th Street extension to meet their overall goals for traffic calming on Tudor.
The city's manager for the road project, John Smith, said in an interview that he's not unsympathetic to the neighborhood's concerns. "We recognize that people have a legitimate concern about transient movement," he said.
But, trying to dissuade homeless people, or any other pedestrians, from entering a neighborhood isn't a factor in road design, he said. "You get into a touchy area there," Smith said.
Some Assembly members now want the engineers to take a second look at Wright Street.
"It's not all about traffic," Coffey said at the neighborhood meeting a few weeks ago. The meeting was arranged by Elvi Gray-Jackson, the other Assembly member for the neighborhood.
Gray-Jackson and Coffey plan to meet with the traffic engineers on Wednesday to talk about alternatives.
Smith said last week that his team is coming up with some alternative designs to try to allay some of the fears of the Wright Street residents.
"I don't think we'll be able to come up with something that fully addresses their concerns," Smith said.
Find Elizabeth Bluemink online at adn.com/contact/ebluemink or call 257-4317.
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