Prompted by the discovery of seven dead men in woods, parks and illegal camps over the last two months, cops, firefighters, social workers and health professionals sat down Friday to talk again about the problem that won't go away -- Anchorage's population of homeless people and chronic street inebriates.

Not only is it not going away, it's growing -- overwhelming existing shelters, food banks and service agencies, according to the panel.

And with winter just a few months away, the possibility of creating a "tent city" or "one-stop shop" where shelter, services and referrals could be provided was a popular topic at the forum held at the Fairview Recreation Center.

A count of the city's homeless population in January turned up nearly 3,000 people -- adults and children, city officials say. That's about a 35 percent increase from numbers produced by a similar "snapshot" count in 2008.

Of those, about 400 were chronic inebriates or substance abusers, according to the city's count.

Alcohol was a major factor in most of the deaths this year, Police Chief Rob Heun told a standing-room-only crowd at the forum. And foul play is not suspected in any of them.

An unknown number of other homeless people die in hospitals, said Diane Ingle, director of Anchorage's Department of Health and Human Services.

"It's very visible to us right now because we've had a cluster of events," she said.

But the problems that keep so many people without a roof over their heads aren't limited to addictions.

"This is not just about chronic inebriates," said Maggie Carey, social services director at Bean's Cafe, adding that her downtown kitchen is seeing "growing numbers of families" snared in a web of low minimum wages, pricey apartments and the "gentrification" of downtown Anchorage, a development that has reduced the number of rooms available in hotels and apartment houses for low-income people.

"We should not fool ourselves that it's just been a matter of bad choices," Carey said.

An obvious first step is finding housing for people without a place to stay, and without enough money to rent one.

A Seattle study showed that just finding a regular place to live helped even chronic inebriates begin to control the rate at which they drink, said Melissa Stone, director of the state's division of behavioral health. After a year in housing, those people pared their intake from an average almost 16 drinks a day to about seven.

TENT CITY?

"We're about 120 days from freeze-up," said Frank Thomas Mears, who works with the Anchorage Gospel Rescue Mission.

"If there are 3,000 homeless, many of whom can't get into shelters -- our shelter is full, McKinnell House is full, Covenant House, Clare House, Brother Francis, they're full," Mears said.

"So I propose a tent city. It's not a great idea, but it's a place to live," Mears said.

Heun, the police chief, said the idea has merit. His officers spend about 10,000 hours a year picking up street drunks and either taking them to a facility or getting the city's community services patrol to transport them.

"A model the police would like to see ... (is) a campus, someplace where my officers can identify people in need who are homeless," said Heun, who described the prospect as a "Dignity Camp" a couple of years ago.

"Right now we've got great programs in town, but the volume is overwhelming," he said. "What we could do is identify these folks, get them to a centralized location where the pros can take over. While they were being serviced and being given these various opportunities they could also maybe be taught a trade.

"Bottom line for us is a one-stop shop where we can get these folks out of the camps. Because I can tell you, the camps are very unhealthy."

Friday's forum was co-sponsored by the Alaska Native Justice Center, the city's Office of Equal Opportunity, and the Anchorage Community Police Relations Task Force, whose chairman, the Rev. William Greene, said he intends to keep the conversation going at the task force's monthly meetings.

Greene also said he wants the city and state to look harder for ways to use federal economic stimulus grants to target homelessness in Anchorage. The officials said the city has already gotten approval for a $750,000 grant mainly to provide housing for families, but Greene called that "a drop in the bucket."

Solutions won't be easy. Fire Chief Craig Goodrich said he remembers going to similar forums 40 years ago.

"There's not just one right magic bullet," said Ingle, the city health director.

"It takes all of our agencies breaking out of our silos," said Melinda Freemon, Anchorage services director for the Rural Alaska Community Action Program.

One of the men who died this spring was one of Kristin Schmidt's clients at RuralCAP's Housing First, a program designed to find housing for street alcoholics.

The program works, Schmidt said, but not every time.

"We tried numerous times to help him," she said. "He just kept falling through the cracks ...These are just numbers to you, but they're people we deal with every day."

Find Reporter Don Hunter at dhunter@adn.com or 257-4349.

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