Anchorage

Police called often to seniors' home

Just before 11 p.m. on a recent Friday night, a sedan rolled up in front of Chugach View, a state-run apartment building for the low-income elderly and disabled in Fairview. A tall young man in a puffy jacket stepped out.

He pulled his hood over his head and strolled to the call box. Someone upstairs opened the security doors for him. Ten minutes later, the electronic doors opened again and he got back into the idling car.

"Now, what's he doing here?" asked an older resident, seated with her walker in the community room where she could keep track of comings and goings.

"I'll tell you one thing," answered another older woman who was flipping through a tattered People magazine. "He ain't visiting his grandma."

Chugach View occupants, many of whom didn't want to be identified for fear they'd be targeted for reprisal, say the steady stream of short, late-night visits are a sign of drug dealers in the building, part of what they say is escalating criminal activity in a public housing project where the majority of tenants are over 62.

"We got a pretty crappy class of people in here, some of them," said Jean Williams, 75, president of the building council. "I don't usually go out of my apartment unless we have bingo."

The building has a growing number of tenants who qualify to live there because they are on disability. Some of are formerly homeless, some suffer from mental illness complicated by drug or alcohol addiction, Williams said.

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Chugach View tenants say problems have gotten worse as the number of such occupants has increased. They tell stories of partially clothed people in hallways, drug dealing, fights, pilfered prescription drugs, homeless sleeping in the exercise room, stolen Social Security money and freezers swiped clean.

According to Ken More, building manager, a stranger recently tried to get into an apartment by ramming the door with a fire extinguisher. A first-floor window was recently smashed in with a tire iron.

Sixty-six percent of the residents in Chugach View are now seniors, but that percentage is decreasing. Chugach Manor, an identical, sister building next door, has similar problems, according to police and residents.

"We have people coming in who don't belong. We have found them sleeping in our lounges at night. We have drunks who have thrown up all over the place and left," said Lois Hackenberger, a building council board member at Chugach Manor.

"A lot of us walked the halls at night just to walk. We don't anymore. We keep our doors locked at all times."

Police have noticed the change at the building, according to Paul Honeman, Anchorage Police Department spokesman. Officers have written reports about incidents in the 120-unit complex 80 times in the last two years. Among the reasons: theft, assault, drugs, harassment, weapons and rape.

Compare that to Salamatof Heights, another 120-unit public housing complex for the elderly on Muldoon Road. Over the same period, police wrote 25 reports about incidents there.

Some of the older people's fears are exaggerated and some residents do make poor decisions about whom to let into the building, but the larger issue is how the building is managed, said Ty Witte, an Anchorage police officer who visits the building regularly.

"If the people were running that place the way it needs to be, they'd stop having these problems," he said. "My impression of security is they suck."

Police can't be there all the time, he said.

"It's turning into a little ghetto in a box. ... I would not want a relative to live there."

USUALLY ON THEIR OWN

Alaska Housing Finance Corp., which owns the buildings, says it is not set up to deal with crimes or residents' mental health issues. It is a landlord, not a security force or a social worker, said Wes Weir, public housing director. It depends on the police and residents to alert it to problems in the building.

"We don't hesitate to cite an individual for violating his or her lease, if that violation can be substantiated," he said in a written statement.

Residents bring the problems on themselves by letting strangers in and failing to close the doors, he said in an interview.

"The best security system in the world won't help that," Weir said.

Late-night and short-term visitors aren't breaking any rules, and many of the tenants' suspicions can't be proven, he said.

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"It sounds like they are getting us confused with a nursing or assisted living home where things are much more monitored," said Pamela Stantorf, Anchorage housing coordinator for AHFC. "If they are concerned that something is happening in the building that's unsafe, my advice is to return to their apartment, secure their door and call the police."

In her first-floor apartment, a retired telephone operator, 72, spent a recent afternoon baking banana bread, rolling around her kitchen in a motorized scooter. She wouldn't give her name. For some time, she's suspected that someone living above her was selling drugs, she said.

"People would come stand outside and yell at him to let them in at 2, 3, 4 in the morning," she said. They were looking for crack, she said.

She complained to the apartment manager, she called police and she talked to officials at AHFC. Nothing came of it, she said.

"They say it's our business and we have to take care it," she said. "I think they know there's a problem but they don't want to do anything about it."

Chugach View has security cameras, and a property manager is on the premises during business hours. There's also someone on hand several days a week from The Salvation Army to help tenants get services. The rest of the time, residents are on their own.

Little wall signs announce the house rules. "DO NOT put garbage in the laundry room!" "Return grocery baskets to THIS area!" And, in case the elevator stops: "Please do not panic -- Thank You, Alaska Housing Finance Corporation."

Residents want a security guard after hours but there's no way to pay for that in-house, Williams said. About half the tenants rely on free food boxes to eat. AHFC says a security guard is out of the question, unless there is a specific problem, because of the cost and because only the police should intervene in situations where criminal activity is occurring.

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Part of the reason evictions of troublesome people are difficult is that residents don't call police or make complaints in writing, Weir said. Just because a tenant thinks there might be drug dealing doesn't mean there is, he said. Proving it is difficult.

"If we're in front of a judge in an eviction hearing, he's going to say, 'What's your evidence?' " Weir said. Suspicion and hearsay won't do, he said.

"That's not hearsay," said the retired telephone operator, her voice tight with frustration. "That's what I'm seeing."

In a second-floor apartment on a recent morning, a very small woman sipped coffee, curled on the couch in an oversized T-shirt. On her television screen, she watched as the building security camera captured a pair of men in their 20s coming in the front door and leaving again 10 minutes later. One of them stopped in the community room to get a free cup of coffee.

"You can see the drug traffic. You can see somebody and know," she said.

She worries she's already been targeted and wouldn't give her name. When she walks by herself in the building, she stays on guard. Someone could easily knock her down.

"When I come back on the elevator and I see people don't belong here, with their pants way down their legs, I go back down, " she said.

Celeste Benson, director of the Anchorage Senior Center adjacent to the housing complexes, hears many complaints from residents.

"When you have housing for a frail, elderly population, it doesn't make sense to have some of these mixes (with the mentally ill or addicts)," she said.

Benson thinks the building should have some kind of 24-hour staff that residents could go to with concerns.

"I do think there should be some oversight," she said. "And some common sense."

ANSWERING THE KNOCK

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John Salazar, a retired dump-truck driver who lives on the third floor at Chugach View, is 82 years old. Sometimes, when the elevator doors open, he steps out and, for a moment, can't remember where he is.

Late last year he encountered a young, homeless couple in the building. The couple, who he now suspects were involved with drugs, had a building key, he said. They also used the many side doors, which are often propped open or improperly closed. He wanted to help them out and he didn't mind their company, he said.

"I let them crash at my place."

He also let the young man borrow $20. But when the couple left, he discovered the man had stolen another $40. Salazar lives on about $100 a week.

"He took two coats out of my closet," he said.

The man pinched Salazar's winter boots and all the frozen chicken legs in his freezer.

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Though they are living independently, loneliness, mental illness and memory problems make people like Salazar more vulnerable than those in a regular apartment building, said Jeff Jessee, CEO of the Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority. Many have trouble drawing boundaries with visitors. AHFC isn't equipped to handle their needs, which go beyond security. They need a 24-hour social worker who can head off problems before they become police calls.

"What you really need to manage this at the front end is ... to have some social-service case management there for the building," he said.

Patricia Kelly, 58, is a former exotic dancer and prostitute left homeless after a house fire a few years ago. She suffers from a laundry list of ailments, including mental illness. In her apartment recently, she reclined on the king-size bed that occupies her living room, smoking Pall Mall cigarettes despite the basket of inhalers by her side. She admits to letting strangers, often street people who are already in the building, come into her apartment.

"I try to tell them there's other ways that's better. Share what I learned when I got in trouble," she said. "I always have extra food."

Police have visited her apartment several times and once a few months ago found crack cocaine there. It wasn't hers, she said.

The building reminds her of when she lived in the Palace Hotel, a Fourth Avenue flophouse known for criminal activity that was finally bulldozed in 1990. She wants better security to keep the homeless out of the building, she said.

"When you get old, you want somewhere you can be comfortable. You don't want nobody coming up in here messing with you."

She hasn't been the perfect tenant, but if she lost her apartment, she'd end up in a shelter.

John Glover, 66, had a stroke late last year. He uses a walker to get around. He's spent some time in jail and was also homeless before he moved to Chugach View, he said.

Late last year, a man he knew from the street took over his second-floor apartment. At first, for reasons Glover couldn't explain, he let the man stay there. He suspected the man was dealing drugs, he said. On one occasion, one of the man's customers tried to break in his door with a fire extinguisher. Eventually, Glover tried to make his nonpaying guest leave.

"I told him he couldn't stay here," he said. "He took a ladder and tried to get in."

Glover said he called police, but by the time they got there the man had fled. Glover said he'd like to buy a gun.

"I need to depend on myself to protect myself, that's what I'm gonna do."

Downstairs, in a living room decorated almost exclusively with ceramic owls, a thin, 93-year-old woman sat under the lamp light. Her shades are permanently drawn. She's lived in the building for 18 years. These days she rarely leaves the apartment she shares with three caged birds for fear she'll get crosswise with some of the strangers she sees in the halls.

"This was a beautiful place to live. We were then seniors and handicapped," she said, speaking with a light accent from Puerto Rico, where she was born. "Handicapped was two men in wheelchairs. It was a pleasure."

She hasn't told her children about the troubles.

"They got their own problems," she said. "I think I'm old enough to take care of myself. I got two canes over there by the door."

Daily News reporter Julia O'Malley can be reached at jomalley@adn.com or 257-4325.

Standards for screening tenants

At any given time, thousands of people in Anchorage are waiting on a list to live in public housing like Chugach View, a 120-unit building built in the 1970s and refurbished a few years ago with new carpet and paint.

For Chugach View, tenants must be low-income, over 62 or disabled. Eligible tenants wait on a list, and certain factors, like domestic violence, homelessness or being a veteran, give them priority.

Alaska Housing Finance does a criminal background check, and tenants are excluded if they have been involved with methamphetamines or if they are on the sex-offender registry. People who have a history of violent criminal activity or drug and alcohol crimes are considered on a case-by-case basis. They must wait three years after their last day of incarceration. ?*????* V ?

A state-run apartment building for low-income elderly and disabled in Fairview. It is owned by Alaska Housing Finance Corp.

Has 120 units. A majority of the residents are over age 62.

About half the tenants rely on free food boxes to eat.

Anchorage police have been called to the complex and filed 80 reports in the past two years. Among the reasons: theft, assault, drugs, harassment, weapons and rape.

By JULIA O'MALLEY

Anchorage Daily News

Julia O'Malley

Anchorage-based Julia O'Malley is a former ADN reporter, columnist and editor. She received a James Beard national food writing award in 2018, and a collection of her work, "The Whale and the Cupcake: Stories of Subsistence, Longing, and Community in Alaska," was published in 2019. She's currently writer in residence at the Anchorage Museum.

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