Here's a really cool idea: Let's make it easier for good-hearted folks to buy, say, adjoining townhouses or homes in comfortable East Anchorage or Midtown or Hillside neighborhoods and remodel them so we can pack in 50 or so chronic drunks. That way the drunks can continue to drink safely, off the cold streets, away from prying eyes. It is, after all, OK for them to drink themselves nearly dead, as long as nobody has to step over them.
We will not force them to become teetotalers; we will not even suggest they get help. It would be unseemly. It is enough to assuage our guilty hearts that our brothers and sisters will be able to drink out of harm's way and stagger to various street corners with hand-lettered signs detailing their particular malady to beg money from suckers.
This is the important part: To make it work, we'll tell anybody who asks that the program, based on one Outside that may or may not work, will not cost taxpayers much; that it will save money; that do-gooders -- I'm sorry, the community-minded among us who annually get awards for this kind of thing -- will pick up the tab. Of course, any moron knows eventually it will cost property owners or the state or the feds wads of dough, but that is down the road. The deal long will have been el finito by the time anybody catches on.
The best part? There are way more than 50 street drunks. There may be 300, or even 500. Wouldn't is be nifty if there were 1,000? Our future would be assured.
Oh, rich, NIMBY neighbors may kvetch about having a gaggle of nasty drunks stumbling around next door, drooling or doing whatever falling-down alcoholics do at all hours to themselves and others. We must steel ourselves to the idea that the property owners' senses of neighborhood and values -- their protests --are not nearly as important as our notion of salvation. Their views -- the poor fools -- are subordinate to our saving the hopeless drunks among us who really, it too often turns out, don't want to be saved.
If we did that, do you think the Assembly would step in, stop it and save the day?
Now, plug into the equation Fairview instead of East Anchorage or Midtown or Hillside and plug in Red Roof Inn instead of neighborhoods where folks such as Assembly members Sheila Selkregg and Dan Coffey live and you have a good grasp of what is happening to a part of town that has been Ground Zero for every ill-conceived social engineering scheme conjured up by folks who would not deign to live there. The area already is home to the Brother Francis Shelter, Bean's Cafe and a sleep-off center for drunks. It is chock full of publicly urinating alkies. Day or night.
The Rural Alaska Community Action Program, also known as RurAL CAP, is not going to make that better. It is a statewide, non-profit corporation that has been around since the mid-'60s, and, let's face it, generally does good work, but its Red Roof Inn -- or Karluk Manor -- drunk project between Fifth and Sixth avenues along Karluk Street is a lousy idea.
The organization was offered the $2.7 million motel for $1.2 million and news accounts report it is seeking state grants to buy the structure.
Not everybody is tickled. The Fairview Community Council voted 21-2 against the proposal. There are signs nearby protesting the facility.
The Assembly last week did not bother to step in. Instead, it passed an ordinance setting rules for facilities housing severe alcoholics, places such as the Red Roof Inn. It requires a public hearing and city Planning and Zoning Commission approval. It set distances to other such housing and schools and parks; and, it bars them from residential areas.
All that is swell, but why are we ignoring Fairview residents' wishes? For as long as I can remember, Fairview has been awash in the drunk and the drugged and the deranged. It has carried more than its share of the social services load for this city with, frankly, criminally scary people roaming its streets. Maybe it is time to spread the wealth.
If another facility for drunks is such a great deal for Fairview, maybe it would sell in an East Anchorage or Midtown or Hillside neighborhood.
Right?
Paul Jenkins is editor of the Anchorage Daily Planet.
PAUL JENKINS
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