Research, summaries, and annotations by Lauren Criss-Carboy

Summary

This section examines currently available data on homelessness, houselessness, and housing insecurity in Alaska and places this data in context with historical causes, similarities with other panarctic communities, and potential solutions. Government reports and academic articles are examined. In part because rigorous data on experiences of homelessness in rural Alaska are scarce, news articles and blog posts from these communities are also included.

The literature is organized around two key topics and includes a brief list of relevant research centers:

§ 2.1 Housing insecurity and homelessness in Alaska, Panarctic, and Other Communities

§ 2.2 Concepts, issues, and bias in Shelter Design

§ 2.3 Research Centers with a Panarctic Focus on Housing Security

A recurring theme from these sources is that differences in presentations of homelessness lead to unreliable counts. In many arctic communities, cultural and environmental differences mean that homelessness manifests in overcrowded housing or “doubling up” rather than sleeping on the streets. This type of housing insecurity results in severe overcrowding or vehicle residency but is far less likely to be included in “point in time” counts of homelessness, and thus the actual number of homeless individuals in Alaska is almost certainly far higher than the approximately 2,000 individuals estimated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Another theme is that people in Arctic communities are more often displaced by housing shortages, crumbling infrastructure, and poor housing quality than they are by cost burden. Finally, several resources advocate that solutions to homelessness must be situated in an ongoing colonial context, recognizing the legacies of intergenerational trauma, settler colonialism, housing discrimination, and predatory lending for American Indian and Alaska Native peoples.