ACEH data: 3,004 people experiencing homelessness in Anchorage; American Indian/Alaska Native residents overrepresented

Jessica Parks, ACEH data presenter, told the Assembly Housing and Homelessness Committee that Anchorage had 3,004 people actively experiencing homelessness as of March 31, 2025.

Parks said the count uses the coalition’s public dashboard and data from the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS). "So starting at the top, this is data that's current as of 03/31/2025. At the March ... we had 3,004 people actively experiencing homelessness here in Anchorage," she said.

The data snapshot breaks the total into subpopulations and housing status. Parks said 2,130 were single adults, 272 were unaccompanied or transition-age youth (18–24) and 602 were people in families. She told the committee that shelter and transitional housing capacity was running at 100% utilization and that 733 people were set to go inactive after 90 days without a recorded contact with a provider.

Why this matters: the dashboard is used for operational decisions about outreach, shelter capacity and housing exits. Committee members pressed for more granular measures that could inform policy choices, including which types of housing exits are most durable and whether the same people are repeatedly returning to homelessness.

Parks described how inflow and outflow are measured: inflow includes people new to the system, people returning from housing and people returning from an inactive status tied to the system’s 90-day inactivity rule. Outflow includes exits to permanent housing and exits to inactivity; temporary moves such as to transitional housing are counted as continuing to meet the definition of literal homelessness.

The presentation highlighted racial and ethnic disparities. Parks said American Indian and Alaska Native people made up 53.8% of the people experiencing homelessness in Anchorage compared with about 14% of the overall population, a substantial overrepresentation. The dashboard also shows inflow by race and ethnicity and exit destinations by housing type, including exits to permanent housing programs, exits to rental or owned property with and without subsidy, and exits to family or friends when those are permanent arrangements.

Committee members asked for more detail on returns to homelessness. Assembly member George Martinez asked whether the system tracks how often the same individuals return. Parks said the system can track returns at the person level but that privacy agreements prevent release of personally identifiable records; she added that the long-term return rate for permanent housing programs is about 15% and that returns from housing in the month shown were just under 10%.

Committee member questions also sought effectiveness comparisons among exit types. Parks said "the most effective would be any type of housing that has that ongoing support," describing permanent housing programs and subsidized rental exits with wraparound services as most likely to keep people housed, and offered to work with ICA and partners to produce data comparing return rates by exit type.

The committee heard that warming sites had large usage during January–March: 5,217 total client contacts at warming (not deduplicated) and 1,381 unique individuals; 245 people were transferred from warming into shelter. Parks said 743 warming users had a single touchpoint during the season.

Ending: Committee members requested follow-up reports analyzing returns to homelessness by exit type and a clearer crosswalk between warming contacts and the HMIS active-count dashboard. Parks offered to provide more detailed breakdowns with ICA and the coalition.