Rain drizzled down as Jonathan Swinton walked down a muddy road in Lemon Creek. He pointed to an open area filled with bright green foliage and spruce trees where a construction site should be.
“There are 51 units that we were hoping to have under construction right now that are missing,” he said. “That’s 51 people that this community isn’t able to house that it could.”
Swinton is the executive director of Gastineau Human Services, a nonprofit that helps people affected by homelessness or addiction.
The nonprofit was expected to break ground here in April for a three-story building with 51 long-term housing units. The housing is designed and designated for people in recovery from substance misuse, reentering society after incarceration, or facing housing instability.
Housing advocates say the units are sorely needed to address increased homelessness in Juneau. But the Trump administration pulled a key grant and Congress nixed earmarked funds. Swinton said that set the project back.
“By now, they would have had the foundations poured,” he said. “I will be very surprised if we can break ground before April of next year.
The nonprofit was relying on the congressional earmark and grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to cover roughly $8.1 million of the project’s $11.6 million cost. It hadn’t been awarded either of them yet, but Swinton said the organization was confident enough to set a construction date.
Swinton said nonprofits like Gastineau Human Services depend on federal funding to provide services to housing-insecure and unhoused people in the community.
“The tragic part of the whole thing is that people don’t have the support that they need to get into a place where they can keep themselves from slipping up again,” he said. “That’s what this housing is trying to do.”
The news comes as some Juneau residents are calling for police to crack down on homeless encampments in town. City officials and police say there isn’t an easy fix to growing rates of homelessness and its impacts — but creating more housing is a start.
Dave Ringle runs Juneau’s St. Vincent de Paul chapter, a nonprofit that provides various types of housing assistance and has operated the city-run emergency warming shelter for the past two winter seasons.
“Housing is the key to keeping people from that homeless cycle,” he said. “Not having enough supported housing and enough low-income rental housing in this community is probably the driving force behind our homelessness problem.”
Ringle said the resources of service providers in Juneau are already stretched thin.
Data on the number of unhoused people living in Juneau is very limited, but information collected by the Homeless Management Information System indicates that over the last three years, the number of people in Juneau who receive housing assistance is roughly 350 to 400.
“Every time we get a vacancy, we have three to four people who could fill the vacancy within our transitional housing,” he said. “Our rental units are 100% leased. We could probably provide double the number of units that we currently have.”
He and Swinton say the urgency to build this type of housing is only growing. Gastineau Human Services is already reapplying for another version of the federal grant and looking for other funding options. Last summer, the Assembly unanimously approved a local grant of $2 million for the project.
