Here’s how it starts:

Brendan Haviland and Ray Gilkey, two ambassadors with the Downtown Partnership, set out before 6 a.m. Tuesday to wake the people who sleep on Fourth Avenue.

Maybe 30 people had bedded down along the quiet buildings and under trees in Peratrovich Park. Feet jutted out of doorways and bodies lay under piles of blankets. An older woman sat on the sidewalk outside the 4th Avenue Market Place in her stocking feet. She was soaked with urine. A pair of shoes sat nearby.

“Anchorage Downtown Partnership. Do you think you’re able to get up? Ma’am?” Haviland said gently. “Ma’am?”

“We got tourists coming down,” Gilkey said.

The woman started hollering. Her words melted together. She mentioned health problems, but they couldn’t make out the details. They dialed 311 to get her a ride to the sleep-off center with the hope that safety officers would take her to the hospital if she needed it. Then, they waited. This was their routine.

Downtown Anchorage is the historic heart of the city, a center of commerce, a significant source of property tax revenue and an entry point for tourists. The ambassadors are its guardians, a group of 21 people in neon vests and yellow jackets who take care of the neighborhood on behalf of the businesses. They give directions, remove snow, clean public restrooms, pick up trash and hose away all manner of bodily fluids. Some spend so much time interacting with the unhoused population, the regulars greet them with a fist bump. The jobs start at $16 an hour with benefits. The last few years, their work is increasingly complex.

Read on.

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Heidi Ross was a senior in high school when she hitchhiked from the Anchorage suburb of Eagle River into the city, leaving a dark childhood behind.

“I didn’t have anywhere to go,” she said of that day, around 20 years ago. “I had the clothes on my back.”

After she arrived, without a way to pay rent, she soon found herself trading sex for a place to stay. Next she traded sex for drugs. Using sex to get things she needed made her feel powerful, she said. At 21, she went to work for a pimp who promised to take care of her.

“It felt strange at first, because I was so used to taking care of myself,” she said. “It felt good. It felt like a piece was missing and it had finally come back.”

Ross said sex work became her “lifestyle”. Eventually, however, she would be the one exploiting young men and women as adrift as she was on that ride into Anchorage.

Sexual exploitation has been an undercurrent of the state’s male-dominated frontier culture since Russian explorers first came to the region, and men flocked to the state during the Gold Rush. Law enforcement, prosecutors and victim advocates have long suspected the state has a high rate of sex trafficking, but the problem has been largely unstudied. Recently, though, a small study of trafficking among homeless youth offered some data to support these suspicions.

Read the rest here.

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How America counts its homeless – and why so many are overlooked

They dressed in several layers of clothing or donned old hats. They carried blankets and cardboard boxes. It was approaching midnight in New York one night in March 2005, and recruits who had been paid $100 each to pretend to be homeless were fanning out across the city.

There were 58 sites dotted throughout the metropolis. Pseudo-homeless people arrived at subway stations in Manhattan, back alleys in Staten Island and Queens, the front steps of a church in the Bronx.

The actors were taking part in a peculiar experiment led by Kim Hopper, a researcher then at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research. The purpose: to analyze the effectiveness of the city’s count of homeless people.

Hopper and his colleagues found that actors at almost one in three of the sites reported being missed by counters. And these were people who wanted to be counted. They did not include the swaths of genuinely homeless ensconced in corners of the city. “Invisibility serves the purpose of security and uninterrupted sleep,” the researchers noted.

Just over a decade later, questions remain about the reliability of America’s biennial street count of homeless people, an extraordinary undertaking in which thousands of volunteers head out into the darkness in cities, forests and deserts around the country.

It still takes place mostly at night, relying on volunteers who are often equipped with nothing more sophisticated than clipboards, pencils and flashlights.

But supporters of the count, which is run by local communities in return for federal dollars and may be the largest tally of homeless people in the world, argue that it is a crucial mechanism to keep track of people who often exist outside of government bureaucracy.

Even if the figures are open to question, they provide a window into the landscape of America’s homelessness problem – and a sense of how it is changing over time.

“The bottom line is that it’s imperfect, but I don’t know that we could do a better job,” said Dennis Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania researcher and a principal investigator on the homelessness reports that are presented to Congress annually.

The most recent report found that on one night there were 549,928 homeless people in America.

Read the rest of the story, including scenes from Alaska’s most recent homeless count, here.

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Here’s how the story starts:

As soon as she glimpsed at the body on the icy street, Marie Nickolai knew it was Jackie Amaktoolik. He’d been drinking outside. People said he had collapsed.

She wept as friends coaxed her from the scene. “That’s my brother,” she said.

When homeless people die in Alaska, it is often like this: outside, facilitated by a lethal combination of alcohol and cold.

Nickolai’s stepbrother, known on the streets as Isaac, died on 13 December. The temperature was 6F (-14C).

Nickolai, 42, and her stepbrother grew up among eight siblings in the remote Yupik village of New Stuyahok along the Nushagak river in western Alaska. She said it was a childhood of picking berries, hunting moose, fishing and attending the Russian Orthodox church.

However, for years in their adulthood, Nickolai and Amaktoolik lived on the streets of Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city. Both lived with chronic alcoholism.

Alaska has some of the highest per capita rates of homelessness and alcoholism in America. From October to April, when temperatures can fall below freezing in this city of 300,000, bodies turn up outside with grim predictability; they are found in cars, hunched for warmth near transformer boxes, or in makeshift camps in the city’s many wooded parks.

Read the rest here.

Here are some of Ash’s gorgeous and heartbreaking unpublished images from our reporting:

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Here’s how it begins:

My dad and I have been rehabbing my old porch this fall. We’ve done most of the work ourselves but for certain things we’ve hired help, and so I’ve been spending some afternoons with an electrician and a painter. They are kind, hard-working guys. I’m always happy to see them in their trucks, backing into the driveway.

The electrician went to school with one of my younger brothers and lived for a short time at my mom’s house when he was a teenager. Now he’s a dad and a former marine, something that makes me proud of him. He’s thoughtful, mature and competent.

He was also leaning towards Trump last time we talked.

Our sons started kindergarten on the same day this fall. We exchanged pictures of them in first-day clothes. We were both emotional. Me, because of passing time. Him, because he worried for his kid’s safety. It might not be rational, he told me as I watched him twist wires, but that’s how he feels. As the conversation went on, he lifted his pant leg to show me a small handgun strapped to his ankle.

Many people own firearms here in Alaska, and many people carry them all the time, often concealed. It’s part of the culture, and practical in rural places. Even so, I thought about my electrician friend later, about feeling like it might come down to that, that you might need to protect yourself and your family because nobody else would.

The next time he came by, we talked about the election. He’s self-employed. Alaska’s health insurance situation under Obamacare might be the worst in the country. That alone was a reason to want a change. Plus, he’d read somewhere about Clinton being in poor health. I told him I was voting for her. I wasn’t passionate about it, but I’m a journalist, gay, married, with children, I said. I didn’t want to end up in the clink.

We both laughed. He flipped on the lights and they worked. It was about time for him to head out, he said.

Next came the painter…

Read the rest here.

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Anchorage loves coffee. And for longtime residents, that love began with a warm mug from Cafe Del Mundo, the coffee shop that introduced the city to espresso 40 years ago.

Founder Perry Merkel, who started roasting coffee in a shed in Spenard, was part of the first wave of specialty coffee culture that brought Starbucks and Peet’s Coffee. When Merkel retired and sold the shop to Kaladi Brothers in 2010, the new owners wanted to update both its coffee and its interior, without losing its welcoming feel and commitment to good coffee thoughtfully sourced from around the world. Many regular customers at del Mundo’s midtown location have been coming for decades.

“We wanted to build an environment around the coffee,” said Jared Mockli, the shop’s general manager, “while maintaining a comfortable, upscale atmosphere.”

Here’s what it looks like now:

Mockli talked me through the redesign—over coffee, of course—on a recent Wednesday morning. Most of the bar seating and bistro tables were occupied and the server behind the counter was busy tending a round of pour-over coffees.

You can still get an expertly-prepared espresso at Black Cup, but the shop now offers several types of drip-style coffee, best served black. Many of the drinks at Black Cup are made using the classic pour-over method, which dates back to the early 20th century and is still widely considered the most efficient way to make a quality cup.

From my seat, I could also see and hear the latest, dazzling addition to the coffee bar, the Steampunk machine, which is considered to be the future of craft coffee brewing technology.

Efficiency and beauty were key to a successful remodel, Mockli told me. Being able to see and engage with the person making coffee and the coffee making process is also central to the Black Cup floorplan. The coffee bar is extensive and open with white marble countertops. A record player sits behind the bar, providing the soundtrack, and occasionally a barista will deftly lift the needle and change the record.

In the back seating area, geometric black and white floor tiles anchor the modern palette, while mahogany wood tables and secluded booths add visual warmth and elegance. Brushed metal barstools and chandeliers offer simple accents. 

The design concept is attributed to Black Cup owner Brad Bigelow, who has an extensive background and masters degree in architecture and design. He envisioned what fellow designer Michele Parkhurst later described as, “a new-old space that is unlike what you see in Alaska.” And she’s right: Black Cup is much more European bistro than Anchorage cafe. “The cafe design was primarily influenced by early 20th century glamour,” Parkhurst said, “with big window curtain panels, chandeliers, Persian-influenced tile floors, and communal tables.”

Those involved in the redesign worked hard to gracefully incorporate references to the original shop. The long central table has been refinished but remains the same. The wall-size map is an homage to an older version that hung on the same wall. The espresso machine, too, is a holdover, but will soon be replaced with another innovative coffee gadget: the Modbar, which will be the first of its kind in Alaska. 

“We’re providing a craft-coffee experience,” Mockli explains, “We’re focusing on the origin of coffee: how the coffee is grown, harvested, and processed, and how all those factors go into creating a different type of quality and an added experience for our customers.”

As I finish my coffee, I look around at the cafe-goers around me. People of all ages sip their beverages, type on laptops, chat with friends. There’s an ease that Black Cup achieves through its dedication to simplicity, to the idea that great coffee can bring people together, and that ease can be seen in its customers. 

If Cafe del Mundo first inspired people in Anchorage to look for superior quality in their coffee, then Black Cup is propelling this notion even further by creating an entire atmosphere around their delicious brews.

While cream and sugar are still acceptable additions, I suggest you take your next cup black.

(This post is sponsored by Black Cup. Go here for more information on sponsored posts or other sponsorship opportunities.)

Visit Black Cup.

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But back in the day, I liked her – and so did many in my community. I’m not conservative, but she grew on me when I worked as a reporter in Anchorage in the mid-2000s, and the reason had nothing to do with politics. She was a kind of regular person I recognized as of this place. Tough, funny, pragmatic. She loved Alaska like I did. If you didn’t know her then, it’s hard to explain or believe.

One day, during her time as governor, my editor pointed out a picture of her in our newspaper one day. The photograph had been taken in Barrow, the nation’s northernmost city. Palin was wearing a kuspuk (an Alaska-Native-style jacket), holding her newborn, talking to a woman in a grocery store about the high price of food. The image had exactly the this-is-Alaska-life realness that resonates deeply here, where voters prize authenticity most of all.

If the grocery store photo-op was planned, my boss said, she was brilliant. If it wasn’t, she was a natural.

I don’t think it was planned – she wasn’t calculating like that, and most Alaska politicians aren’t that sophisticated. At the time, Palin’s politics could only be described as moderate. Democrats liked her. She had no problem with taxing oil companies or handing out money to help people with fuel costs. She believed in climate change. As for the word-salad syntax problem everybody makes fun of? Up north, nobody cared. Maybe it even added to her regular-person cred (our long-serving representative Don Young suffers from the same affliction.)

Above all, Palin was nice. If a reporter called her office, she called back on their cell phone: “Hi, this is Sarah.” Like most people here, she was religious, but didn’t talk about it publicly. Like most people, her family hunted and owned guns, but she didn’t talk too much about that either. She was fuzzy on policy details, but only insiders noticed. She made a big deal about government corruption.

“She wanted to be liked and, as a result, was likable,” said a reporter friend of mine who covered her as governor. “Her only real enemies were white-guy boys club oil politicians who were getting indicted by the feds.”

Read more here.

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 1. How to buy an IKEA couch and have it delivered to Alaska. Yup: with perseverance, you too can have all the Swedish-designed, Allen-wrench assembled furniture you want and even with shipping, it’s comparable to what you can buy in AK. AND, AN UPDATE: I went to IKEA in Seattle over Thanksgiving and was pleased to discover they have a sweet shipping desk where somebody will help you get your stuff to a freight forwarder. It’s $100 bucks, but much smoother than the rogue approach I’ve taken before. I used Linden as my shipper. They were GREAT.

2. For Talking Points Memo: What the Lower 48 doesn’t get about Denali  The best line, from my sister-in-law’s friend Ajax, who I reached on his fishing boat in the Gulf of Alaska: “It doesn’t matter to me,” he said. “Let’s do whatever’s cheap.”

3. Before & After: The Living Room. (That down there is what it looked like before.)

4. Before & After: The Kitchen (It was pretty heinous.)

5. Before & After: The Master Bedroom I should have kept the light fixture.

6. This is a guest post by the talented event planner Erin Velander of Blomma Designs: Xtratufs, pistols, mountain peaks: Four truly-Alaskan weddings (This is her wedding photo)

7. Before & After: A pink bathroom gets a makeover, keeps its mid-century soul  Look at that pink wall-mounted toilet.

8. For the Anchorage Press: Getting sideways. This was a blog-post-turned-essay about the time I got two visiting journalism professors and my baby stuck at the top of Arctic Valley in a rain/ice storm. Because? I still don’t understand my thought process. Luckily my dad came to the rescue.

9. For The Guardian: Alaskans put politics aside for Obama visit. Remember that one time when the president came to Alaska?

10.Friday/Pieday: Cranberry Curd Tart. I know, Uncle Tommy is right,  there is something weird about reading “curd” next to  “tart.”

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Dave Battle, on-call wildlife biologist, stepped gingerly behind a nearby stand of trees, watching for signs of agitation. It’s the tail end of mating season in south-central Alaska, and you never know what kind of a day a 1,500-pound moose might have had before it ran into you, he said.

“Different moose,” he said, “have different breaking points.” You don’t want to push one over the edge.

New York City has its rats. In Portland, Oregon, it’s raccoons. Here, the Anchorage urban wildlife comes super-sized and very occasionally deadly.

Battle and an assistant work full time for the state of Alaska’s department of fish and game, keeping track of the city’s wild animals, including moose, bears, lynx and wolves. On a recent morning, as Battle cruised through a couple of neighborhoods, he came across two bull moose in an hour’s time. A pretty average count. There are maybe 1,500 roaming freely around the city.

Read the rest of the story here.

With photos by Katie Orlinsky.

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