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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Early Tuesday morning, 11 men and a woman stood on the concrete steps outside Anchorage’s Downtown Soup Kitchen. The night before, they’d slept in tents, in cars, abandoned buildings and on shelter mats. But that morning they were lucky. They were about to get a shower.

There are only a few places in Anchorage a person living on the street can take a shower for free. Brother Francis is one. The Rescue Mission is another. The Soup Kitchen shower house opens to a group of 12 twice a day. Each person is entitled to 20 minutes of hot water in a private bathroom, shampoo, shaving cream, lotion and sunscreen. The morning group may also have their clothes washed by volunteers. People sign up in advance and look forward to it.

Read the rest here.

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For the last 10 years, she’s been part of a special unit designed to build relationships with the homeless, particularly the several hundred people, mostly chronic alcoholics, who forgo shelters to live outside in this northern city’s large forested parks.

“Over the weeks, the months and the years, it takes its toll,” she said.

Here is what she observes: Skin dulls. Eyes lose their brightness. Sexual assaults are common among women who spend time in the camps. Many people bear evidence of physical assaults. And the cold eats at them. Fingertips, ears, toes and feet blister and turn black. Tissue dies and must be amputated.

When the weather slips below zero, Jones and other APD officers might cruise by the usual spots, the trails that zigzag into the snowy forests, the tents carefully hidden under trees just yards from businesses. They keep an eye out for faces that have grown familiar.

“Sometimes you stop seeing them,” she said. “And you wonder, what happened to these people?”

Read more here.

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