While many rural communities in Alaska host cold-weather shelters for unhoused people, finding permanent housing remains a barrier to breaking the cycle of homelessness.
On March 11, Bethel will host an open house at its new, 24-unit Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) building, Atsaq Place.
“In order for someone to become stable in their life, if they're chronically homeless, you need to start with housing first,” said Jaela Milford, the executive director of Bethel Winter House. Milford said that the new housing building is making history in rural Alaska. It’s one of two permanent supportive housing projects of its kind in the state, after a smaller permanent supportive housing center opened earlier this year in Nome.
“It's difficult when you're homeless to find a job, to have a mailing address, to even have clothes or a place to clean them,” Milford said, noting that those basic necessities are building blocks to helping people escape homelessness. “In order to do all that, you need a house.”
Bethel’s Permanent Supportive Housing building will serve as a year-round, full-time residence for 24 individuals. The units are furnished studio apartments with kitchens. Bethel Winter House will continue to operate separately as the cold-weather emergency shelter in the city between October and April.
Milford said that there is already a list of more than 24 people who are chronically unhoused and want to stay in Bethel. Who gets an apartment in the Atsaq Place will depend on several factors, including how long the person has been homeless.
“Individuals can live there as long as they want. This is permanent. This is not meant to be a transitional housing opportunity,” Milford explained. “It's meant to get these individuals back on their feet in whatever capacity that means. And if moving forward they want to move out then we would help them through that process, working with case managers and services around town in order to move forward. But some individuals will spend their whole life in this apartment.”
Tenants of the building will have rent responsibility tied to their level of income. But it will also differ from a typical apartment building. There will be counseling and health services in the building, as well as other staff services and surveillance to help buffer residents from unwanted visitors.
Construction on the $6.7 million apartment building started in April 2023. Milford said that the project has been funded and supported by organizations throughout the state. Milford said that in addition to helping stabilize life for up to 24 people in Bethel, the facility will be positive for the broader community as well.
“This is a compassionate and pragmatic way of trying to get housing for people with chronic homelessness,” Milford said. “This is harm reduction and cost reduction. One of the big parts that happens when you're homeless is you use a lot of community resources that you don't think about. So police calls, hospitals, services such as that, if you don't have housing, you're utilizing those resources more often. So with this permanent supportive housing building, it becomes more affordable for the community because you are housing these individuals and they are no longer pulling those resources that they are now getting directly from the permanent supportive housing building.”
Milford said that they hope to have tenants in the Permanent Supportive Housing building by April 1, but added that the building needs to hire staff and get a whole lot of paperwork in order before then.
The Permanent Supportive Housing Atsaq Place Grand Opening is scheduled for 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Monday, March 11. The building is located next to Bethel Winter House at 129 Atsaq Street.
Milford joined Coffee@KYUK on March 11 to talk about the Permanent Supportive Housing Project and open house. Find a transcript below, which has been lightly edited for clarity and flow.
KYUK (Sage Smiley): Thank you so much for joining us for coffee today.
Jaela Milford: Thank you for having me.
KYUK: So happy to have you here. So tell us a bit about this Permanent Supportive Housing. I'm sure that people have seen this building process going on. When did it start?
Milford: Yeah. So [the] grant started about July of 2021. So this has been a long process in the making. And we did a whole grant process through the state, and we just started getting the ball rolling on that. But construction started [in] April of 2023. So we're actually less than 12 months later, we are completing the building and having our grand opening on March 11. So it's really big news, actually.
KYUK: That's huge. So backing up a little bit. What is permanent supportive housing? This building is connected to Winter House; how is it related? Maybe I'll ask one question at a time. So first of all, what is permanent supportive housing?
Milford: So permanent supportive housing is this idea that in order for someone to become stable in their life, if they're chronically homeless, that you need to start with housing first. It has been shown through multiple studies all throughout the country and the world, honestly, that if you provide a place for someone to stay, it's much easier for them to get out of that cycle of homelessness. Of course, as always, it's difficult when you're homeless to find a job, to have a mailing address, to have even clothes or a place to clean them. And so in order to do all that, you need a house. And so this idea is, if you provide housing first for these chronic individuals, they will be able to grow and hopefully eventually become stable and, you know, a member of society.
KYUK: So how is this different from what Winter House does? Because it's connected to Winter House, it’s in the same little complex. But how are they different?
Milford: Yeah, so Bethel Winter House, the shelter, is the emergency homeless shelter. So the shelter will continue to operate as it has been between the months of October and April. This is just to catch people who are homeless and outside just to ensure their safety through the coldest months out of the year. The permanent supportive housing that is now connected to Bethel Winter House is a full-time voucher residency for 24 single individuals.
KYUK: So how will that process work, of an individual being maybe someone who's utilized Winter House services in the past, how would someone transition into permanent supportive housing? And then how would they transition out of permanent supportive housing?
Milford: Yeah, so the idea of Bethel Winter House is that we do intakes, and we get data from individuals, anybody that uses our services, we try to get information from them. And through that process, through that intake, we ask them, ‘Are you looking for help finding housing?’ ‘Are you looking for vouchers?’ ‘Are you looking for a permanent place to live?’ If they say yes, we then take a step further and go, ‘Where do you want to live?’ And if the individuals have said, ‘I want to live in Bethel,’ they have now been added to this list that we are accessing for the permanent supportive housing building. So the idea of permanent supportive housing is you're supposed to take the most chronic homeless first. So everyone has been ranked based on their information that they self-identify. And then it's put in this huge database called coordinated entry. And coordinated entry is something that the federal government and [Housing and Urban Development], which is the housing entity of the federal government, ranks them and then we are able to pull those names, and we can move forward in the process of asking if they want to live here.
KYUK: What will be provided? If we're going into the specifics of permanent supportive housing and the permanent supportive housing in Bethel, what do the rooms look like? What is the experience of being at permanent supportive housing going to be like for an individual that's housed there?
Milford: Yeah, so there are 24 studio apartments. So each apartment is equipped with furniture that you'd see in a normal apartment. So bed, mattress, table, chairs, a wardrobe-like closet, full stove, full sink, and a full fridge. So this is very much a single use apartment. Individuals can live there as long as they want. This is permanent. This is not meant to be a transitional housing opportunity. It's meant to get these individuals back on their feet in whatever capacity that means. And if moving forward they want to move out then we would help them through that process, working with case managers and services around town in order to move forward and then, but some individuals will spend their whole life in this apartment.
KYUK: Will there be a cost associated for them with that permanent supportive housing?
Milford: Yes, so tenants will have rent responsibilities depending on how much income they have available to them. It will never prohibit, if you have no income there is a voucher system that goes on. But there will be a rent responsibility for every single one of those studio apartments. That being said, we will work with the individual if they do not have a current source of income in order to find that source of income, [but] it won't be a barrier if they don't have that at that moment.
KYUK: In a lot of ways, this sounds like an apartment. How does this differ [from] an apartment?
Milford: The main difference of this apartment is the 24-hour surveillance. So these individuals have been chronically homeless for probably years at this point. And when you have been chronically homeless for that long, your idea on how to survive and how to just get through day to day changes. And so by putting them in a permanent supportive housing building with this 24-hour access, you're able to have monitoring and staff resources all the time, no matter the time of day, no matter what's going on, these individuals can request assistance or calls in any way that they need. With the permanent supportive housing 24-hour surveillance, it does come with full camera coverage. And so these individuals, it's not meant to be like an institution. It's not meant to be something they can't leave, it's actually meant to protect anybody from coming in that is not welcomed by these guests. So it's more for their safety that we have 24-hour surveillance. And a lot of these individuals have disabilities. And so they will work with the staff trying to just get the resources that they're looking for.
KYUK: So speaking of staff, how is this project funded? Where did funding for it come from? And then moving forward, who's in charge?
Milford: Yeah. So this permanent supportive housing is the first, actually one of the first two in rural Alaska. We are making history actually in Bethel, which is amazing. The other project is in Nome. And so both of us are in our process of trying to gain occupancy. We had a lot of huge funders for the permanent supportive housing building. And they were the only reason that we were able to move forward in this process. So just a quick shout out to Alaska Housing Finance Corporation who actually has the rentals, and we are going through them to get our lease documents, and they're the ones that we are working with to occupy these buildings. And then the Rasmuson Foundation was huge in giving us just the money that we needed. Alaska Mental Health Trust authority was an amazing resource, Premera Fund, the Weidner Apartment Homes, Denali Commission, Weinberg Foundation. And then last, but definitely not least, is actually the City of Bethel, because they donated the land originally for the shelter and the land that now the permanent supportive housing building is on. And they also are providing sewer, water, and garbage facilities for the apartment building, which they do with the shelter at this moment. But they are adding on the permanent supportive housing building as well. So that was a huge partnership that we were able to get. And we thank the City of Bethel for that. Also the Community Action Grant was huge for just getting the development started. So yeah, we've had a lot of funders and a lot of people involved in this. Also, whereas Bethel Winter House will be the one who will own the property, it was actually Bethel Community Services Foundation that was the developer of the projects. So when the grand opening is on [March 11], they will hand over the building to Bethel Winter House, and it will be run under Bethel Winter House and myself as the executive director.
KYUK: That really sounds like the epitome of it takes a village for something like this. This project is a village-wide, region-wide, statewide project happening here.
Milford: Absolutely. We would not have been able to do this without the partnership that we were able to have for this project. Key partners like Bethel Family Clinic [which] is going to help with the case management work coming up, which will be huge for getting these people the resources and any services they need. NeighborWorks Alaska is helping us with our lease documents and just more of the higher up stuff that we've never done before that we're excited to get some expertise on. And then AMW, which is the developer for the construction of the building. Amazing. It was so fast. It was I think within a year, 11 months almost, and it's local. And Alex Wasierski is amazing. He was a huge resource too, having this project and just having someone build locally just made all the difference in how fast the project came up, and the resources and just the cost that aligned with it.
KYUK: So you've mentioned this grand opening ceremony that's happening on March 11.
Milford: Right.
KYUK: Tell us about the details of that. How can people come and see this permanent supportive housing housing project?
Milford: Yeah, absolutely. So March 11, we will be opening it to the public at 3 p.m. And so 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. will be an opportunity for anybody in the community to stop by. We will have a slight, very small ribbon cutting ceremony at the beginning, probably around 3:30 [p.m.], just to kind of celebrate the opening. But after that, we will have tours available, people can just walk around just to see how amazing and how beautiful this new building is. And just have an opportunity to see it before it gets occupied and no longer open to the public.
KYUK: Sounds like a really exciting opportunity.
Milford: Yeah.
KYUK: When will people move in?
Milford: Yeah, that is, of course, kind of the question that always when people are asking. We are completing construction as we go. Grand Opening is today, March 11. We hope, and this always comes down to a couple of things, we hope to have people occupying the building by April 1. That is our ultimate goal. It does come with some caveats. We really need employees, we need people to staff that 24 hours. So if you're looking for a job, it's full time, go to bethelwinterhouse.org and sign up and try to see if you want a job at this new building complex, we need a couple of them. And then also just getting the names and all of the documents for the individuals to start leasing.
KYUK: How big is the waitlist? Is there a full 24 that are in the process of...?
Milford: Yeah, so we're slowly working through all that. We haven't identified all 24 yet, but we know a good number of them. And we're still pulling as we go. As we all know, in Bethel, there's not enough housing to go around. And so the list is much longer than 24. But we're excited that we get at least 24 apartments.
KYUK: Absolutely. Is there anything else you want to touch on as we look toward the opening of this big, amazing, village-wide, permanent supportive housing project?
Milford: Yeah, I just want to emphasize that this is a compassionate and pragmatic way of trying to get housing for people with chronic homelessness. This is harm reduction and cost reduction. So one of the big parts that happens when you're homeless is you use a lot of community resources that you don't think about. So police calls, hospitals, services such as that if you don't have housing, you're utilizing those resources more often. So with this permanent supportive housing building, it becomes more affordable for the community because you are housing these individuals and they are no longer pulling those unnecessary resources that they are now getting directly from the permanent supportive housing building. But yeah, we're super excited. This is again, Bethel making history in rural Alaska. This is one of one of the two projects that have ever been accomplished out here. So that's amazing.
KYUK: Awesome. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for taking some time to be on Coffee@KYUK today.
Milford: Thank you. I appreciate being here. Oh, come by at three o'clock today for the grand opening. We'll be there until seven. Hope to see you soon.
