Posted on 07/03/2002 2:20:24 PM PDT by chance33_98
Officials tear down homeless shelters in trees
You could hear the chain saw off Crow Creek Road in Girdwood today as Anchorage officials began dismantling several homeless camps in that area. Officials are mostly worried that these camps are a fire hazard.
It doesn't look like it, but just off Crow Creek Road in Girdwood, there's a neighborhood.
People serving community service sentences and a couple city workers will spend this summer tearing about four of them down.
But these shacks are surprisingly well built. We took a look inside the first one, which has been here about five years.
"This is amazing in here. This guy's got art, books, and stereo equipment. Are they all like this? How many have you see that are this well done? This is probably the average. I mean there's one that's probably more elaborate. They all have these personal effects," said Kenneth Day, Community Work Services assistant.
About 50 yards away, another structure, complete with a deck, a sort of a sunken living room, and glass windows that open and close.
Officials notified people staying here days ago that they were trespassing on municipal property.
"The main concerns are the trash, the fire hazard, especially with the dry wood around here and there's just a lot of spruce-killed trees," said Fred Fulgencio, Anchorage Community Work Service.
Just a little farther up into the woods is a third shack.
And if find a small community of poor man's palaces out here isn't surprising enough, What you can see here is that they've created their own entertainment center. That's right, this is a rock-climbing wall that they've built up against two trees. Officials say there are 25 to 50 of these Robinson-Crusoe-like structures on a five thousand acre plot of land here in Girdwood so they're tearing them down.
And they think just the first three or four shacks will take them all summer to get rid of.
The structures are actually on Heritage Land Bank property.
Officials say the next step is to find the rest of the structures, but they say they expect this to be a continuing program they'll repeat each summer for the next several years.
They say they'll be doing the same thing on the rest of their land in the municipality as well.
Are you kidding me?...What, no bulldozers?...oh yeah, I forgot, they're not allowed in forests...
We've got plenty of them here in Durango fighting fires caused by assholes like these...Take No Prisoners!
FMCDH
According to some natural law traditions, these "homeless" (they're most certainly not -- they've constructed homes) would be entitled to defend their property...
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