Chester Creek, an Anchorage park taken over by the homeless/Craig Medred photo

Is there hope for Anchorage?

Having become the Portland of the North, or worse, what will Anchorage do now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled the homeless can be prevented from camping out wherever and whenever they choose?

Portland, it is worth noting, has already taken action. It enacted an ordinance due to take effect Monday that bans fires and gas heaters, prevents campers from blocking sidewalks or access to private property, requires the homeless keep their belonging with two feet of a tent, establishes environmental constraints, and says that anyone who refuses an offer of shelter can be fined $100, jailed for seven days or both.

Anchorage – the city that once promoted its “Big Wild Life” – has continued to allow the homeless to run wild with sprawling encampments full of stolen goods overflowing parts of the city’s greenbelts.

Sanitation has been ignored. Logging in the Chester and Campbell Creek watersheds has been overlooked. And litter has been allowed to proliferate.

Meanwhile, the city fathers and mothers have done little more than argue about what to do about the problem while doing little, and some of the most sympathetic on social media have taken on the role of enablers for bad behavior.

Because, well, some of the homeless just can’t help themselves, and there’s little doubt they can’t.

As Justice Neil Gorsuch observed in writing the opinion for the six of nine judges in the majority on the lastest decision, “Homelessness is complex. Its causes are many.”

He was right about that. Some of the homeless have mental problems with which society doesn’t want to deal. Others suffer from addictions to drugs and alcohol. And some, believe it or not, prefer the lifestyle.

As one camper tucked away in a back corner of a chunk of municipally owned land between the Eastchester and Sitka Street parks explained, it’s nice to find a place to stay indoors for the winter, but for the warmer months, it’s much more enjoyable to camp free of household rules and the burden of trying to get along with roommates, family or friends.

He was, it must be added, among the cleanest and most discrete of Anchorage’s homeless campers, and the city’s problems with the vagrants who have overrun its public spaces would be a lot less if they were all like him.

They’re not.

And because of this, to steal a line from the late Alaska Gov. Wally Hickel, “you can’t just let nature run wild,” and most of the homeless are living in a primitive, “natural” style albeit with some of the comforts of the modern day – cell phones, propane heaters, stolen propane, beer coolers and more.

Some in Anchorage seem willing to accept their lifestyle as is, too, and the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) did its best to support the lifestyle. It is unlikely, however, that if the issue were put to Anchorage voters today the majority would favor letting the craziness continue as it has for years now.

And it was the opinion of the Supreme Court that a community’s majority should have the right to decide how to handle the situation.

Given the problem is complex, Gorsuch wrote, “so may be the public policy responses required to address it. A handful of federal judges cannot begin to ‘match’ the collective wisdom the American people possess in deciding ‘how best to handle’ a pressing social question like homelessness.”

It will be interesting to see what Anchorage’s new mayor and assembly do next to harness “the collective wisdom” of local voters.

It always seemed to me that the least the city could do is charge those who make a mess with littering and, if they proved unable to pay the fine, ask a judge to sentence them to community service, preferably on litter pickup details.

Given the energy some of Anchorage’s homeless have put into building camps, they clearly do not lack the physical ability to get this job done, and supervised work details might actually help some of them develop enough discipline in their lives to go get a job.

And, at the very least, court-ordered labor to clean up the mess created by the combination of the homeless, the ACLU and the city’s political elite could help restore the public spaces that were once Anchorage’s most attractive feature.