Juneau neighbors want a homeless camp cleared after a reported bear shooting

Residents near Juneau's Governor's Mansion are pressing the city to clear a homeless encampment that has stood above Capital Avenue for years — a local flashpoint in a tension rising across Alaska over where unhoused people can go.

In a letter filed with the City and Borough of Juneau in late July, Peter and Sandra Metcalfe, writing for a group of neighbors, ask the city to clear the camp from the city-owned land, clean it up, and secure it against re-encampment. The camp has long been a nuisance, they write, but tipped into "a threat to public safety" this month: a person in the camp, they say, shot a young black bear out of a tree at the edge of the site. "Now that we know the people in this camp are armed and have fired a weapon with no regard for who is nearby, we have reason to fear for our safety," the letter says.

The city's code already forbids camping on public land in and around downtown Juneau, so the neighbors are largely asking the city to enforce rules already on the books.

Neither the letter nor the city records address what happens to the people living there. Clearing a camp doesn't resolve where its residents go — a problem Juneau shares with Anchorage and other Alaska communities facing similar demands. The records don't document who is at the site or what services, if any, would follow a sweep, and the letter's central allegation, the bear shooting, isn't independently verified in the public record.

No public record yet shows the city, police, or anyone else taking formal action.