A land-use dispute between the municipality, a small family farm tucked off of O’Malley Road and its neighbors recently gained the attention of the Anchorage Assembly.

Dalton Baines started helping his family distribute hay in South Anchorage more than two decades ago, when the bales weighed more than him. Now 32, he owns the family’s farm and runs a secondary small business called Alaska Hay & Feed Supply.

After numerous visits from code enforcement for suspected land-use violations, Baines said the municipality had threatened fines and to shut down his operations.

The Assembly on Tuesday unanimously passed an ordinance reaffirming that the retail sale of hay, feed and compost — at businesses like Baines’ — are allowed under city code.

Baines and other horse and livestock owners said they hope the ordinance will help promote food security in Alaska and ensure the thousands of horses, cows and other livestock on the Anchorage Hillside stay fed when local supplies run low.

“It’s an ecosystem to stay alive up here in Alaska,” Baines told the Assembly on Tuesday during a public hearing.

“(This ordinance) ensures that all animals are protected and able to be fed, especially when barges are late, or crops are late, like this year,” he said.

City code allows on-site feed storage and transactions for animal boarding and training and horse riding lessons. It did not, in “plain language,” permit the retail sale of hay, feed and compost at those facilities, said Assembly member Keith McCormick, who represents South Anchorage. He co-sponsored the ordinance with member Zac Johnson.

“This omission otherwise leaves compliant operators exposed to code enforcement for activity that Anchorage has allowed in practice for decades,” McCormick said.

Baines finished building a new warehouse space, which looks like a set of large garages with a loading dock, last spring on one of his Gander Street properties. The warehouse is usually full of pallets of alfalfa hay bales he imports from Washington state, but his stock was thinner than usual on Wednesday, he said.

After burning through his last shipment, he said he had decided to wait to order more until he knew the outcome of the ordinance.

Livestock facility limits

Baines built a new warehouse space, which looks like a set of large garages with a loading dock, last year on one of his Gander Street properties. The warehouse is usually full of pallets of alfalfa hay bales he imports from Washington state, but his stock was thinner than usual Wednesday, he said.

After burning through his last shipment, he said he had decided to wait to order more until he knew the outcome of the ordinance.

The dispute between Alaska Hay & Feed Supply and the municipality’s Development Services Department began almost two years ago with a noise complaint.

According to a June 2025 memo from former Planning, Development and Public Works Director Lance Wilber, it eventually raised the question: “Does commercial activity associated with large domestic animal facilities include the retail sale of hay and feed?”

Any property with four or more animals, such as cows or horses, falls into that category. This included Alaska Hay & Feed Supply.

The short answer, Wilber said, was “yes, with limitations.” Commercial sales should serve the animals kept on-site and are intentionally limited because livestock facilities are allowed in a number of Anchorage’s residential areas, the memo stated.

Repeated encounters with a code enforcement officer spurred Baines to file a lawsuit.

The municipality put the debate in front of its Zoning Board of Examiners and Appeals in September. During the hearing, neighbors said they believed the hay and feed business had lowered property values and complained of noisy delivery trucks and equipment.

The board ultimately decided Baines’ hay sales violated city code, an action that led to the Assembly ordinance.

In addition to feeding his own black Angus cows and horses, Baines supplies hay and feed to hundreds of customers in Anchorage. Many simply don’t have enough acreage to support livestock, and Alaska’s harsh climate presents another set of challenges for hay growers, he said. His customers range from those with a couple of chickens to horse barns with as many as 40 horses.

Rose English, the owner of Rockin’ B Ranch in South Anchorage, said there have been times in the past when the weather did not allow Alaskans to grow hay, forcing farmers to import hay and feed. She shared containers with neighbors so they could also feed their animals, she told the Assembly on Tuesday.

During the pandemic, her farm also raised pigs, chickens and dairy goats they used to provide meat, eggs and milk to residents when the shelves at the grocery store thinned. It’s necessary for places like her ranch to provide when and where gaps exist, she said.

“It’s going to be very difficult in the future, if anything ever happens, like an earthquake,” English said. “These situations need to be available to help people make ends meet.”

In a written letter from the Hillside Home and Landowners Organization, President Katie Nolan said the recent interpretation of Anchorage’s large domestic animal facility rules created “untenable situations within the agricultural community.”

Nolan encouraged the adoption of the ordinance on Tuesday, citing all the work that had been done under previous mayoral administrations on Anchorage’s animal control laws.

“We ended up with something that worked for our city for decades,” she said. “Unfortunately, along the way, somebody reinterpreted code, and because of that, we had a glitch that needs to be fixed.”

The new ordinance became effective immediately.

California reported one of the largest decreases in homelessness over the past year, according to a new report from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud).

The Golden state recorded a total unhoused population of 181,934 in 2025 – an almost 3% decrease since the year prior, placing it among the five states with the largest decreases from 2024. However, more significant drops were recorded in Illinois (44%), Hawaii (41%), Florida (11%) and New York (8%).

The new data signals at least some success on the part of Gavin Newsom, the California governor who has intensified his crackdown on homelessness over the past year. In May 2025 he announced a new model ordinance for cities and counties to address “persistent” homeless encampments, as well as $3.3bn in voter-approved funding to increase housing and drug treatment programs.

California, along with New York, had the largest population of unsheltered people recorded in 2025. Homelessness has been a key issue in this year’s gubernatorial race, as well as in the Los Angeles mayoral race.

The data also showed that the national homeless population decreased for the first time since 2016, coming down 3% from 2024. The Trump administration attempted to downplay the small one-year decrease, instead highlighting the fact that homelessness has increased 27% since 2013.

“The data is clear that the status quo of ‘housing first’ has failed to meaningfully reduce homelessness, resulting in crisis levels of people living on the streets,” Scott Turner, the Hud secretary, said in a press release. “HUD is restoring its programs to advance recovery and self-sufficiency and to ensure that taxpayer-funded benefits serve American families.”

As the administration attempted to downplay the drop in homelessness, it also sought to connect the success to its immigration policies, stating that the 2025 decrease was “attributable to decreases in Sanctuary Cities”.

The data comes from the federally mandated homeless point-in-time count, which tallies people sleeping in shelters and outside on a given day. On a single night in January 2025, there were 745,652 homeless persons in the United States.

While anti-homelessness advocates cited the decrease in homelessness as a “relief”, they also pointed out that the Trump administration’s policies may erode the progress that has been made.

“So much of the progress reflected in the 2025 PIT Count is due to targeted housing and service resources that were available in 2024 to rehouse people, including the highly successful Emergency Housing Voucher program, and new funds to address rural and unsheltered homelessness,” Ann Oliva, the CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said in a statement.

“Unfortunately, the Trump Administration has largely deprioritized these tools and worked to dismantle the very systems that drove these reductions.” Oliva pointed to the administration’s proposed cuts to permanent housing programs, which the organization found would “force at least 170,000 formerly homeless people back on the streets”.

The government has also mandated treatment for recipients of federal housing vouchers, and penalized jurisdictions that employed harm-reduction strategies such as safe consumption sites. In April 2026, Hud introduced a proposed rule that would require federally funded shelters to house prospective tenants based on their birth sex alone.