Tshibaka keeps selling homeless fable
Kelly Tshibaka, who needed a backstory to contrast with that of Sen. Lisa Murkowski, is still going around selling the fable that her parents were homeless in Alaska in 1975.
She wants people to know that she is the daughter of two people who rose up from being homeless, not a banker’s daughter.
“My mom and dad once were homeless in Alaska,” Tshibaka said in a press release column printed by some Alaska newspapers in which she attacks Murkowski for not doing enough to help victims of domestic violence.
The homeless tale is a fixture of her campaign interviews Outside, when she mentions her parents.
“They had some rough times and ended up homeless, living under a tarp,” she told the right-wing “America UnCanceled” show Oct. 5.
The problem with this story, as I wrote here in August, is that it’s an exaggeration bordering on fabrication.
I’m surprised that Tshibaka is still repeating this humble brag, perhaps expecting that Alaska news organizations will continue to do no real news coverage of her campaign.
Spending time in a tent in Russian Jack Springs park—four years before Kelly was born—did not make her parents homeless. It made them campers. Like lots of other people.
Late last year, as she prepared to run for office, Tshibaka made the homeless story a central part of her biography of humble beginnings, claiming her family’s story is a “homeless to Harvard” fairy tale.
The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, in a puff piece on Tshibaka Sunday, repeated the homeless fable and passed it off as true, including this bit of doubletalk from the candidate.
“The tent situation . . .that ended up being a homelessness situation for them because they thought it was short-term camping, but it ended up being a long-term problem that they couldn’t get out of,” Tshibaka said. “They had to fight their way into working class Alaska.”
Tshibaka’s maternal grandfather was an elementary school principal in California in 1975 and her maternal grandmother taught in the Los Angeles school district. Tshibaka’s paternal grandmother worked in California at Montgomery Ward.
At a time when the vacancy rate for apartments in Anchorage was near zero, living in tents was not uncommon, In Fairbanks, my twin brother lived in a tent in 1974. He wasn’t homeless.
Most of the young and healthy people who lived in tents back then in Alaska were not homeless in the way that the term is now used.
Most never did any panhandling. If they stayed in flophouses, that was because of the severe housing shortage and the abundance of flophouses.
Jobs were readily available to those who wanted them in Anchorage or Fairbanks. It did take time for many people to get out of the tent and into a pipeline camp where the big money was made. Some people never made it.
“You can buy a tent or a camper,” Mike Wallace of CBS reported after a trip to Fairbanks in 1975 about the housing options. “That’s the route thousands here have had to go, both homegrown Alaskans who are not making those fantastic wages with which to pay inflated rents. And people from Outside who have come here looking for the pot of gold.”
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The 1975 “60 Minutes” piece on Fairbanks starts at about 17 minutes into this video. “103 percent full” refers to the housing situation in Fairbanks that year.
I remember that the closing comment by banker Frank Murkowski led to controversy in Fairbanks as some people interpreted his words as jarring advice to those who hadn’t cashed in on the pipeline.
This segment on the pipeline and the report on Alaska Native land claims that precedes it, contain important history lessons.