The former Golden Lion continues to operate as transitional housing with outpatient substance abuse treatment planned for the future. Photographed on Sept. 9, 2025. (Bill Roth / ADN)

A former hotel in Midtown Anchorage is set to see a drug and alcohol treatment facility open in what was once its lounge. The building, known locally as the Golden Lion, was at the center of a major political fight during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and has since been turned into transitional housing.

The city is moving ahead with plans to add outpatient treatment services inside the building, without displacing any of the people currently living there.

As part of the same plan, outlined in a proposal the municipality is finalizing, officials are aiming to find an operator for 24 “microunits” soon to be installed near Tudor Road that would be geared toward people in substance abuse recovery.

“The (Request for Proposal) is for a community behavioral health provider that has experience with these types of programs and bills Medicaid,” said Thea Agnew Bemben, a special assistant to Mayor Suzanne LaFrance who oversees many of the administration’s homelessness and housing initiatives.

The plan has two main parts. The city hopes that a contractor specializing in addiction treatment will run programming out of the former hotel’s second floor, and also operate a new community of tiny homes for people in the early stages of recovery.

The former Best Western Golden Lion Hotel will remain largely what it has become in the last two years: housing for low-income people, including some families with children, who are typically transitioning from homelessness into long-term assisted living or renting homes of their own. Since 2023, the building has been run by Henning Inc., a local nonprofit that has held a number of shelter and housing contracts with the city in recent years. Currently, there are just over 100 people living in 84 units, according to Alexis Johnson, Henning’s director of strategy and formerly the city’s homelessness coordinator under Mayor Dave Bronson.

The former Golden Lion hotel. (Bill Roth / ADN)

The Golden Lion became something of a rallying cry in local politics beginning in 2020. Under the terms of a voter-approved sale of electric utility Municipal Light and Power to the Chugach Electric Association in 2018, Anchorage was required to spend $15 million of the proceeds to fund substance abuse treatment, and to do so by October 2025.

By the summer of 2020, with business closures and public health restrictions firmly in place in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, former Mayor Ethan Berkowitz’s administration planned to use $22.5 million in federal emergency dollars to buy the Golden Lion and set up a treatment program in it, along with three other buildings.

Opposition to that plan exploded, fueled in part by anger over how local elected officials were handling the pandemic. A group of Anchorage residents condemned not just the public health measures, but also the use of relief money to pay for drug treatment and homeless services at a time when the city ordered many restaurants and small locally owned businesses to stay closed. Bronson capitalized on much of that political rhetoric and activism in his successful 2021 mayoral campaign.

Eventually, though, under Bronson, the city-owned building was opened to people exiting the shelter system with few other housing options. Tenants pay Henning around $800 a month in rent, and generally stay from three months to a year, according to Johnson. She said Henning has been in talks with the city about its plans for opening up a treatment program on the building’s unused former barroom on the second floor, and is relieved that current tenants will not have to move out in order to accommodate it.

“We have no problem with the clinic being there,” Johnson said.

A portion of the second floor is being renovated to add offices, treatment suites, bathrooms, and to better comply with disability access requirements, according to an invitation for construction bids put out by the city’s purchasing department in August.

Last month, Anchorage Health Department Director Kimberly Rash told members of the Assembly that the department aims to find a behavioral health care provider capable of offering a “continuum of outpatient substance use disorder treatment and recovery supports” at the Golden Lion.

According to Rash, the purchase of the building, its use as transitional housing and the construction costs to facilitate outpatient treatment services “will meet all of our requirements” under the terms of the ML&P sale.

Simultaneously, Rash explained, the municipality wants that same provider installed at the Golden Lion to be in charge of the microunits slated to open this fall as a “recovery residences.”

The structures themselves would be tiny houses, with little more than heat, a bed, some storage, electricity, and a locking door. Shared toilets and showers are set to be in separate modular structures. The microunits are currently being built in a warehouse by local firm Visser Construction, and will be installed at a municipal plot of land just off Tudor Road near the Elmore Permit Center, likely in November, according to Bemben.

Details about programming at both facilities — the former Golden Lion and the microunit cluster — are not yet determined. Bemben said the exact arrangements will depend on what providers put forward in their bids to run both sites.

“We’re looking to bidders to tell us what they’d do with them,” she said of the RFP process.

That could take many different shapes, she explained. The drug and alcohol treatment landscape nationally and in Southcentral Alaska has changed significantly since Anchorage voters approved the ML&P sale in 2018. Back then, many of the conversations focused on opening up more detox and residential treatment beds.

“Between that time and now the way that behavioral health services are paid for and delivered has really changed,” Bemben said.

The types of services covered by Medicaid have expanded, including more medications for people in recovery. Both Providence and Southcentral Foundation have added capacity for addiction treatment and detoxification, with more set to come online. Specialized public safety personnel like the municipality’s Mobile Intervention Team and HOPE Team have been incorporated into emergency response and homeless outreach. And a deficit of housing for people moving from acute addiction treatment into longer-term recovery has emerged as a persistent obstacle.

“The needs of the community have shifted,” Bemben said. “Having safe and sober and supported transitional housing is a huge need.”

According to a spokesperson for the Health Department, the request for proposals is expected to go out in the weeks ahead. Once those bids are evaluated and a provider is selected, it will be up to the Anchorage Assembly to approve a contract.

Bemben said she expects the microunits will open to residents before the year is over, and that outpatient treatment services could begin in the former Golden Lion some time in the first part of 2026.

Neither the microunits nor the treatment services at the former Golden Lion are expected to cost Anchorage taxpayers much money. Though the city will lease the facilities to a third-party service provider, their operating costs are expected to be paid by Medicaid and insurance reimbursements from clients. Bemben said the city plans to use approximately $550,000 from the state’s settlement with opioid companies to cover startup costs for the outpatient operations, but otherwise is not adding costs to the municipal budget for it.