There’s a truism that comes up a lot when Alaska experts talk about ending homelessness.
“Housing is the pure solution to homelessness, hard stop,” said Alaska Coalition on Housing and Homelessness Executive Director Brian Wilson on Talk of Alaska in December.
“We know that the answer to ending homelessness is housing,” Anchorage Health Department homelessness coordinator Alexis Johnson said on Alaska Insight in May.
“You will hear me say it every time I get the chance to speak: The solution to homelessness is housing,” said Anchorage Assembly member and Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness Executive Director Meg Zaletel at a press conference in April 2022.
In recent years, Anchorage taxpayers, charities and businesses have invested millions of dollars converting hotels into low-income housing. These units have helped hundreds of people sleeping in cars and tents and emergency shelters get into permanent housing.
Anchorage has also been spending a lot of time, money and effort helping the city’s homeless people with their most basic needs: food, shelter and health care.
“There’s that tension between the emergency safety net and the longer term investment,” Zaletel said on Talk of Alaska in December. “The solution to homelessness is housing. So if we’re intending to solve homelessness, we have to make investments in housing, and we need to maintain a safety net to keep people alive and well in the mean time.”
The pockets for directly investing in housing are only so deep, and there are only so many properties that can be converted. In an ideal free market, this wouldn’t even be a public sector problem – private developers would build the supply to meet the demand.
Instead, when experts look at the big picture, they see a lopsided housing market, where limited supply drives up rent and home prices, and the housing insecurity that contributes to homelessness.
Almost everywhere in AK, housing is too expensive and in short supply. Last Friday I shared some observations about housing with the Anchorage Assembly. A🧵.
— Nolan Klouda 🇺🇦 (@NolanKlouda) May 23, 2023
Housing construction in Anchorage has been in a long decline. Census Bureau data show that most of Anchorage’s housing was built in the 1970s when the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System was being built, and the 1980s after the oil started flowing. Today, Anchorage has more homes that were built in the 1950s than in the 2010s.
So home prices and rents have climbed, and so has homelessness.
“Most of our real estate is over 40 years old in Anchorage – means we’re not even building enough to replace the older homes that are getting dilapidated,” said Anchorage Assembly member Kevin Cross.
Cross and Zaletel are proposing a dramatic simplification of the residential zoning rules that govern home building in the Anchorage bowl, Eagle River, Chugiak and Girdwood. Right now, zoning rules block building anything but single family homes and duplexes in huge swaths of the municipality.
Cross, who is a commercial real estate broker, said the current rules drive up building costs excessively, and also create perverse incentives for developers to build extra large, single-family homes and duplexes on a given piece of land, while market trends and demand are for more modest homes.
Cross said zoning is an initial hurdle that may block a developer from building multiple small homes with the same overall footprint and number of bedrooms as the hypothetical megahome.
“We just need to get out of our own way,” Cross said. “Let’s simplify zoning, let’s get private development back at the table.”
Cross and Zaletel are working together on a residential zoning reform ordinance. In the Anchorage bowl, it would take the 15 existing residential zoning types and collapse them into two. Similarly, in Chugiak and Eagle River it would go from 13 to two, and in Girdwood from six to two. Utility infrastructure like sewer and water would be the key distinction between the two new zones.
The specifics of the new, simplified zoning types aren’t in the proposal. Instead, it sets a goal to write them after the ordinance passes, and have the new rules go into effect in 2025. But the intent is clear: simpler building rules and more homes per acre.
Cross said that will lead to more affordable housing.
There are critics of Cross and Zaletel’s proposal. Two former Anchorage Assembly members who worked on the current zoning rules told the Anchorage Daily News it would “decimate single-family home neighborhoods” and that it would be like “throwing a bomb” at those neighborhoods.
Cross said if homeowners’ immediate reaction to zoning reform is fear, he asks them, “If you had to buy your house today, could you afford it? And the answer is alarmingly, ‘No.’”
He said that plays a big role in today’s labor shortages, outmigration and declining school enrollment.
“Affordable housing solves all our problems,” Cross said. “It gets us the workforce we need, it attracts skill and attracts competent labor. It provides that and it quits the rapid inflation of housing prices that drive people out of their homes. That’s why I’m so passionate about this zoning reform.”
The ordinance is scheduled for public hearing at the Assembly’s July 25 meeting. Cross said he expects that hearing will be delayed to allow for more Assembly deliberation in work sessions.
Anchorage’s elected officials have rolled back other regulations to encourage more housing in recent months. In January, they relaxed rules to allow for more accessory dwelling units to be built at existing properties, and in November eliminated onerous requirements for off-street parking spaces at new developments.
Jeremy Hsieh covers Anchorage with an emphasis on housing, homelessness, infrastructure and development. Reach him at jhsieh@alaskapublic.org or 907-550-8428. Read more about Jeremy here.
