Alaska’s largest city is facing a significant housing crunch, due to the age of existing homes and a decline in new construction. Housing experts say the number of units built annually needs to dramatically increase to keep up with demand.
Tyler Robinson is working on solving the problem. He’s vice president of community development, planning and real estate at Cook Inlet Housing Authority, the main provider for affordable housing in Anchorage.
He told Alaska Public Media’s Ava White that the city is struggling to build apartment buildings.
This script has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Tyler Robinson: When you look at housing projections and needs, that’s both based on where our population is currently, but also just replacing old housing stock. You talk about a need for something in the realm of 900 units a year, and we are really producing something along the lines of maybe 200-300 a year, and have been for a while. So those numbers fluctuate year to year. But you know, suffice to say, we are in the last couple of years, and this year among the least amount of new housing being produced and permitted since really post pipeline years.
Ava White: At the Anchorage Home Builders Association Conference last month, you stressed the need for innovative home building. And then an idea that you brought up was skinny housing. So what is skinny housing, and why might it be a good fit for us in Anchorage?
TR: I wouldn’t limit it to just that. I mean, I think the example that we had played around with is, we have a 60 foot wide lot. Imagine if we split that into and built two detached homes. So clearly, you could build a duplex, or hopefully a triplex or fourplex on that lot, but could you actually split the lot and have a fee-simple house? So in other words, one unit on one lot, not touching the walls.
There’s challenges with that. We have deep utilities here. We have snow that has to be cleared from streets. But the idea is, could you, can you get creative with the land lot patterns that we have and play around with a new design? And I think we have designs that could show you could even have two units on that, and it could live pretty cool.
AW: You’re hinting at a couple of different things, but what are the biggest challenges that your organization is facing right now, during the housing crunch?
TR:The biggest issue is just the cost overall. And those cost factors are everything. It’s labor, it’s land, it’s infrastructure, and it’s, you know, it’s the cost of construction itself.
I think the thing that’s important for people to understand is, even before the pandemic, even before the statewide recession- so going back to sort of 2010 to 2015, Anchorage had really low vacancy rates. We didn’t have a statewide recession, and we had virtually no multi family housing that was being built. And so in other words, we realized that there’s a feasibility gap of building this denser housing, and as you run out of land, you have to look at this other type of housing.
Now fast forward to where we are today, and we’ve got 40% price increases on what was already a tough situation. So this is the fundamental challenge is expensive to build, and so we’re always looking for if there are things that affect those prices, that are things that we control, like our regulatory environment, or, you know, maybe it’s time to look at those minimum lot sizes, things like that, then those are the things we ought to be looking at.
AW: At the end of June, the Anchorage Assembly approved the HOME Initiative, which basically eliminates the single family zoning in the majority of the city. How helpful Do you think that will be for creating more housing in Anchorage?
TR: I don’t know. I think it falls into the bucket of let’s try some things. You know, as an affordable housing developer, we’re usually building not in single family neighborhoods, but we’re building in those multi family neighborhoods. And so what that ordinance does is it says, you can get what some people might call gentle density, or a couple of units here there, in places where you otherwise could build a pretty decent sized single family home.
AW: You talked about how housing advocates and organizations are working in silos in the city right now. Why do you think that is, and how do you think a more team based approach could help?
TR: If we can get the assembly, the mayor’s office and staff to all say ‘hey, we know we have challenges in Anchorage, but what can we do to make it easier? Better? Try some new things?’ [And] not be so afraid of potentially building bad housing, whatever that means.
A lot of our stuff is reactive to old housing that we have here. It’s time to sort of put that behind this and just try new things.
Ava White reports on economics and hosts the statewide morning news at Alaska Public Media. Reach her at awhite@alaskapublic.org or 907-550-8445. Read more about Ava here.
