Residents of an Anchorage mobile home park are pushing back against a plan to redevelop the property where their homes have sat, in some cases, for decades.
The developer plans to clear the area and build townhouses, and he's offering the residents $6,000 each to vacate the property so the project can move forward.
But the residents -- who own their mobile homes and rent the space upon which they sit -- say that's a fraction of what it would cost to move their homes, and many aren't sure where they'd go anyway.
Anchorage Daily News reporter Michelle Theriault Boots has followed the unfolding tension at South Park Estates.
Theriault Boots told Alaska Public Media's Casey Grove that her reporting highlights how plans to build more housing for some Anchorage residents can end up taking away affordable housing for others.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Theriault Boots: This is a mobile home park that has been around, really, since Alaska became a state. It was purchased in 2005 by Debenham, Shaun Debenham's company, and pretty quickly the company realized that there was extensive environmental contamination in some of the soil, left over from the heating oil lines. They always planned to redevelop it, but they kind of settled in and said, "OK, we're going to own this park for probably decades, until we get to do what we want to do with this land, which is turn it into brand new townhomes."
In 2021, he applied to, and received permission to, rezone it. And then last year, people were told that there would be a phased eviction, and they would need to move out and move away their mobile homes. People said, "Well, I can't move my mobile home." So they were looking at potentially losing their biggest investment. Basically, some people that we talked to said they had put upwards of $70,000 into these mobile homes.
Casey Grove: Is this a question of whether they can stop this redevelopment from happening, or is it more of a PR campaign to try to get a better deal?
MTB: I mean, the truth is that Debenham owns the land. He owns the property, and he would like his project to move forward. I think what's up for debate or negotiation is what the residents might be compensated and under what terms and on what timeline. And I think that is still ongoing, so I could not tell you how that's going to turn out, but I think what the residents want is to get more compensation for the homes that they say that they cannot move.
CG: So the context of this is also pretty interesting, because Mayor Suzanne LaFrance has this initiative to get more housing built in Anchorage. It's, what, 10,000 new homes in 10 years? But there's this interesting nexus there where it's like, "We're gonna build more housing," but it's going to put some other people out of their housing, right?
MTB: Yeah, I think one of the most interesting things I learned while reporting this story is that I talked to Thea Agnew Bemben, who works for the city, and she said, "Look, in the early 1970s," when she was growing up in Anchorage, "mobile homes were one of the main forms of housing." Lots and lots of people lived in mobile home parks. But due to city ordinances in the '80s and '90s and 2000s, it became really, really hard to operate a mobile home park and very onerous for owners to update or move their mobile homes.
So this was a form of really affordable housing that has withered away over time. And Debenham himself — you know, I interviewed him — and he says the way the laws are right now, it's not really possible to operate a mobile home park in the way that he wants to operate it. He says it's too hard to enforce quality-of-life things like trespassing and to tow junked cars and basically to keep the park a safe, clean, nice place.
And it has been his plan all along to build townhomes, which he says are in high demand, but will be more expensive and not an ownership option for the same people that can live in these mobile homes. And so what's happening is mobile home parks are going away, but there's sort of a donut hole where there hasn't been an as affordable form of housing that has come in to take its place that's really viable, that also has that ownership option.
CG: So zooming out from this particular mobile home park, Michelle, what do you think this story says about Anchorage in general, and I guess the future of housing in Anchorage?
MTB: Yeah, I think that this story shows that mobile homes are an important but very much endangered form of affordable housing in Anchorage. And that really came into focus at the special Assembly meeting where this was discussed. And Midtown Assembly (member) Erin Baldwin Day said, "Just tonight, we've approved several rezones that will likely lead to other mobile home housing being converted and redeveloped into apartments or something else. We need to figure out how we, as a city, are going to kind of reckon with this change and this issue, because this is just the beginning."
