This commentary was originally published on akmemo.com.
In this edition: The Anchorage Assembly is set to take up an ordinance aimed at increasing housing density in the land-limited Anchorage Bowl. With an ongoing housing shortage and escalating prices, backers say that allowing duplexes, mother-in-law apartments and tiny homes would go a long way to increasing the availability and affordability of housing in a city that has faced out-migration. The opposition, which seems to dwell on anxiety about the parts of town where poor people live, has argued that it would undermine the city’s quality of life. Let’s break that down in this edition.
If you’re expecting Anchorage to be a left-wing paradise/nightmare once Mayor-elect Suzanne LaFrance takes office, may I suggest looking into the ongoing battle over the city’s zoning laws?
LaFrance is set to take office next Monday, but the city’s moderate and progressive wings are already brawling over attempts to address its housing shortage by updating its obstructive-by-design zoning laws. The well-meaning efforts to update the city’s planning laws have run into a lot of not-so-ambiguously coded language about maintaining “neighborhood character,” illustrating a divide in not just what the city should look like but whose interests it should cater to.
“We have a housing shortage, so what?”
That was the lasting line from status quo supporters, who testified against an ordinance earlier this month that would have streamlined and clarified how we update the city’s zoning laws. In reality, the ordinance was an attempt to fix a complicated process that empowers entrenched nimbyism. It failed on a 6-6 vote.
Now, Anchorage Assembly members Meg Zalatel, Anna Brawley and Daniel Volland are proposing the HOME Initiative — a simplified version of what was a more significant effort to update the city’s zoning laws. The measure, which will be in front of the Anchorage Assembly tonight, would allow duplexes and other multi-unit forms of housing on nearly every residential lot in the Bowl (Eagle River and Girdwood excluded). Some building constraints would still apply — Anchorage’s building laws also place higher standards on duplexes than single-family housing — and homeowners associations could prevent such development in some areas.
As Assembly member Brawley discussed with me for a story I did with The Alaska Current, the idea is that the changes could not only make more housing units available — driving down prices and making it more affordable for people to buy homes — but that they can also better meet the city’s evolving needs. She argued that the city’s housing policies idealize single-family housing as the best use of Anchorage’s land. In contrast, today’s Anchorage could use more multi-generational, multi-family housing as well as smaller housing options.
Unsurprisingly, much of the push back has centered around wealthy Anchorage residents’ anxieties about the poor parts of town. Columnist and former Anchorage resident Charles Wohlforth took aim at Mountain View in a column warning against changing the city’s zoning laws.
“Mountain View had been a proud little working-class neighborhood of cottages on small lots. It became the city’s roughest, most transient area with apartment buildings on those tiny parcels, without room for kids to play or space to park cars,” he wrote, noting that progressives of the past worked on ideas to “how to slow growth and limit the population of the city to preserve its quality of life.”
The question, to me, is what does preserving the city’s quality of life even mean?
It’s impossible to overlook the fact that much of what opponents point to as lousy development are simply parts of town where poor people live. Parts of town that, I’d guess, are occupied mainly by people who don’t own the property and, because of escalating housing prices, likely won’t anytime soon. This anxiety over anything that isn’t single-family housing overlooks that people are stuck renting homes in a market increasingly squeezing them for all they’re worth. You don’t have to look far to find stories of rent that has increased by as much as 100% overnight, with little justification.
The thing is, too, a lot has changed since the zoning laws were last rewritten. Unlike the oil boom days, when land was still widely available, it does not look like there are many get-rich-quick schemes in the Anchorage housing market. We’re at a point where if we want to make significant strides in housing availability, we have to look at increasing housing density.
Home ownership ought to be an attainable goal — it’s one of the easiest ways for families to build generational wealth and equity for their futures. One of the ways to get there is to build more housing — which in the land-constrained Anchorage Bowl means increasing density or erasing the city’s green space gems. This worked in Austin, Texas, where recent headlines of collapsing home prices were a bit alarmist before you remember that regular people being able to afford a home is a good thing.
Because, at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about. As someone who’s lived in Alaska for about 15 years now, I’ve watched too many intelligent, dedicated and passionate people leave the state for greener pastures. Indeed, more housing wouldn’t have kept all those people here, but it would have kept many of them. Even now, I have friends looking at this city’s housing market and not seeing a future.
If I have to weigh this not-so-ambiguously coded value of maintaining status quo “neighborhood character” against the much more tangible reality of attracting and retaining talented younger people by allowing them to invest, build and grow, then the decision should be easy.
I want a city filled with people who have a stake in their homes and a reason to care and be invested.
There are many barriers to that right now, and housing availability is one of them.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
