One part of the community tells a side of the story about housing in Anchorage, but the data is not clear that there is an actual housing “crisis” in Anchorage, as some call it. If there is a housing crisis, it has been around for a long time.
People in Eagle River told their Assemblyman Kevin Cross last week that Anchorage people are moving to the Mat-Su Valley and a lot of them are also working in the valley. They are not moving for the reasons Cross was saying, which is that there is not enough affordable housing in Chugiak, Eagle River, or the rest of Anchorage.
Opponents of the Kevin Cross “fix” for affordable housing argue that people are moving to find a better political climate; Anchorage has become more liberal in the past decade and the quality of life has deteriorated, and schools have become unsavory due to unwholesome agendas being forced on students and their families.
Cross, who develops real estate for a living, had called the community meeting to discuss his massive rezoning plan, a rewrite of the Title 21 ordinance. His changes, in an ordinance he advanced in the Anchorage Assembly after taking office. The goal is to build more apartments and condos across every part of the municipality, including Chugiak and Eagle River, and Girdwood, which have their own zoning carve-outs from Title 21.
The ordinance was given a poor reception, however. Residents worry about multi-story apartments being built next to their single-family homes, and are also concerned about the deterioration of their family neighborhoods.
A look at the data shows a population in decline in Anchorage, even as more housing has been built over the past few years.
According to the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation, the population of Anchorage was 298,908 people in 2015. Today, the population is down 288,000.
That’s a loss of about 11,000 people in Anchorage in less than a decade.
According to AFHC, in 2017, the municipality had 115,000 housing units, with 105,164 of them occupied, leaving an unoccupied inventory of nearly 10,000 units.
If those housing units were stable over the past six years, and with a falling population due to move-outs and low birth rates, there are still more than four housing units for every 10 people in the city, including adults and children.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, it threw a monkey wrench into many sectors of the economy, including apartment and home building. People in 2020 and 2021 approached housing in different ways — some rational ways, others not so much.
The supply chain dried up in 2020 and lumber costs skyrocketed, as did all other materials. Labor was in short supply starting in 2020 and continuing to today. These were impacts felt in every community across the country and Anchorage was no different.
At the same time, some people started working from home more, and their needs for space changed.
In November of 2020, the number of housing units approved by permits was about 415 in Anchorage, but vastly more homes were being built in the Mat-Su, which is lightly regulated.
Now, with mortgage interest rates near 7%, there’s yet another monkey wrench in the system.
According to AHFC, the rental vacancy rate was 5.7% in 2020 and slid to 4.3 in 2021. Typically, a 5-7% vacancy rate is considered a healthy balance, which puts Anchorage’s rental market a little on the tight side.
“As vacancy rates are going down, median rents have steadily gone up across the state from 2016 to 2022, with an average increase of 10.64%,” AHFC reported at the end of last year. The state reports that the average Anchorage rental is $1,400.
At the same time, none of this explains how the population loss of 11,000 in Anchorage would make the housing market tighter. The numbers from one agency to another don’t always tell the full story. After all, this is a city that is talking about the need to close a few schools due to declining enrollments; Anchorage has lost over 5,800 students since 2016.
What about the Anchorage street people? The unsheltered population in Anchorage, according to the Alaska Homeless Management Information System, is 3,198 individuals who are living in emergency shelters, couch surfing, or living on the streets or in tents in various greenbelt encampments.
Many of the unsheltered population suffer from behavioral issues that make them unsuitable candidates for a rental unit at any cost — they are drug addicts or people with serious mental illness. Some of them are repeat criminals looking for their next mark. A change in zoning to make more housing available at the bottom end of the market for this particular population is not going to be without controversy because they don’t make good neighbors.
For others in Anchorage, it’s actually far cheaper to live in Alaska’s largest city, where over 40% of the state’s population calls home, than in Seattle, the metropolis to the south. In fact, if you live on $53,000 a year in Anchorage, you’d need $60,000 a year in Seattle to maintain the same standard of living, according to Salary.com.
In fact, Anchorage doesn’t even make the top 10 list of cities with the biggest housing shortages according to multifamily.loans or Angi’s List.
Anchorage builders are frustrated, as they watch their contemporaries in the Mat-Su Valley build and sell hundreds of home.
Title 21 has, no doubt, raised the cost of building in Anchorage and made it more complicated. But Title 21 took years to write, and a quick overhaul may have unintended consequences.
