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With mortgage rates at their highest level in two decades and rental prices increasing dramatically, across the state, it's getting harder for Alaskans to find adequate housing.

And then I come back to Anchorage, Alaska and they're like, we want Fort Yukon dollars a month for like some 1980s, never remodeled Marshall.

I'm just I'm not either.

What's causing the housing crunch and what efforts are underway to meet the demand for new housing in Alaska?

We'll discuss it right now.

Unalaska Insight Good evening.

Thank you for joining us for the premiere episode of Season seven of Alaska Insight.

We're grateful to have you with us tonight for this important discussion on the chronic and growing need for more housing in Alaska.

But before we get to that discussion, we'll start off with some of the top stories of the week from Alaska public Media's collaborative statewide news network Eugene Peltola Jr., the husband of U.S. Representative Mary Peltola, was killed after his plane crashed Tuesday night in a remote area of western Alaska.

Following the announcement of his death.

Condolences have poured in from across the state, with friends and family remembering Peltola Jr., known as Buzzi, for his sense of humor.

Years of public service and commitment to his loved ones.

In a statement announcing his death, congressional staff Representative Peltola described her husband as a devoted family man who was obnoxiously good at everything Mary and Eugene Peltola Jr., have a large, blended family that includes seven children President Joe Biden led a memorial at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson Anchorage on Monday on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks, the president stopped Jabor on his way back from the G20 summit in India.

and a diplomatic visit in Vietnam.

During his remarks, the president described that day 22 years ago as a day that tested his strength, resolve and courage.

of all Alaska Insight.

He went on to decry all forms of terrorism, both foreign and domestic, and use the remembrance to call for national unity.

Employee of the Alaska Public Office Commission recommended fines totalling nearly fifty thousand dollars for people behind the drive to repeal rank choice voting in Alaska.

In a formal report to the commission, the staff alleges that Art Mathias and Anti the end, the anti ranked choice groups he leads, including Alaskans for Honest Elections, violated multiple provisions of Alaska's campaign reporting laws.

The report arises from the investigation of a complaint by the proponents of Alaska's new voting system, including the author of the ballot measure that implemented the system, alleging that Mathias illegally funneled 90000 dollars in campaign contributions through a religious organization to disguise their source and obtain a tax deduction.

The commission is expected to consider the report when it meets on September 28th.

You can find the full versions of these stories and more on our website.

Alaska Public Doug, or get breaking news alerts right to your phone by downloading the Alaska Public Media app.

Now on our discussion for this evening across Alaska.

It's a challenge to find affordable housing, homebuilding and vacancy rates are down while rent, mortgage rates and home prices are up.

The lack of affordable housing drives people into overcrowded homes and homelessness or out of state.

Some officials have begun referring to it as a housing crisis.

Alaska Public Media's Jeremy Hsieh reports General.

It was like Eric Peterson is 32 years old and was born and raised in Anchorage.

He was living abroad in Japan until five months ago.

when he moved back home into the house he grew up in with his parents.

I don't have to pay rent, which is amazing.

because the rent is out of control.

But he says he has a good paying job and could buy a modest place in town for himself.

his French bulldog.

But he doesn't think he'll stay in Anchorage long term, he says.

In Japan, he rented a great apartment for 400 dollars a month.

And then I come back to Anchorage, Alaska, They're like, we want fourteen hundred dollars a month.

Like, you know, 1980, never remodeled special.

And I'm like, I'm I'm not going to pay the I don't think anybody should have to.

And I just think that the average rental prices of any form of housing Anchorage as well as the purchasing price of anything is completely out of control according to state economy, the average home in Anchorage cost about four hundred and sixty nine thousand dollars last year.

That's up 20 percent in just a few years.

The cost of rent has also been climbing in recent years across much of the state and an Anchorage especially if you look at the cost of land in most communities, labor has gone up in most communities, materials have gone up.

Transportation from the materials gone up.

And we've gotten to a situation where now even building market homes developers can't afford to build it and then sell it at what they built it for.

That's making housing prices go up, plus the cost of borrowing to buy a home has climbed to the highest rates in decades.

The Alaska Housing Finance Corporation is a special agency that can tap into capital markets.

Regular lenders can't that way.

It can offer a lot of Atka home buyers mortgages at better than market rates.

As an example, a year or two ago, 21 percent of the houses that folks were buying in the Alaska where HFC loans this year, it's thirty four percent in Soldotna.

The nonprofit Rural Cap is overseeing work to build nine home.

These construction workers.

They're also the owners.

Nine local families are working together to build nine homes through rural caps, mutual self-help housing program and nonprofit program connects lower income families with low interest and subsidized mortgages from the federal government.

Each family commits to work 36 hours a week on the houses.

Volunteers can contribute to their sweat equity covers.

The down payments Rhonda Johnson learned about the program in 2009.

She was working at Walmart at the time and renting an apartment for herself and for kids.

Oh, there's no way I could bought a home, a sweat equity.

You I would say who has thirty thousand dollars to put down on the home.

I don't.

It took about seven years before Johnson qualified, made up the waitlist and finished her home And then I had friends and built after mine and I just helped build, build, build and I just love to volunteer.

And within a few years she logged thousands of volunteer hours on 45 homes.

She won a national volunteer Award in twenty twenty one.

Now she works for rural Cap on the program.

She says it's fulfilling just to move in.

And they could say it's their own home.

I built with my hands microcaps program has helped thousands of people since it started in 1971.

But there is a new building technology on the horizon that could dramatically lower the cost of market rate housing 3D Conker printing next year.

Nome will be the testing ground for a system like this.

to lay the foundation walls and roof of a home.

The city and its partners are getting a federal grant to build demonstration homes to test the feasibility and economics.

But barring disruptive tech breakthroughs, Alaskans like Eric Peterson are advocating for relaxing the rules that govern what can and can't be built as a more immediate path toward affordable housing.

So many of Anchorage problems could be alleviated with cheaper housing.

Reporting from Soldotna and Anchorage.

I'm Jeremy Hsieh housing.

However, the price of housing.

Joining me tonight to better understand how we ended up in a housing crisis and to discuss the various efforts underway to encourage more home construction is Dr. Daniel Buckland.

Daniel is an Anchorage assembly member and has been working together with other assembly members on zoning reform to help address housing needs.

We'll discuss some of that in a minute.

Also with us this evening is Nolan.

Clodagh Nolan is the executive director of the University of Alaska Center for Economic Development.

Welcome, both of you.

Thanks for having us.

Lori again.

Thanks for being here.

So, Daniel, I want to start with you.

There are more than two hundred places being converted from hotels to housing in the city currently through a public private partnership.

Give us your assessment and kind of overview of how large the housing problem still is for Anchorage and what do you think the next fastest step is for creating more?

Well, thank you, Lori.

I am one of those people who would contend that we do have a housing crisis on our hands and that there is a direct connection between lack of affordable housing and the homelessness issue.

we're facing as a municipality the Anchorage Assembly has worked very aggressively to use federal funds to convert hotel rooms to housing.

In fact, I was first elected one of my first co-sponsors, Appropriations was to help close the sale of the guest house downtown that is used for extremely low income housing.

That's folks who who work or have some type supplementary income, be it disability or Social Security.

And they're on the lease.

And so they have skin in the game.

and they get to be stably housed.

And then there are also there's a small percentage of those rooms that are used for permanent supportive housing for folks that have more needs and maybe need more wraparound services.

That program is going really well, that that location is being very well operated with minimal impact to the neighborhood.

We have hundreds more units coming online, as you said, whether that's the Golden Lion, the lake house, the former barritt.

And we'll be coming online soon.

But we have a long way to go.

The 20 40 land use plan envisioned that we would have to be building about 800 40 units per year to keep up with projected growth by 20, 40.

Anchorage is falling far short of that.

We aren't even achieving half of that.

We're only building less than 400 units per year.

So I think we need to be building more housing at every income level, whether that's extremely low income, affordable housing or if it's middle market housing, even luxury housing, which higher income housing, that frees up that middle market for those young professionals.

Are working age pulation or families that are getting started to be able to afford housing as well.

And we'll talk about some incentives, such as your thoughts on zoning reform in just a bit.

But no one outside of Anchorage, where are some of the other areas of Alaska that you see that have the most extreme?

Sure.

Well, thanks, Lori.

I think that most of the state of Alaska has some version of a pretty serious housing problem right now.

And it's not necessarily the same problem everywhere.

I think that the challenges that we have in Ancrage are different from those that would be in a small rural vilge.

But I think that that the challenges are especially acute in a lot of the rural communities that are off of the road system.

They have much more expensive shipping costs, much more expensive labor costs, material costs, And so those are the kinds of places where the cost to build the homand the cost and the sales price of the home are just so out of sink that that really no private developbuild would typically be able toe make a profit building housing and as a result, very little housing gets built unless there's some kind of public money behind it.

in a lot of Alaska.

But I think you can also talk about places that are relatively urban, like Juneau, like Sitka, like Ketchikan.

and where there's just not quite enough housing getting built.

A lot of times reasons are land availability, construction costs, labor costs and labor shortages I think are all factors that contribute to it.

Hmm.

Daniel, in response to the recent report from the State Labor Department about the big the state, you sent this uptis message X, formerly Twitter, our zoning codes encourage the most expensive type of housing that uses the most land and takes up the most square footage.

Describe what's happening there, how is this the code?

Well, I would say tt there's a disconnect between our adopted plans.

The twenty twenty comprehensi plan and the Twenty 40 land use plan, which encourage houng density and housing diversity, all kinds of housing, whether that's accessory dwelling units, which the Anchorage Assembly has been supportive of or townhome coos, small accessory dwelling units, multifamily.

But oncessembly we try to make that connect to our zoning code or title twenty one code, and not only zoning, but also dimensional designs standardsoften we can't achieve the type of housing density or diversity that the plan calls for because of overregulation.

or because things like building heights or set backs are minimumot sizes.

Those standards don't actually allow a developer to build that type of housing.

So I'm interested in hocan we how can we marry the two and how can we simplify our zoning code right now?

My myself and my colleagues, Ambler Brawly and members, xylitol are working on a project that we're calling the Home Initiative that would do a few things.

Number one, it would consolidate residential zoning And I want to be very clear that it does not pact commerciazoning.

It does not impact industrial zoning.

It will not allow a junkya or an auto body shop next to your home.

but it will simplify if it passes residential zoning code.

Right now, we have fifteen residential zones in zones andopefully give a little bit more flexible and redictability in those those various zones.

They also are informed by that 20 40 land use code to come directly fm the land use designati thaare in that plan.

that are already is the e signation that I would fall into and how big a piece do yothink this is as far as I an, if you got the changes passed and suddenly it was reduced to five, do you think we would see a dramatic increase in housing?

I mean, how big h big a proem is zoning?

I think it is a piece of the puzzle.

And I would argue it's a big piece of the uzzle, especially when you look to the Matsue I mentiod earlier that Anchorage is strgling to build less than 400 units a year.

Well,hat Seward is building like crazy.

Ty're building about 2000 units per year now.

One of tse factors is thland availability that that Nolan mentioned.

But we have to look when it comes to Anchorage, wt are the things that are in ' availability that that Nolan control all of the broader economy forces that result in higher costf construction, but can we control our own regulation when it comes to what types of housing is allowed to be built?

I would argue yes.

Now I don't think we're going to see an overnight change in our neighborhoods with all all the sudden we're going to see tons of small and large multifamily I think we're going to see more incremental change over time.

But it's got to start.

But it's got to start somewhere.

Exactly.

Nolan, how do you see this this that marry up with what your receipt, your research shows as far as how zoning codes could either incentivize or complicate building?

And how do we compare to other cities of our size?

Sure.

I do think zoning is is part of the problem that we have.

I think that when we look how our rates of building New home construction in Anchorage are very, very low, even compared the state level, which is already pretty low but abysmal compared to the country as a whole, probably zoning is a major contributor to that.

It is not the entire story.

There are certainly all kinds of other factors.

The lack of buildable land in Anchorage.

I mean, you know, it's not quite true that we're fully built out, but we you know, we have a fairly low density of development and Anchorage, but we don't have a lot of just open green fields that are ripe for development.

So zoning is something that policymakers at the local level do have some amount of control over.

And so it makes sense to look towards that as at least one potential solution or at least a part of the solution to allow for more density, for more types of homes to be built into and to not have to force us into this very low density format that really we've grown up with in Anchorage for a few decades.

And do we how do we compare a few now to other cities of our size as far as complexity with zoning?

Well, compared to other cities in the U.S. and other states in the US, Anchorage is very poor.

National.

You see about five homes for every thousand residents getting built just just across the country.

for every for every thousand residents, about five homes get built in Anchorage.

We do just about one home for every thousand residents.

So our rates are quite abysmal for four for our population size.

I am sure that landlords really enjoy the tight market.

But how does the lack of affordable housing disrupt economic growth and community stability?

It does.

It works in a lot of different ways.

I think when you when you think about how people are looking for places to live with younger people who are who are moving, who are kind of establishing their own households, people who have left the state that want to come back or people who might be interested in coming to Alaska.

High cost housing and low availability really discouraged that.

So something that feeds into our outmigration trend to it to at least some degree.

So so that's one aspect of it.

So when we start to think about labor force shortages and and some of the economic challenges that the state, as you know, if we had greater openness in our housing market some of those problems would be alleviated.

Let's talk for just a minute.

about different challenges in places outside of urban centers.

like Anchorage, Juneau and Fairbanks.

for rural communities.

What are the restrictions?

I was looking at information this morning from the Association of Alaska Housing Authorities and there are they know that there's no hoing funds within the federal infrastructure build and for tribal housing, the Indian housing block grant for twenty three was one hundred fourteen million, but it hasn't been adjusted for inflation in many years.

How do you see this picture for the rural areas of the state?

Yes, So it's a really thorny problem.

I think in rural Alaska because of the economics of housing of how exd what price you could actually charge somebody to buy the home.

It just doesn't work outd very well.

So there isn't really very a very functional business model for a developer to actually build homes that that can be purchased by by anyone locally.

And you do to the fact that you have a lot of lower incomes, higher unemployment and a lot of rural parts of the state.

And so it paints a picture of basically needing that federal money like those like those those federal dollars that you mentioned from from HUD or from or from others in order to see any housing get built.

housing, so so those dollars don't necessarily go that far.

toward alleviating the housing shortages that you see in rural Alaska.t's not so much they're about the same kinds.

You know, in Anchorage, we talk about zoning and permitting restrictions andn rural areas, those aren't really the major constraints.

It really is the public money available to build the housing Is it also the complexity in the layers of who actually has fee to the land?

The title of the land?

And are there problems that people run into in that regard?

Also, when they're trying to build in rural areas that can be complicating because you you have a lot of areas of federal ownersh.

So you know, where you wouldn't beble to build if it a national wildlife refuge and son.

But there are ways that some of the native lands excellence can be can be used with the right sorts of permissions.

So so sometimes land availability could ba major problem.

It's not always the biggest issue.

There's also issues, topography, the buildable surface area, and a lot of parts of the state.

Those contribute as well.

But I think that the availability of public funds and the expense of building homes a really the biggest problems in rural Alaska.

And I know that price is very widely around the state, depending on where you are and where you have to send materials.

But compare building a new home and Anchorage to somewhere on the Kobuk River.

Is it three times aexpensive?

Fr times?

Well I couldn't give you an exact estimate for it, but I can tell you that that as a very rough general rule, Anchorage construction costs about forty percent above the national average.

That's just kind of a general rule of thumb.

that the develers will site.

And and when you talk about buildg in a place like Bethel or an outlying village, then you're talking about the additional co of shipping those materials there and how that could be, you know, could easily get to another 50 or 60 percent just as just as kind of approximate figures or event really starts to escalate dramatically.

I think we'd be remiss to Lori if we didn't point out the the challenges of climate change andome of those communities, u know, we're looking melting permafrost and Kiana is buildings, communies like desf Shishmaref anKivalina that may have to be 140 million dollars is a drop in the bucket compared to the need Daniel, in our in our finalesps minute here, you want to encourage more triplex fourplex construction, multifamily housing, given the constraintsf distance from supplies and other factors at expense and aren't going away, how do you see how can local leaders incentivize this to boost more housing?

So I'm to encourage triplex an ww fourplex development.

Working on that with my colleagues, member Solt and Member Cross.

And I very excited about that.

We've had a number of productive working group conversions involving theoss.

traffic department, the fire department, the building department, the planning department, A we'reooking at l of those processes that are iolved.

Once you go beyond a duplex, you have to circulation, a drainage review, on off site improvements.

All of these things that escalate the time and the cost.

And so we're looking at how cawe wri those regulations to encourage that type of development?

AnI'll say for myself, I a young professional.

I owner-occupied duplex.

I live up top with my fluffy dog, Juniper, and downstairs below speech my small multifamily house, three young professionals get to live in a desirable neighborhood close downtown close to the coastal trail, city market, grocery store.

And so I really appreciated the opening package of this program that looked at the story of young professional and how hard it is for both renters.

but also those who want to achievehe dreamf homeownershipMany people of Iight Airbnb and her short term rentals as a big part of the proem is fr your perspective.

So I think Nolan would probly agree with me tt we need updated data.

Some of the data that we are working off of wh it comes to short term rentals, it's from a housing study in twenty welve.

So there is an effort right nownderway to do a new housing study.

The ar certainly areas of Anchorage that I think e more impacted Girdwood, I believe, has something likthirty seven percent of our housing units as short term renta downtn has a lot of short term rentals.

I'm not on thisn project, but few of my units colleues are looking potentially doing registration term reals and Anchoragend a pt Nolan, your thoughts a few secon he about those constraints of short term rentals.

Short term rentals are probably something that's onibuting ton inease in rents in many communities around the state and including here in Anchorage.

I think that it is a part of that increase and what conces me, especiay abt short term rentals, thais that over timth increase.

Right, that we've seen, we we n't have perfecdata, buthe data that we do have show that more and more of our housing robablis a problem.

l ight.

Thank you both so ch That time went by so quickly.

Thanks for being here.

This my other thingsn li easier when people n pay heir rent or mortgage withou wrying about whetr th can buy fooor pay other bills, ey have beer health to their family a communitymese well-bein And stable ho life hes children get a good future.

It's in all of our str best inresto support iesting in a wide rangef housingptions f economic growth and community heth and cesion.

Thas it for this editioof Aska Insight Visit our Web site, Laska Public Dog for breang news and repts from oupartner stis across thetate.

Wle y're the,ign or our free Daily Digest so be back next Friday.

anks for joining us th ening.

I'mori wnsend being