The greatest threat to our city is not upscale ADUs or a few more attractive duplexes in nice neighborhoods, but that we give in to unjustified fear and hyperbole.
New homes are under construction in the Lauren Glenn development on Thursday, June 1, 2023 in Anchorage.
I ended up driving in circles through the neighborhood, but could not for the life of me identify the offending ADU. I could only find it after calling someone familiar with the brouhaha. Opponents of efforts to increase housing often gin up a cast of convenient villains: greedy developers, greedy contractors, greedy builders and so on. Obviously, people in these fields are needed for new building . But critics almost always fail to mention the primary beneficiaries of reform: those who are increasingly being priced out of lives in Anchorage.
Meanwhile, Anchorage has adopted an exceptionally complicated, erratic, and restrictive patchwork of building requirements that have demonstrably stifled building. New home construction has steadily declined over the last decade, despite rising demand. As of 2021, Anchorage built a paltry 1.3 new housing units per thousand residents, while the Mat-Su built seven . Our rental market has an extremely low vacancy rate of only 3.2%,.
Policymakers, primarily including the Assembly and mayor, should work quickly to remove self-imposed barriers to building new housing in Anchorage. Our current approach is not working and has created a crisis, and the longer we wait the harder it will be to fix.
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