Community

Juneau has some of the highest housing prices in Alaska. According to the  state Department of Labor, the average single family home costs $349,000 dollars in the capital city. A typical rental unit is more than a thousand dollars a month.

One way to combat the high cost of housing is to rent a slip on the docks for a houseboat or a live aboard.

Carrie Warren and her three children live in Aurora Harbor. She’s originally from Washington state, but has lived in Alaska on and off for 20 years. In 2013, she moved to Juneau from Tenakee Springs. As soon as she came to town, she started looking for housing and found a houseboat that suited her needs.

“I chose it because I could actually own it. There are not very many things in Juneau that you can purchase for 50,000 dollars or less.”

Warren says the seller financed the boat for her, and she paid it off in about a year and a half.

She says harbor fees add up to around $200 a month, plus a little extra for utilities. The city’s Docks and Harbors department provides power, water, outhouses and a sewage pump-out. Warren says cooking can be a challenge.

“I have a Dickinson stove that doesn’t work,” she says. “It’s not hooked up. And even if it did, that’s mostly for heat. You can’t bake on it. I mean, you can heat water. I can make a mean pumpkin pie in my toaster oven. I don’t have a microwave. Electricity is hard because you can’t have too many things happening at once. You blow your breaker.”

Warren is a single mother who home-schools her kids and the boat is about 200 square feet. She says sometimes it’s a challenge to make sure the family gets along in such a small area. Warren’s older son plays upright bass and her daughter French horn and they need to arrange individual practice times.

“Our space and boundaries are different than most people’s, and rather than sit around and whine about it, you just suck it up,” Warren says.

Katie Spielberger is Warren’s neighbor. She lives in a houseboat with her partner and a cat.

“A couple of our neighbors have seen the cat and have come by with an extra can of cat food or half a container of kitty litter that they found in the free bin,” she says.

Spielberger works for the state and has been in Juneau for about nine years. She compares living on a boat to the tiny house movement, in which architects design homes that are less than 400 square feet. She says living in a small area has made her more creative.

“It’s kind of nice to have that challenge to simplify things and it feels very rewarding when you actually can live in such a small space and have everything you need,” Spielberger says.

She hangs as much as she can on walls, takes advantage of all available space and rents a storage unit. Spielberger says living on a houseboat provides the best of Juneau at an affordable price.

“It feels very much of this place,” she says. “You don’t feel like you’re living in a house that could be anywhere. The views surrounding a boat in any harbor in Southeast Alaska, I think are gorgeous and hard to beat except at some very nice land property.”

In addition to houseboats, some people in Juneau have live-aboards.

“There’s a live-aboard vessel which is just your normal boat that somebody might live on,” explains Harbormaster Dave Borg. “And then we do have some houseboats designated specifically just as a houseboat. They generally don’t have any mode of power.”

Borg says there are nine houseboats in Aurora, three in Douglas Harbor, two in Harris Harbor, and nearly 140 live-aboards. Monthly moorage fees are $4.20 per foot.

Warren says there are unique problems with houseboats, but they’re mostly in-line with other homeowner concerns.

“When it’s real windy, it’s a little freaky. You know, I worry about things like my canvas blowing away, but you know, I think any homeowner when it’s stormy and yucky has those same kinds of worries. Anybody who’s living in a not super insulated home has those same kinds of worries,” says Warren.

And she says it’s more affordable than other housing alternatives.

It’s First Friday and art appreciators will be hitting the sidewalks this evening to socialize and check out new shows.

Historically, December First Friday is the biggest art walk of the year, but this November is no slouch. This is no surprise to Marianne Manning who is showing at the Juneau-Douglas City Museum and says this is the time of the year to make art.

“There’s nothing like painting on wet, rainy days to go into your studio,” she says. “You can kind of see why Southeast Alaska has always had amazing artists.”

Manning, who paints oil and pastel landscapes and portraits, is sharing the night with cartoonist Tony “TOE” Newman, and the “Downtown Sights” crew whose work features a variety of mediums capturing Juneau’s core. Just down the hill, ceramic artist Brandon Howard is showing at the Canvas. Howard says his love for ceramics came from utility.

“I like getting to build things and make things for use, to solve problems,” Howard says. “It was my way of making the things that I eat from, the things I drink from, storage containers — making them the way I wanted them to be.”

If you’re coming in from the Mendenhall Valley or Douglas, you might want to stop at the JACC and see the collaborative poetry and calligraphy work of Gordon Harrison and Sara Isto. Isto says their coming together was serendipitous.

“After I retired I wrote two nonfiction books and then I was ready to work with something shorted and maybe a little more creative,” she says. “A couple of years ago I started writing poetry and then Gordon picked up some of the pieces and used them for practice, and here we are.”

If you’re inbound from Thane, you could begin your night at the Red Dog Saloon with Brian Weed’s photography of historic Juneau area mines. His passion for his subject began when he was a kid. He says his dad would bring him to work and set him loose.

“In the summertime he would bring me to Douglas and drop me off and say ‘Be back by 3:30 and that’s when I’m leaving,'” Weed says. “I would run around Sandy Beach and go way out there and explore the mine tunnels, kind a stray off the trail, and see the old mine ruins, and run as fast as I could to be back in the parking lot by 3:30.”

As you get into town you can see Tony Harbanuk’s photography at the Juneau Artist Gallery, or go make art by participating in Kindred Post’s “Mealtime Antics” photo booth and hear Cats and Kites, or see Barbara Lavallee and Alice Tersteeg’s work at Annie Kaill’s, or comic artist Dylan Meconis at Alaska Robotics, or Elise Tomlinson’s oil paintings at Suite 105, or Mary VanderJack’s work at the Rookery.

There are just too many to mention. Check out KTOO’s First Friday Guide for more.

Despite beefed up patrols, the Juneau Police Department did not make any arrests for driving under the influence on Halloween.

JPD credits the local chapter of Alaska CHARR, the Cabaret Hotel Restaurant and Retailers Association, which offers bar patrons free cab rides home on certain holidays. The nonprofit provided more than 400 free cab rides on Halloween, according to a JPD news release.

The department had seven extra officers on the street that night. They made 21 traffic stops, and responded to more than 60 emergency and non-emergency calls from the public.

Juneau gained its fifth sister city this weekend. Representatives from Kalibo in the Aklan Province of the Philippines signed documents Saturday afternoon to formalize the agreement. Juneau and Kalibo are both vibrant tourism centers and regional capital cities. They hope to mutually benefit each other socially and economically as sister cities.

About 3,000 Filipinos live in Juneau and roughly 800 of them are from Aklan. Vicky Roldan is one of them. She’s been in Juneau for 21 years and says family is the reason so many Kalibo residents move here.

“There’s a big number of them here because of intermarriages and all that and they keep bringing family over here.”

Alex Carrillo  was born and raised in Juneau and says the Filipino population has always been a tight-knit community.

“Just growing up in the Filipino Hall around even people who weren’t our relatives. We were so close back then because that’s all we had was one another. The Filipino Hall is a really big part of my life.”

He says Juneau’s bond with Kalibo is more than just a sign of good will toward the Philippines.

“Filipinos are a big part of Juneau, I think. And it just shows that the city of Juneau really appreciates us.”

While in Juneau, the Kalibo delegation did some sightseeing including visits to the Mendenhall Glacier and the Shrine of St. Therese. They also visited local businesses, like the Alaskan Brewing Co.

Many expressed hope that the sister city connection will encourage an exchange of goods, services and information. Dr. Makarius Dela Cruz is Kalibo’s municipal health officer. He says Aklan needs support to provide better health care to its residents.

“Your government could help my government to provide medicines, equipments and also promote nutrition in our town.”

Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines last November and damaged buildings in Aklan. Juneau’s Filipino Community Inc., or FilCom, reached out to those affected across the Philippines. Larry Snyder is on the Juneau Sister Cities Committee.

“The FilCom had a fundraising event for relief money to assist Filipinos. And then the state of course donated two cargo planes full of Alaska sea products, salmon, canned salmon.”

Seafood is important to both Southeast Alaska and Aklan. Jenny Gomez Strickler is the Philippines’ honorary consul to Alaska. She wrote to Alaska Airlines to explore the possibility of a direct flight to Manila that could increase the amount of fish exported. She says there are products that people in the Philippines could use that would otherwise go to waste in the United States.

“In Alaska, our fishermen grind up the salmon heads and throw it back in the ocean. I joke that that would be a taboo to Filipinos. Filipinos love making fish-head soup. They call it sinigang.”

John Pugh is the chancellor of the University of Alaska Southeast. He says there could be a trade in education.

“Having the sister city relationship will enable us to work towards maybe some educational exchanges through agreement with Aklan University – for students, for faculty exchanges – and we think that would be a real benefit.”

If the sister city relationship is successful, members of both communities hope it will also spark more tourism.

Consultants have come up with seven key initiatives to guide Juneau’s economic development over the next decade.

They include enhancing the capital city, building the senior economy, workforce development, affordable housing, renewing the federal sector and downtown revitalization.

McDowell Group and Sheinberg Associates have been working on a new Juneau Economic Development Plan for the past year.

Sarah Bronstein with Sheinberg says the initiatives are based on research and public input. The project team hopes to get more community participation in two more town hall meetings.

“We’re hoping to get feedback from people about what types of actions we might want to take and how we want to strategize over the next ten years to achieve those initiatives,” Bronstein says.

Each community meeting will be half presentation, half workshop.

“If people have a particular passion for affordable housing or for workforce training or providing childcare, these are all things that people will have an opportunity to talk about,” she says.

A town hall meeting on the plan takes place 7 o’clock tonight at the Elizabeth Peratrovich Hall. The next one is at 7 p.m. Oct. 29 at University of Alaska Southeast.

The economic development plan is scheduled for completion in December.

Calling all hoarders, music lovers, and DVD collectors! KTOO announces its Fall Used Record, CD & Video Sale! Scheduled for Saturday, October 25, from 9 a.m. – Noon, the sale marks the beginning of the Fall season, as collectors are invited to clean out their closets and collections and donate them to Juneau’s public radio stations. The sale is a great time to stock up on some classics – all at a price one can’t resist: $1 each! If you have records, CDs and Videos you’d like to pass on, drop them by the station beginning October 20th. For more information, please call Jeff Brown at 463-6425.