Housing

Alaska’s response to the national housing shortage has been different than other states. In many areas across the country, new housing is going up rapidly to meet demand.

But not in Alaska.

In a recent presentation to the Sitka Chamber of Commerce, Nolan Klouda explained that Alaska ranks 45th out of all states in per capita new housing construction, building about two new units per thousand people on average. Within the state, the Mat-Su was at the top of the list for new construction, and not far behind – surprisingly – is Southeast.

“Sitka actually builds a lot more housing per capita than anywhere else in the state besides the Mat-Su,, which is just something that’s really interesting,” said Klouda. “This is all adjusted for population: Sitka is building about four units for every 1,000 people. I found it interesting that Southeast communities are on the top there. Also Haines, Ketchikan, and Skagway, which are above the statewide average, too.”

Klouda is the director of the University of Alaska Center for Economic Development in Anchorage. He traveled to Sitka to participate in the chamber’s fall speaker series on housing.

Most of the new housing construction in Sitka is the result of an expansion by the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium. Overall, Klouda said that projects like employer-built housing and new subsidized housing for seniors will improve housing markets — but not necessarily the bottom line for buyers.

“Whatever the cause, though, I think that’s really good news overall,” he said. “I still want to see much more housing. Nonetheless, Sitka is doing better than most of our communities in Alaska on this measure, even though affordability might still be a big problem.”

Klouda attributed the affordability problem to a lack of land in the state, high construction costs, and out-of-date zoning laws, most of which were written when Alaska was a different kind of state.

“A lot of times zoning is about protecting existing neighborhoods from change, more than it is about health or safety or anything like that,” Klouda said.

He also was unwilling to place full blame on the growth of short-term rentals for Alaska’s high housing costs. Based on anecdotal data, he estimated that three percent of Sitka’s housing stock was tied up in short-term rentals. Klouda felt that the short-term rental market was adapting to changes in the visitor industry, faster than other types of accommodation.

“So the challenge is not that short term rentals are inherently evil,” Klouda said. “I think it makes a lot of sense that you would want to have that kind of income supplement. I think the challenge with it is each year you’re going to see more and more housing tied up as short term rentals, as visitor numbers increase. Statewide, we don’t necessarily build a lot of hotels anymore. And so more and more of your housing stock gets tied up as short term rentals. And we have low rates of building (new housing), so more and more housing stock becomes essentially a hotel.”

Klouda said he feared the short-term rental trend growing out of hand, however, and he favored imposing caps to keep them in check.

Nolan Klouda spoke at the Sitka Chamber’s Fall Housing Series on November 29.

Alaska legislators and staff will have a new housing option during this year’s session in Juneau: a former office building that’s been converted into apartments.

It’s just steps away from the Capitol. The rates are about average for Juneau – from $1,100 for a small studio to $1,600 for a large one-bedroom. And the apartments will come with a perk that’s hard to find here: they’ll allow cats and dogs.

But earlier this month, when a House-Senate committee discussed a list of policies for the apartments, not everyone was keen on having furry friends in the building. 

Sen. Donny Olson, a Democrat who represents the Kotzebue, Nome and lower Yukon River regions, worried about odors and allergens.

“You go into a place that has pets, you have that smell that’s there, you have the dander that’s there,” he said.

Rep. Craig Johnson, R-Anchorage, worried about damage.

“I once was a landlord and I’m no longer a landlord because of pets,” Johnson said. “They can be very destructive.”

He asked the committee to consider removing the policy.

“I would certainly like an opportunity to vote, as much as I’ll be accused of being a dog and cat hater, that we not jeopardize our investment with pets,” he said.

Sen. Jesse Kiehl, D-Juneau, led the group of legislators who drafted the apartment policies. He said they talked extensively about whether to allow pets.

“These folks are all going to be either legislators or legislative staff,” he said. “We will have a relationship with them. They will have an interest in keeping the place in good shape.”

Johnson said he was still concerned about the noise, damage and allergies that pets might cause.

“We do have a relationship with the humans that live in those apartments, and it’s not them I’m concerned about,” he said. “We do not have a relationship with the pets that live in the apartment.”

But Johnson’s motion to ax the pet policy failed. That means legislators and staff – along with their pets – will be allowed at the new apartments next year.

Olson said he wanted it on the record that he does have a dog. He’s just “very strict” about where it’s allowed to be.

Juneau’s population is aging, and unless more young people start moving to Alaska’s capital city, there may not be enough people to fill jobs and take care of its seniors.

That’s one of the takeaways from this year’s economic indicator report from the Juneau Economic Development Council.

“For the first time in our history here in Juneau, the over-60 crowd outnumbers the under-20 crowd,” JEDC Executive Director Brian Holst said at a presentation to the Juneau Chamber of Commerce last week.

Juneau’s birth rate isn’t high enough to maintain its population size without more people moving here. But Robin Thomas, an attendee at the presentation, said now isn’t a good time for people to have kids in Juneau.

“If you’re looking at considering having a child, you have to look at the cost of daycare, medical expenses and housing,” she said in an interview. “There’s a lot working against people.”

If that trend continues, it could mean even fewer people having children, lower enrollment in the Juneau School District, a smaller summer workforce and an increased demand for senior services and health care.

“This is going to have a big impact on how we think about what we should do as a community,” Holst said.

Where did the new housing go?

Housing continues to be a major barrier for people looking to move to Juneau. Business owners in the region have said the lack of housing is the biggest challenge to hiring and retaining workers.

That’s despite Juneau adding around 1,500 units over the last decade.

“Our population increased by, basically, zero,” Holst said. “So where did all the housing go?”

Holst said some of it has become short-term rentals, which may have doubled in 2022.

“We also know that tourism companies, to call them out a little bit, have had to purchase a residence for their workers,” he said. 

Juneau’s aging population is also affecting housing availability, as more seniors choose to stay in their homes. Holst said nearly 800 units are occupied by people over 65 years old who live alone. 

The number of Juneau home sales continues to decline after reaching a peak for the decade in 2021. That year, nearly 550 homes were sold. Just over 100 sold in the first half of this year.

Efforts to increase housing availability are in the works.

City leaders increased the size of grants to help people build accessory dwelling units and are considering adding new housing to Telephone Hill. Tlingit Haida Regional Housing Authority plans to build housing at Juneau’s Pederson Hill subdivision and is helping tribal citizens become homeowners. And an assisted living complex opened this summer, providing a new option for seniors looking to leave their homes but stay in Juneau.

But for now, the market is extremely tight. Homes that do go up for sale aren’t on the market for long. In 2019, the average number of days that homes were on the market was 18 days. In 2020, it dropped to 8, then to 5 for the following two years.

“As houses come on the market, despite high interest rates, they are going really, really, really, really, really quickly,” Holst said. 

High cost of living

So far this year, median prices have been $515,000 for single family homes. Renters in Juneau pay an average of $1,420 per month, and Juneau has a lower vacancy rate than the rest of the state.

“The vacancy rate and the price of an apartment are pretty tightly correlated,” Holst said. “If you don’t have a lot of competition, there’s not a lot of reason to lower your rent.”

And the prices of things like groceries and health care may also keep people from moving to Juneau. Juneau’s cost of living is higher than both Anchorage and Fairbanks.

Mining jobs pay the highest average monthly wages in Juneau, but Holst said many of those workers commute between Juneau and other places in the state or country.

“The wages are great. It would be great to have them. It would be great for our economy,” he said. “But they choose not to live in Juneau. Is cost of living part of that answer? I think it might be.” 

Holst said Juneau has a lot of good jobs to offer, but potential employees won’t make the move if they can’t afford to live here.

“We have a lower population, lower workforce, increasing seniors who require services, and yet we have an economy that is actually really solid,” Holst said. “We have mining jobs, we have fishing jobs, we have tourism jobs, but we don’t have the workers.”

Domestic violence is a leading cause of homelessness for women and their children. Alaska’s major cities are struggling to manage homelessness, especially in the winter, when the stakes for survival are even higher. And experts have identified domestic violence as one of the faucets that floods cities with homelessness.

“Probably every woman in here has experienced domestic violence,” said Mariya Lovishuk, the director of Juneau’s emergency shelter, the Glory Hall. “Most women who come to us have experienced domestic violence at some point in their lives. Maybe not yesterday, but definitely it was very serious, and it has impacted them.”

Lovishuk said that not only does the statewide dearth of affordable housing keep people unhoused longer, but it can keep them in abusive relationships longer, too. “Even if they want to leave… going to shelter is not a very appealing option. So they just stay,” she said.

Lovishuk said that because shelters can be chaotic places, she sees some people stay in abusive situations rather than navigate them alone.

She said the extensive paperwork for affordable housing programs can take months, and for people who want to flee domestic violence, that wait can outlast their resolve to leave: “What we see is people who are in domestic violence relationships give up,” she said.

Abuse commonly compromises victims’ economic stability. For example, it can result in eviction due to disturbances at home, job loss from missing work or poor credit from a partner’s financial actions. That, paired with a lack of affordable housing in the state, often results in homelessness — nationally, most women who experience homelessness have been victims of domestic violence.

In Alaska, where nearly 20% of adults who experience homelessness said they had a history of domestic violence, some emergency shelters are building long-term and permanent housing to keep families safe.

A growing need

In Anchorage, where the vacancy rate for rentals is under 5%, homelessness complicates the response to domestic violence. At Abused Women’s Aid in Crisis, the largest women’s emergency shelter in Alaska, director Suzi Pierson said that homelessness has devastated the community.

“You’ve got more people in camps, more people at risk,” she said. “You know, in close living conditions, when you’re talking about some of the camps, it’s very dangerous, and the level of violence and drugs and all those things are in the camps. So it’s really not safe for victims of domestic violence. They’re even at higher risk for any other kind of crime.”

As a result of the state’s housing crunch and resultant uptick in homelessness she has seen the average shelter stay lengthen — and more clients from rural areas.

“We end up having people stay here for months, because of the lack of housing,” she said.

The challenge with longer stays is that there are fewer beds available for people in crisis, Pierson said. Shelters measure risk by what’s known as “lethality,” a chilling metric that refers to the likelihood someone will be injured or killed. Shelter managers like to have beds open in case a person with high lethality is in need of shelter. In 2021, her shelter expanded from 52 to 67 beds.

“You want more housing, so you can support people getting into housing that are not staying in your shelter for long periods of time, so that you have beds that are available for those in emergent situations,” she said.

“Our vacancy rate for shelters in the community is at zero,” Pierson said. “So, we’re all full here.”

The shelter still makes room for people in emergencies and screens calls to prioritize those who need shelter most, Pierson said. But the shelter doesn’t have the capacity to build or manage housing for survivors of domestic violence.

Building a solution

The Fairbanks shelter manages nearly two dozen units of housing for survivors of domestic violence, the Bethel shelter is working towards more permanent supportive housing, and this year, Juneau’s domestic violence shelter built seven units of permanent housing. Mandy Cole, the director of local nonprofit Aiding Women in Assault and Rape Emergencies, said it is the thing survivors want most.

“If you can control the door to your home, you control who has access to your family, to your body,” she said. “There’s no daylight between healing and surviving domestic and sexual violence and independent, safe, affordable housing.”

She said the shelter she runs was aware of the housing crisis long before it became a statewide issue. The shelter’s residents had trouble leaving due to a lack of safe, affordable housing options.

By 2012, the shelter had added housing strategies to its long-term plans because she said emergency shelter is not a housing solution.

“Emergency shelter saves lives. Absolutely. But it’s also a trap, in some ways, for repeated bouts of poverty and homelessness,” she said. “This is not a controversial idea. It is not one that everybody knows or understands or wants to talk about, but the data bears this out pretty clearly: that if generations of families live in emergency shelter, they have a very difficult time kind of getting out of poverty and violence and victimization and the repeated cycles of these things over their lifetimes and over family generations.”

The shelter started with transitional housing programs, then expanded to provide financial support through what is known as rapid rehousing. Cole said that this support is crucial to protecting people who leave situations of domestic violence because they are extremely vulnerable to homelessness.

“With people who are just kind of getting back into the workforce, if one tiny thing that happens — you know, a couple of days without child care or transportation issues or a medical issue — they lose their housing for it,” she said. “Whereas people who have more means can absorb some of those things, people who live on the margin just cannot.”

This article was produced as a project for the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2023 Domestic Violence Impact Fund.

A full list of Alaska shelters and victim’s services providers can be found here.

After she left her abusive boyfriend, Brynn Butler also lost her apartment. Drug use is a common coping response to the trauma of unhealthy relationships, and she said her addiction to methamphetamines “spiraled.”

“It just snowballed into, pretty much I lost everything, right? I was staying at a trap house with my children, who were 12 and 13 at the time,” she said.

Another man promised her housing and stability in another state so she could “get her life straight,” but she said that ended up being another abusive situation. When he broke her eye socket, Butler said she decided to change her life.

“I was really hesitant to go to the emergency room, because I had track marks all over my arms, and I was just a very sore sight,” she said. “I looked in the mirror and I’m like, ‘Who is this person?’ and then I decided I couldn’t do meth anymore.”

Butler went to the Interior Alaska Center for Non-Violent Living in Fairbanks and was placed in transitional housing, where she could stay at the women’s shelter for six months and stabilize. The staff saw such a dramatic change in Butler that they offered her a job, which helped her work towards independent living.

Survivors of domestic violence often need assistance to secure and pay for housing because abusers commonly sabotage their victim’s economic stability. That can result in trouble finding rental properties because of poor credit, rental and employment histories. The support Butler got for housing gave her room to quit drugs and hold down a job. Now she is the housing coordinator for the city of Fairbanks, and she’s working to build out transitional services for the community.

A number of domestic violence survivors in Fairbanks say housing saved their lives. Affordable housing is a crucial step for stability after domestic violence, but it is hard to come by in Fairbanks and across Alaska. Advocates say that causes a backup in shelters, which can mean more people return to their abusers or other risky situations.

“We don’t have housing to put them in”

Interior Center for Non-Violent Living is the only low-barrier shelter in Fairbanks, where winter temperatures can regularly dip to 40 below. A low barrier shelter has no conditions, like sobriety, to enter. Emergency shelters are not a long-term solution, but they are a starting point for unhoused people.

Kara Carlson, IAC’s interim director, said she has housing vouchers available and a surplus of rental assistance dollars to move people from shelter to independent living, but she still cannot get survivors of domestic violence into homes.

“We have a lot of funding available to help people get into housing. What we don’t have is housing to put them in,” she said.

There are several ways to house people who are leaving domestic violence. Shelters are crisis housing and the stays are not intended to exceed 60 days. Transitional housing is usually low-income housing managed by shelters or nonprofits, and its cost is usually shared between the survivor and the program. The next step is either independent living, usually with the help of a housing voucher, or what is called permanent supportive housing, for survivors for whom independent living may be difficult because of a continued threat to their safety. It can come with security and a caseworker.

In Fairbanks, Carlson said, low-income housing has become even scarcer as landlords turn their properties into lucrative short-term rentals. There are two military bases in Fairbanks, and she said landlords often prefer military families to tenants that have housing vouchers.

“Landlords are kind of scared of renting to people that have evictions on their record, and may have a criminal record, or all of the above, when they can get a military person or a person with good credit to pay more and not give them any problems,” she said.

One of the manifestations of domestic violence is financial abuse. Often women leaving abusive relationships have no credit or bad credit, or no work or rental history if they were supported and housed by their abusers. They are often also the primary caretakers for their children. Things like evictions and criminal records, which can be the result of domestic violence situations, are often unacceptable to landlords.

In response to how tough it can be to house survivors of domestic violence, IAC manages 20 units of supportive housing. For people like S., a survivor of violence who lived in various emergency shelters for months until she could find permanent housing, the option is especially important.

“Saved my life,” she said, looking around the small apartment.

S. was in a lot of danger when she arrived at a shelter. The Alaska Beacon is not using her name for safety reasons. The door of the building locks, there is security and she has a key to her own door.

The walls of S.’s apartment are covered in framed artwork. A small bag of biscuits, baked by a neighbor, sat on her kitchen counter, and plants grew under a special light. A crocheted blanket and stuffed animals top her bed; on her bookcase were framed pictures of case workers.

Shelters are not easy places to live, especially for people like S. who live with medical conditions. She said she often considered leaving. “I had my backpack strapped to me, ready to hitchhike to Anchorage and couch surf until I could get a job,” she said. Her case manager convinced her to wait.

“Housing affects all areas of a person’s life”

Michelle Hicks, the center’s housing director, said managed housing works well for survivors, but it is difficult to run and there needs to be more of it. “You could probably double what we currently have, and it would still be full,” she said.

Hicks said IAC has been in the housing business for 35 years. Its first building, named after Carmen Door, who was shot and killed by her abuser, currently houses six families. Several more buildings followed, but Hicks said she still has to turn housing applicants away.

“We saw that one of the biggest barriers women had when fleeing an abuser, and it was particularly women, was safe housing,” she said from her small, paperwork-filled office in a residential area of downtown Fairbanks. The wall above her desk is lined with drawings and sparkly “thank you” cards from her tenants.  “I think there would be fewer deaths, and there would be fewer complex traumas, if the housing need would be better able to be met.”

Hicks balances Alaska state law, the federal Fair Housing Act, health privacy laws, federal Department of Housing and Urban Development regulations and the Violence Against Women Act to shelter a hard to house population. She has perfectly manicured nails and works nights and weekends.

“Housing affects all areas of a person’s life,” is printed in purple ink on the bottom of her business cards. Binders and filing cabinets full of paperwork line her walls. “It’s the single most important thing,” she said.

At the shelter’s annual meeting, she cried when she described a tenant who planned to move out of managed housing to her own place. Her voice cracked on the words “buy her own home.”

Hicks was emotional because she knew what that tenant was up against: For people who have experienced domestic violence, the barriers to housing include managing their trauma; convincing landlords to take a chance when they may lack rental history, good finances and a clean record; and a tight housing market.

She said month-to-month leases have proliferated in town and she thinks landlords do it to avoid housing people who use housing vouchers, which are for 12-month leases.

“You would be hard pressed to find a year lease anymore in this town,” Hicks said. “You’re not discriminating if everyone’s lease is month-to-month.”

Personal, safe space

A. had to wait for two years to get her housing voucher, but now she lives in one of IAC’s supportive housing units with her sons. Their artwork covers the walls, and a cat darts in and out of the room. She said it likely saved her life.

“I would have gone back to him and been beaten or killed,” she said.

For safety reasons, the Alaska Beacon generally does not identify victims of abuse by name, with the exception of people like Butler who have been public about their experiences and who agreed to be identified. The Beacon is identifying A. by her initial with her agreement.

A. tried to make her marriage work out, despite abuse. After leaving and returning to him multiple times, she said her family gave up on her.

“They didn’t like him. They didn’t like what he’s doing to me. And I kept going back to him and playing the game, and I wanted the family,” she said. “I can’t regret the time that we had because I had my son, but I just wish I wouldn’t have stayed so long. It’s never too late, but it’s really hard to find the guts to leave.”

She was homeless for two weeks before she sought services at the shelter. Then, she had to wait two years for a housing voucher that let her move into one of the apartments managed by Hicks. “Here, I got the code and it’s my place. Any other time I lived, it was his place. And he got to kick me out,” she said. “This is mine. Nobody can kick me out.”

Now A. has a job and can focus on rebuilding her relationship with herself. “For 12 years I gave him my all, and I honestly lost myself,” she said. “I didn’t know who I was, what I like — I still don’t,” she said. Her life was so built around pleasing her ex-husband that she said she is still figuring out what she likes to do, even what she likes to eat.

For A., the best part of the apartment is security: There’s a code to get in the building and a lock on her door. Now, she said, she feels “free, but not free” — because her ex is back in town after several years in prison.

“It was quite nice, because I didn’t have to look over my shoulder,” she said. “We’re getting along great now, but I never know when it’s gonna flip.”

She said she knows he keeps track of her still, even though she hears that he has new relationships and that his behavior has not changed — “He’s got another girl pregnant,” she said. “That girl has no clue what she’s getting herself into.”

Building for a safer future

From her light-filled office with the city of Fairbanks, Butler is working towards increasing the availability of low-barrier shelter in the Golden Heart City. She said greater access to housing and shelter can prevent women in abusive relationships from returning to their abusers.

“It makes a difference when it’s 40-below,” she said. “If people aren’t guaranteed a spot in a shelter, they will return to the abuser rather than stay outside.”

She is working to coordinate a housing solution that connects people who are homeless and addicted to drugs, as she once was, to emergency shelter and services to solve the big-picture problems of housing and sobriety. By 2026, she wants the city to have a complex for transitioning people out of homelessness.

And she said other entities are opening up, too. Fairbanks Help Link is a new overnight, emergency shelter. It isn’t housing, but a place to warm up so people don’t freeze.

But, ultimately, she said the city needs housing its residents can afford. She knows what it is like to have to choose between housing instability and a violent relationship: “I’ve been there, done that, got the t-shirt and the track marks to prove it,” she said.

Housing was critical to her success in ending her addiction, and stabilizing her family. She said her kids witnessed her abusive relationships, but they’ve also witnessed her recovery. She described her husband as a nice, decent man, and she said their relationship is stable — and her daughters see that, too.

“These things are important to heal the trauma,” she said. “And not have it pass on to the next generation.”

This article was produced as a project for the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2023 Domestic Violence Impact Fund.

A full list of Alaska shelters and victim’s services providers can be found here.

Tlingit Haida Regional Housing Authority has won a $2 million grant to help tribal citizens throughout Southeast Alaska become homeowners.

The housing authority’s Success Starts With Me program helps low-income tribal citizens qualify for mortgage loans and make down payments.

President and CEO Jacqueline Kus.een Pata said homeownership helps create stability and a sense of responsibility.

“It’s a shift in mindset,” she said. “When that father and that son lay that floor in their house together or paint the walls, they have a sense of pride and ownership. You don’t get that when you’re a tenant.”

Tlingit Haida Regional Housing Authority partners with 12 tribes in Southeast Alaska, including those in Petersburg, Wrangell and Skagway. In 2019, when they asked tribal citizens what they needed most, the most common answer was help buying a home.

COVID funding helped the housing authority kick off Success Starts With Me. Along with loan packages, the program also provides financial education and lessons on home maintenance. 

Since then, the housing authority has built 10 homes in Angoon, Kake and Klowack through the program. Pata said some of the workers who built the homes then ended up buying them, with the help of Success Starts With Me. Four more homes are under construction, in Angoon, Kake and Kasaan.

The program also supports tribal citizens who want to buy existing homes. Pata said one tribal citizen has done that in Juneau.

“That was a better and more affordable choice than building a new home,” Pata said. “The cost of construction is sometimes higher than the homes you can buy off the marketplace.”

The $2 million grant comes from the Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge, a nationwide competition by the Wells Fargo Foundation and Enterprise Community Partners. The housing authority is one of six winners.

Christi Smith, who oversees the competition, said Tlingit Haida Regional Housing Authority was the only Alaska-based semifinalist out of 429 applicants.

“This is a program that’s the epitome of what the Breakthrough Challenge is all about,” she said.

The six winners form a cohort that will meet quarterly to discuss the successes and challenges of their projects. Smith said having Tlingit Haida Regional Housing Authority in that cohort will help the other winners have a better understanding of the housing challenges in Alaska, especially among tribal citizens.

“The Breakthrough Challenge is not about one idea in one place that only supports one community,” she said. “It’s about, how can we create new solutions for the broader field?”

Smith said having Tlingit Haida Regional Housing Authority in this year’s cohort means other winners will discuss expanding to Alaska.

“Those are the opportunities that this cohort brings to light,” Smith said. “If we were to bring our innovation to Alaska, what would that look like? What changes would need to be made so that it could be applied to these different communities that have very different needs from where the idea is originally being piloted?”

Other winners of the 2023 competition include a workforce development high school in Birmingham and a modular home manufacturer in Pittsburgh. Pata said she was inspired by other winners’ work on energy efficiency and shared equity models.

“There were a lot of really innovative, creative ideas,” she said. “I’m looking forward to ongoing dialogue and learning from them.”