Let’s talk about zoning

Anchorage’s home and rental market is a joke. According to the Anchorage Daily News, at the turn of 2024, Anchorage homeowners were delighted to receive notice that their resale value would theoretically increase by 9.2%. Great news! Until you realize where this increase is coming from. 

Rental units in the city had an abysmal average of 4.1% vacancy in 2023, according to a report from the state’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development. The same report pinned median rental costs at about $1,275 on average. Meanwhile, according to Alaska Business Magazine, our state is barely able to recover from years of recession and Anchorage still suffers from an acute homelessness problem. 

People who visit or reside in Anchorage are often left in a state of wonder. They wonder why everything from road maintenance to policing is understaffed. They wonder why sensible, single-bed rentals are massively overpriced. They wonder why it takes so long to get anywhere or do anything useful. They also wonder why Anchorage, despite having so many supposedly adorable neighborhoods like Spenard and Roger’s Park, seems to blend into itself. I bet folks are also wondering why the frequently-heralded mixed-use developments of Anchorage’s sluggishly-recovering downtown aren’t being repeated elsewhere. 

An answer may lie in the befuddling zoning paradigm the city seems intent on keeping. This Anchorage land use map, developed by  city planners, was drafted in 2016. See the soul-crushing expanse of yellow sections? That’s all single-family-exclusive development. 

Good thing poor people don’t exist, because that would quickly become too expensive for them to afford as residents inevitably fill those homes in. 

See the absolutely diminutive purple and pink sections? That’s available space for mixed-use development. It’s a good thing people never shop, work or do anything outside their homes, otherwise the National Association of Realtors would be documenting our  harrowing commercial vacancy and an Associated Press Study would find our residents would need to commute about 23 minutes on average to get to work. 

See the narrow corridors of brown and orange sections? That’s where all the multifamily housing is. Notice how far they are from the purple and pink sections? It’s a good thing the Anchorage Daily News found owning a car is such a cheap and totally not nightmarish thing thing to do in a cold and isolated state,  otherwise people in those multifamily developments would spend large swaths of their income on vehicle ownership.

The best part? This 100% intuitive and not-overly burdensome land use pattern is currently being enabled and championed by whiny homeowners. 

An op-ed in the Anchorage Daily News moaned about how part of their sunlight throughout the day is mildly impeded by an accessory dwelling unit. So sad, heartbreaking even. Won’t someone think of our half-million-dollar-on-average money pits? 

In another ADN editorial, we also have similarly concerned citizens lamenting that the assembly’s later horribly defanged zoning revisions would erase “neighborhoods with distinctive character and harmony with the natural setting.” 

Oh wise Sharon Stockard, in response I must ask: what character? Does “The Terraces” subdivision near Lake Otis have character? How about “White Hawk” near Elmore? Maybe Columbia Park near Milky Way? 

Drive up and down Abbott and Tudor, you’ll notice similar unremarkable expanses of cookie-cutter subdivisions are bisected by strip malls and six-lane 45-mile-an-hour thoroughfares. How lovely. How picturesque. What an efficient and economically sustainable use of space.

Our city is currently recovering from decades of minimum parking requirements choking commercial spaces. Citizens are finally starting to see mixed-use spaces provide business owners with cheaper, safer places to set up shop. 

Unfortunately, vacancy was still slim last year. Residential property values come with the sinister undertone of limited affordable places to live near anywhere decent to work. 

By bullying the city government into reluctantly accepting  ridiculous non-concerns, entitled homeowners are punishing Anchorage residents for wanting a sociable, sensible place to live.