Anchorage Assembly members aim to cut red tape for tri- and fourplex housing

Anchorage city rules for years have stifled construction of small multifamily housing — triplexes and fourplexes — in many neighborhoods. Meanwhile, Anchorage is grappling with a housing shortage, with rents and home prices skyrocketing.

Three Anchorage Assembly members have proposed a pair of ordinances to change zoning and building rules, to remove several of the barriers and prohibitive costs in triplex and fourplex development. Both proposals are scheduled for a public hearing and Assembly consideration at a meeting Tuesday, though one may be postponed for a vote in January to allow more time for public input, members said.

“The regulations were so complex that we blew the cost of these out of the water to where we eliminated the market for it. You just can’t afford to do it,” said Assembly member Kevin Cross, who is sponsoring the legislation alongside members Daniel Volland and Randy Sulte.

Since 1999, the building of triplexes has slowed to a near-halt, at a rate of about one per year, Volland said.

“How do we get more smaller multifamily on land that was already zoned for it? Why aren’t they building it? Why are the builders just not building the small units that we need? And how do we remove those obstacles?” Cross said.

‘Stomped out’ construction

City rules essentially treat any housing built with more than two units — anything above a duplex — as a commercial building, Volland said.

Because of that, the city “basically stomped out triplex and fourplex construction for the last 15-plus years,” Cross said.

There are added extra permitting processes, building requirements, offsite improvements, extra drainage requirements and reviews, traffic circulation reviews — sometimes a builder would be required to pave a whole alley or street in order to build a triplex, Volland said.

“All of these added processes can add tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to a project and a much longer timeline. So those are all the things that we’re trying to address via these two separate ordinances that will work in tandem,” Volland said.

Developers and homebuilders have long recognized the issues, said Andre Spinelli, vice president of design and development with Spinell Homes.

For example, three- and four-unit dwellings like townhomes are held to the same design and landscaping standards as a 100-unit apartment building, Spinelli said.

“When you’re trying to apply that to a three- or four-unit townhome, you start to have these requirements that don’t make sense, and they don’t work, and, therefore, they don’t get built,” Spinelli said. “I tell people you should build a duplex with 10 bedrooms, rather than a fourplex with 10 bedrooms.”

That’s the case even when a single-family home has a bigger footprint than a triplex or fourplex, he said.

For Spinelli, the problems crystallized when he built a 6,000-square-foot house around the same time as a triplex.

“The single-family house actually had a bigger driveway, more square footage and just made more of an overall impact on the land — but the single-family house didn’t require any of the extra stuff that a triplex did,” he said.

For the triplex, Spinelli hired a civil engineer to do a drainage plan, applying commercial drainage codes to a small residential building. The city required them to put in a manhole and storm drain pipe, adding around $30,000 to the project cost. Then, an electrical engineer had to do a lighting analysis of the driveway — basically the same process and standards required for building a Walmart parking lot, Spinelli said.

[Staffing shortages at Anchorage permitting department create backlog for homebuilders]

Making them easier to build

Work to solve the issues started about a year ago, Cross said. To draft the measures, the Assembly members for six months worked with a group of local builders, developers, researchers and a broad array of city staff.

One of the biggest changes proposed would reduce the lot size requirement for tri- and fourplex buildings in one type of mixed residential zone to 6,000 square feet, the same as a duplex or single-family home in those districts.

Most infill lots in Anchorage are about 7,000 square feet, but a triplex needs at least 8,500 in those districts in city code. That “functionally precludes” development of tri- and fourplexes even in areas where city land use plans call for them, Volland said.

That ordinance would also relax some setback requirements, among other changes.

The proposal would reduce the currently larger setback requirements for small multifamily buildings to the same requirements for houses and duplexes, similarly limiting maximum square footage.

Tri- and fourplex buildings would still be under the same height limits as houses and duplexes.

The city’s Planning and Zoning Commission unanimously voted in favor of that proposal earlier this month, recommending that the Assembly approve it.

The other measure proposes changing three-unit housing to residential construction from commercial. It would also relax some building code requirements for fourplexes, but keep them in line with state laws, which regulate residential buildings of four or more.

“When it comes to building denser housing, you don’t want to throw the safety baby out with the overregulation bathwater. So we worked with the fire department to say, ‘OK, what type of sprinkler system should a fourplex have?’” Volland said.

Ultimately, they found a system that’s less expensive than currently required but also keeps intact fire safety, he said.

Neighborhoods fear crowding, parking issues

The proposals have elicited some concerns from residents and a few community councils, worried about possible impacts to neighborhoods, Assembly members said.

“The biggest misconception is that we’re now authorizing three- or fourplexes all over the city in places where they’re not already existing. And that’s not the case. We’re making it easier to build where they already exist and are already allowed,” member Sulte said.

Some residents are worried that new large multifamily buildings could block out sunlight of neighboring homes, or crowd neighborhoods by adding multiple residents in buildings — especially a concern for areas with already scant parking. Others raised worries about aesthetics of multifamily development.

In a vote Thursday, the South Addition Community Council indicated its opposition to the proposed changes to city zoning rules for tri- and fourplexes, Volland said.

“Anytime you put something out there which would enable more people, more structure on an existing lot, over existing infrastructure, it raises concerns,” said Rogers Park Community Council president Scott McMurren.

During a recent meeting of the community council, several residents were concerned that the proposals would impact the character and density of their neighborhood, McMurren said, and residents voiced a wide range of viewpoints on the issue.

“Most of us live where we live, in part, because of the character of the neighborhood. And so, when you change the character of the neighborhood through proposed zoning ordinances, this stirs things up,” he said. “And we’re all cognizant of the extraordinary housing shortage and the extraordinary lack of affordable housing.”

More units don’t necessarily lead to increased density, Assembly members and developers said. A family of six or eight could be living in a single house, while in a triplex next door, just three people could be living in its one-bedroom units.

‘Reconciling’ with housing realities

Volland said the city in the future will likely need to tackle the expensive offsite requirements for small multifamily buildings, like paving alleyways.

“We’re reconciling with a lot of realities right now,” he said. “No. 1 is that we’ve seen, since 2019, an increase in the average listing price by over $100,000. We’ve seen inventory fall by 72%. So we have this imbalance between supply and demand.”

Rental rates last year in Alaska increased at the highest rate in more than a decade, and Anchorage has a low vacancy rate of about 3%, he added.

“So it’s very hard for renters to find housing in Anchorage right now. That includes people who already live here, but that also includes people who may want to move to Anchorage and start their lives here and be a part of our economy and part of our community,” he said.

The Assembly members said they’re aiming to chip away at restrictions in city code to help build “missing middle” housing — smaller two- to four-unit buildings and townhomes that blend in well with neighborhoods.

Anchorage’s household demographics have been changing.

Despite some outmigration, there’s evidence that the city needs more of the middle housing type, and evidence that there’s a mismatch between what people need and what’s available, said Jeannette Lee, Alaska research director for Sightline Institute, a Pacific Northwest-based nonprofit think-tank. In a report last year, Lee broke down the problems hampering triplex development and Anchorage’s housing needs.

Census data from 2000 and 2020 revealed that the share of one- and two-person households in Anchorage grew, while the share of households with three or more people shrank, she said.

And while household sizes shrank, the number of households increased, as did the percentage of single-family homes.

“So the type of housing stock we have, which is very single-family centric — it’s just not diverse enough. It doesn’t provide the consumer choice that we actually need,” Lee said.