OPINION: We shouldn’t minimize racism in Anchorage’s housing history

In a recent column he wrote for the ADN, commentator Charles Wohlforth opined: “There’s no question that white leaders of the past used community planning to promote segregation, generating inequality that persists today… Just not much in Anchorage.” And while Mr. Wohlforth is correct that the municipality experienced much of its growth in the decades after the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, he understated the impact of racist housing policy and urban planning in Anchorage. This is curious, as he is aware of much of this history, as evidenced by his previous publications.

What Wohlforth did not fully acknowledge are the myriad ways in which racist and restrictive covenants, urban renewal, highway construction and neighborhood disinvestment have undermined the ability of Anchorage’s most historically marginalized people, namely Native residents and those of African descent, to build, maintain, and pass along generational wealth. Furthermore, Wohlforth minimized the extent of housing segregation with a rather glib statement conceding: “Some plats in the oldest parts of the city have racist covenants.”

In fact, nearly every neighborhood north of Tudor Road had racist covenants. Moreover, Anchorage’s demographic landscape, despite relatively high levels of more recent integration throughout the municipality, still bears the scars of past generations of urban planning

(The obvious parenthetical here is, of course, that the very establishment of Anchorage led to the displacement and disruption of Dena’ina communities that had subsisted in the area for a thousand years.)

Simply put, if you were Black or Native in Anchorage from the 1920s through the 1960s, and even into the 1970s, it would have been somewhere between challenging and impossible to purchase property or own a home in the following neighborhoods: Government Hill, South Addition, Turnagain, Huntington Park, Spenard, Rogers Park, Geneva Woods and Airport Heights. Fairview (especially its southern extent, a small enclave known as Eastchester Flats), Mountain View, Nunaka Valley and Green Acres were the options left.

Notably, racially restrictive covenants and patterns of segregation persisted beyond the famous Supreme Court case, Shelly v. Kraemer (1948), which did not effectively void or explicitly outlaw racially restrictive covenants so much as make them constitutionally unenforceable. It was, as Wohlforth pointed out, the 1968 Fair Housing Act that provided the legislative tools to enforce bans on housing discrimination.

But by then, generational wealth had already accrued to those who secured property and home equity in Anchorage’s more established and exclusive neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the few neighborhoods where Anchorage’s Black and Native population were reliably permitted to reside had become saddled by depressed housing values, elevated levels of poverty and predatory businesses, higher percentages of renters, as well as pernicious slum and absentee landlords. These patterns persist into the present.

Go to Zillow or dig into municipality property tax assessments and note the value of a home in Turnagain, South Addition or Rogers Park; then look at home values in Fairview and Mountain View. Talk to a longtime Anchorage resident of the more exclusive neighborhoods, and they’ll likely recall one racist incident or another that effectively kept their communities white. Likewise, longtime Black and Native residents can relay horrifying examples of discrimination experienced in the local housing market, on the job, and even walking down the street.

Rogers Park was the setting of a vicious, racially motivated arson attack that spurred the establishment of the first Alaska chapter of the NAACP. Residents of Geneva Woods and Tudor barred Black residents, which in response led a Black woman, Cora Green, to purchase land adjacent to the neighborhood. Known as Green Acres, the small development was physically segregated from its surroundings by a tall fence (which some locals called “the wall of Apartheid”) along Scott Street.

The urban renewal projects of the 1960s and 1970s further corroded the livability and desirability of the areas most associated with Anchorage’s communities of color. Nowhere is this more obvious than along the Seward Highway corridor and the split into Ingra and Gambell streets. The highway project had the immediate impact of shuttling a predominantly white commuter workforce through Anchorage’s poorest neighborhoods and into wealthier and newer southern and northeastern reaches of the burgeoning municipality. In the process, financial disinvestment and entrenched poverty increasingly defined Fairview and Mountain View.

None of this is to suggest what should or should not be done to rezone Anchorage in our present day. We all agree that the housing shortage is untenable and that addressing homelessness and housing insecurity should be among Anchorage’s top priorities. We should also recognize the nuance and not conflate Anchorage’s history of urban development with such places as Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, or any other number of cities which have a much deeper, well-documented history of housing segregation.

Moreover, we should indeed celebrate the diversity of our communities and be grateful that many of our neighborhoods are more integrated than what one finds throughout most cities in the Lower 48. But we should also not minimize the very real impact that racially restrictive covenants, racial violence aimed at would-be home buyers of color, and disastrous urban renewal projects have had on our municipality’s most politically and economically marginalized residents. While that history need not be the sole focus of our current discussions on rezoning efforts or housing policy, it must at least inform the discussion in such a way that ensures a stronger, safer, more resilient, livable and affordable Anchorage for all.

Celeste Hodge Growden is the president and CEO of the Alaska Black Caucus. She lives in Anchorage.

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