OPINION: Simplifying and relaxing Anchorage’s zoning restrictions could have multiple benefits.

Good for Anchorage Assembly members Meg Zaletel and Kevin Cross for proposing to reduce and simplify the Anchorage zoning ordinance. They have recognized that the Anchorage Bowl has limited land left for development, and they want to encourage denser development through infilling with new construction under a simplified zoning system. Their intent is to set up a process for public review and comment on proposed changes to land use regulations. The first public hearing is proposed for July 25.

Their initial proposal would create two residential zones in Anchorage, both allowing a more liberal combination of single- and multi-family housing and compatible non-residential uses. The main difference between the two zones would be access to municipal plumbing vs. reliance on individual wells and septic systems. The latter would necessarily be less dense.

Concern has been expressed by people who want to protect the exclusivity of single-family housing. But it is certainly possible to revise the zoning ordinance while respecting the agreements of homeowner’s associations that people signed when they purchased their homes.

As is, Anchorage clearly is not flourishing. Housing is scarce and expensive, and construction of new units is not keeping up with the need. Young people in their most productive years are heading south probably, in part, because of the cost of housing. In the past few years, our city’s population has been stable or declining, while the population of the United States overall has grown by about 7%.

The proposed changes in zoning would address this decline by increasing housing density, allowing more multi-unit housing, and reducing the cost per unit of construction. In turn, less costly housing, located closer to business areas, would make the trip from home to work less expensive and make it easier for businesses to hire and retain workers. If housing were less expensive homelessness would be reduced.

Further, it is not necessarily accurate that mixed uses and multi-family housing devalue single-family homes. In fact, the history of Anchorage’s South Addition shows just the opposite effect. Key non-residential components of the neighborhood were constructed long before zoning. The Inlet Tower was built in 1952 to alleviate a severe housing shortage as the city grew during the post-war decades. Eventually the building became the Inlet Tower Hotel. The New Sagaya City Market is the latest iteration on an existing commercial site that was once a combination grocery store and drug store where people could buy presents for children’s parties. Construction of homes followed. Initially people lived in garages and residential units built into the bluff on the north side of the K Street alley for both economy and warmth. Those basements and garages have now become two-story houses!

Today, proximity to the City Market and the Inlet Tower Hotel adds convenience, and probably makes living in the area more desirable. Over time a wide variety of new single and multi-family housing has been constructed with no great alarm.

I urge other Assembly members not to preconceive the outcome of the zoning review proposed by Assembly members Zaletel and Cross. As Cross put it, “We have a significant housing problem, and the cost of construction is astronomical.” He went on to say that zoning rules should better align with federal lending guidelines to facilitate financing of multiple units on a single lot.

Anchorage’s existing ordinance became effective in 1969, and after multiple amendments, it now amounts to a dense 187-page document. Though the Assembly has reduced restrictions on parking and allowed accessory dwellings in some areas, there is substantial benefit in examining the impact of much more sweeping changes, particularly the costs of travel from home to job, and the consequent availability of labor and the potential reduction of homelessness.

In taking a fresh look at our zoning regulations, Anchorage would be following an international trend. Auckland, New Zealand, to name one of many cities, “upzoned 75 percent of its residential land increasing its legal capacity for housing by about 300 percent in an effort to encourage multifamily-construction and tamp down prices.” In Japan, Tokyo, is celebrated as being a model for YIMBYs — “yes in my backyard.”

Janet McCabe and her husband David came to Alaska in 1964. She is a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a member of Alaska Common Ground and Commonwealth North.

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