Two Anchorage Assembly members have a proposal meant to make it easier to build in a city that needs more affordable housing.
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Assembly member Erin Baldwin Day and co-sponsor George Martinez introduced the ordinance at an Assembly meeting on June 9.
The goal is to build housing at price points that more people can actually afford, Baldwin Day said.
“We know that we don’t have that right now,” she said. “We know that working folks in backbone industries are being priced out of Anchorage homes. We know that housing that is attainably priced is often extremely old, and it requires significant reinvestment, and we know that rents continue to rise.”
is called Missing Middle Housing Opportunity Overlay, or MMHOP. The “missing middle” refers to housing like duplexes, cottage courts, tiny home villages, garden apartments and townhomes that are difficult to build because of restrictive zoning laws, Baldwin Day said.
But Baldwin Day said the proposal isn’t a rezone. It allows property owners in some neighborhoods along traffic corridors to opt in to more flexible rules on, among other things, the number of units allowed on a lot, how buildings can be placed on the lot and allowable size of lots and buildings, she said.
Baldwin Day said when people want to build medium-density housing or change existing housing, they’re often forced to choose between expensive rezones or scrapping the plan.
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“There are more and more individual property owners who want to make adjustments to their property, and the process to do that is really unclear, really cumbersome, and really expensive,” she said.
The new proposal is a rework of a controversial zoning initiative Baldwin Day championed last year called the Transit-Supportive Development Overlay, or TSDO. That plan went through six iterations in response to varied public comments before the Assembly put it on pause last fall at Mayor Suzanne LaFrance’s request.
Baldwin Day said public comment on the previous initiative informed the current proposal. She heard a lot of feedback from people in single-family neighborhoods, she said.
“They were really concerned about heights and shadows in their neighborhoods, and so there is a new element that allows the heights in single-family residential to remain the same,” she said.
The new proposal also has a longer timeline, Baldwin Day said.
“I think that one of the chief grievances that was put forward during TSDO was that there was not enough time, there was not enough process, there was not enough opportunity to comment,” she said.
The Assembly plans to vote on the proposal in September.