As the city seeks to encourage more development to address its housing shortage, the Anchorage Assembly on Tuesday is considering putting a three-year pause on many of the city’s design rules for large multifamily housing.
Local developers say the chunk of city code frequently adds onerous costs, and that requirements for building facades, building spacing, sunlight design features and additional landscaping don’t necessarily make sense for the living spaces they’re trying to build.
The Assembly proposal would put a three-year moratorium on design standards for apartments and townhome developments of five units or more. That means developments that move forward between Feb. 1 and Jan. 31, 2028 would be exempt from the design rules and from major review of large projects.
“The intention here is to get out of our own way for a period of time, collect data on what works, what doesn’t work, and then have an ongoing conversation about what residential design standards should be in place,” said Assembly Vice Chair Meg Zaletel during a meeting on the proposal last week. Zaletel and member Anna Brawley are sponsoring the ordinance.
Some community members have raised alarm about the proposal, which is up for an Assembly vote during Tuesday evening’s meeting.
In a letter to the Assembly, the Rabbit Creek Community Council opposed the ordinance, saying that “three years with no building standards poses long-lasting risks to public safety, health, and property values.”
“Anchorage is already blighted with ill-functioning and indisputably ugly buildings constructed before the adoption of design standards,” the council said.
[Earlier coverage: Soaring rents, mortgages and home prices: What new data shows about Anchorage’s housing crunch]
The ordinance would not change the city’s building code for health and safety requirements, nor would it change where apartments and townhomes could be built, Brawley said.
“For the most part, we’re talking about rules for what buildings look like with five or more units, “ Brawley said during a presentation last week.
The ordinance would also require the city’s Planning Department to analyze and report on the impacts of the moratorium, she said.
The city’s land use plans call for between 800 and 1,000 housing units to be built a year, and development — especially multifamily — is nowhere near that mark, Cook Inlet Housing Authority’s vice president of community development, Tyler Robinson, told Assembly members during the meeting.
“At best, sometimes these things result in higher cost. At worst, they kill a project,” Robinson said of the multifamily design standards.
Graham Downey, special assistant to Mayor Suzanne LaFrance, said the administration sees the legislation as critical for its goal to have 10,000 homes built in 10 years. And it’s a temporary measure, he said at the meeting.
“If it turns out, we start building gray boxes, then we can flip the switch back, right? I think it’s pretty easy to address potential harms, and it gives us that chance to collect data, which feels really valuable,” Downey said.
Assembly member Daniel Volland has pushed other recent pro-housing measures. However, at last week’s meeting, he voiced caution about making a sweeping change to city code. Many of his neighbors fear what might be built without the design standards, he said.
The city’s code regulating land use is extensive and has many other requirements in place now that weren’t in place in the years when much of the city’s aging and dilapidated multi-family housing was built, Robinson said.
“I am, frankly, growing very tired of people showing me pictures from the 1970s and ‘80s that say this is what’s going to happen if we tweak this one little section of code. Absolutely not,” Robinson said.
Undergoing a process to review tweak the standards “around the edges” would mean no real changes for two or three construction seasons, Robinson said.
“We can’t afford that. This proposed moratorium allows us to try to move the needle while we come up with a process to replace them with common sense standards that support new housing,” Robinson said.