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Alaska needs more homes. Leadership can restart our homebuilding engine.
By Shauna Hegna and Mike Huston
Try building a home in rural Alaska. You may spend years chasing dozens of funding sources just to pay for it, and you still won't have driven a single nail.
Then come the costs. In the 80% of Alaska communities with no road access, every board and nail, and many skilled trades, must be flown or barged in. Houses can run $800 a square foot, four times the national average. With almost no nearby sales for comparison, appraisers struggle to value homes, and standard loans often fail.
This isn't only a village problem. In Anchorage, Fairbanks, and other road-connected towns, building costs outrun what the market can pay, and working families can't find affordable homes. Employers, hospitals, the military, and the university struggle to house the people they need.
A teacher in Anchorage and a health aide in a Bering Sea village face different obstacles, but both are priced out. Alaska's economy pays the price.
Congress recently passed the bipartisan ROAD to Housing Act promising funding and rules that better fit rural places, including faster environmental reviews, more factory-built homes, disaster recovery help, and faster construction on vacant or underused parcels. Whether Alaskans see the benefit depends on whether state leaders are ready.
We're not starting from scratch. The Alaska Housing Finance Corporation already runs many housing programs, and state-managed funds could help finance workforce housing. Regional housing authorities, tribes, employers, and builders have the expertise and are poised to build.
What's missing is a plan that brings it all together. Now, projects wade through separate applications, deadlines, and rules, and paperwork alone can sink them. A collection of programs is not a strategy.
A National Housing Crisis Task Force offers a roadmap. Alaska could start with five steps:
– Lead with a statewide plan – Make housing a priority, set a production goal, and put someone in charge.
– Put public land to work – Make vacant and underused public land available so projects pencil. A new state program is trying it.
– Fill the financing gap – Seed a loan fund with public and philanthropic dollars and recycle the repayments to finance the next round of homes.
– Build cheaper – Lower building, renovation, and energy costs by scaling innovations like modular and factory-built homes incorporating energy efficiencies.
– Cut red tape – Help local governments allow more kinds of homes in more places and approve them faster.
Coordinate all five together, and the impact multiplies. For example, Housing Alaskans pooled $3 million from public, private and philanthropic sources to complete 292 homes in 27 projects across 19 communities. Each project was already vetted by multiple funders but stalled just short of full funding. That $3 million unlocked about $100 million already invested but not deployed, without piling on paperwork, and families moved in sooner.
Now imagine that approach applied to federal dollars: partners coordinating investments, conducting joint reviews, and attaching fewer strings. Projects would finish faster, face fewer price spikes, and federal money could be tailored to the ground it lands on, whether permafrost or an empty lot in Anchorage.
The window is open, but it won't stay that way. If we are serious about housing as essential infrastructure, Alaska must be ready to claim these resources and coordinate them with our own.
Let's House Alaska is a community network working to make that happen. With a newly elected governor and Legislature about to get to work, it is time for bold action to address the housing shortage.
Alaska has the assets, the expertise, and the institutions. What we need now is the will to bring it all home, literally.
• Shauna Hegna is the president of Koniag and chair of the Housing Alaskans Board of Directors. Mike Huston is the president and CEO of Northrim Bank and vice chair of the Housing Alaskans Board of Directors.
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