Housing, housing, housing

Work at the Chilkat Vista Apartments site on Aug. 2, 2025. (Laurie Craig / Juneau Independent)

By Michelle Bonnet Hale

As you approach the Vanderbilt Hill intersection from the Valley, on the hillside you can see three new two-story apartment buildings. This is the Chilkat Vista development and yes, you can see the Chilkat Mountains from the apartments’ picture windows.

Seeing their own employees struggle to find housing while they paradoxically built other people’s (big) houses, the developers of the Chilkat Vista Apartments are going out on a limb and building small apartments, 395 square feet. The project was partly financed with a very low-interest loan through the CBJ Affordable Housing Fund.

Upon completion, there will be 48 new apartments renting from $1,450 and up available in Juneau. It’s a very bright spot in the community's need for more housing.

Bill and Michael Heumann, builders of Chilkat Vistas, saw a need, and they saw it clearly. They can’t hire people to build for them if those construction workers can’t find a place to live. You can’t operate a successful business if you are prevented from hiring the people you need. More than this, they saw the need in Juneau for starter apartments, for everyone ranging from their workers to people coming out of halfway houses.

Yet even building small yet surprisingly complete apartments, the Heumanns are taking a risk. Their risk is that the rent they need to charge to simply cover their costs will be too high for Juneau’s housing market. This risk is the primary reason builders are cautious about building apartment buildings, and this is why new units are such a rarity these days.

I used to be critical of Juneau’s builders for building huge houses when what we really need are small starter homes. I’ve learned a lot more about house building since then: The lot is a substantial cost; and the basic infrastructure of water, sewer, and electricity are also big costs. Pouring a concrete slab is costly, and making it bigger is just an add-on to that cost. Builders build big houses because they’re in the business of trying to make a living off building, and big houses sell for more. And, people want big houses.

Despite the claims, the biggest costs of housing in Juneau are not taxes. They are materials and shipping and lot prices and heating. With Chilkat Vistas, the Heumanns are trying to keep those costs to a minimum and create affordable or workforce housing. They have seen the need and are being creative, and we need a lot of that in Juneau, right now.

CBJ is being creative, too. A senior staff member is rewriting Title 49, the CBJ code governing housing construction in Juneau. The work is being done in stages in order to provide early wins with a goal of streamlining this cumbersome building code, thus making it easier to build housing in Juneau.

It’s already getting easier, but that is not to say that it’s easy.

In 2025, CBJ changed Title 49 so that Accessory Dwelling Units, or ADUs, are allowed on duplex lots. Before then, no matter the size of the lot, you couldn’t add an ADU if you had a duplex. My family owns a duplex, and we’ve long wanted to add an apartment or tiny house, but couldn’t because of that restriction. 

Now, we can. We have worked with an architect to draft plans for an apartment over our garage. We’ve run the plans by the Community Development Department and have begun working with a builder. We’ve talked with the bank. Due to complexities of adding on to our 50-year-old house, the price for a fairly simple, small ADU above our garage is estimated to be upwards of $250,000.

That is a sobering amount. We’re saving for the down payment now and are hoping to build in 2027. The city has a grant program to encourage the development of ADUs, and we hope it will still be in place next year. While any money is a help, the $13,500 grant won’t exactly push this project across the finish line.

Now, I am a civic-minded person. I know that housing is a critical need and if I can help, I want to. But this project will take a very long time to pencil out. At about 600 square feet, the rent we could charge likely won’t cover our costs. The apartment will have a stupendous view of the Mendenhall Towers and would make a good summertime short-term rental, but that won’t help with Juneau’s housing shortage. Civic-minded, I remind myself.

This is it. This is why we don’t have a flood of people adding ADUs to the 324 duplex lots in Juneau, or even to single-family homes. This is also why the Assembly has shifted from talking about “affordable” housing to “worker” housing.

How to create affordable or worker housing has been a question in Juneau since at least the 1980s. Everything is expensive here, and it’s hard to translate those high costs into something affordable. My family is opting for the small unit approach. So are the Heumanns.

• Michelle Bonnet Hale’s roots go deep in Juneau and Southeast Alaska. She and her partner share their household with various relatives, dogs, and chickens. She served for six years on the Juneau Assembly.