What happens if Telephone Hill residents don’t leave homes by Saturday? CBJ goes to court to enforce evictions
- Mark Sabbatini
- Oct 31
- 2 min read
Officials won’t forcibly remove people and possessions during the weekend, city manager says; state law allows landlords to obtain order allowing law enforcement to remove tenants
By Mark Sabbatini
Juneau Independent
Police won’t be throwing people and their possessions on the street if the houses they occupy on Telephone Hill aren’t vacated by a Nov. 1 eviction deadline. Rather, the city will go to court seeking to enforce the evictions via a process in state law that could take days or weeks.
"If we need to initiate any legal proceedings we'll follow the legal procedures for that," City Manager Katie Koester said Thursday. "We're not going to be like storming people's homes on Saturday morning with police officers or anything like that."
The first procedural step of filing an action in state court would occur Monday, she said.
If a tenant refuses to move out voluntarily despite an eviction order, landlords can obtain a Writ of Assistance, which is "a written order from a judge telling a law enforcement official, like a police officer, to perform a certain task," according to the Alaska Court System’s website.
Occupants of 13 residences on Telephone Hill have been ordered to vacate the properties by Saturday as part of the redevelopment plan for the historic neighborhood. Residents there are renting homes on property that was owned by the state for decades until it turned the land over to the City and Borough of Juneau in 2023, with city leaders now proceeding with a plan to demolish the existing structures and build four mid-rise apartments with 150 total units.
The evictions and redevelopment plans have been highly controversial, in part because some of Juneau’s oldest homes are in the neighborhood. Some residents have lived there for decades and are now senior citizens, and for at least a few extensive packing and moving remained to be done as of Friday morning.
A Writ of Assistance may be issued by a judge during an initial hearing or after, after which the landlord would take it to a law enforcement agency to have it served, acccording to the court system’s guidelines. The online property manager website Doorloop notes that in Alaska "the law outlines no specific timeline" for resolving a request for such a writ.
"The Writ of Assistance may be issued within a few hours to a few days, while the move-out period can take a few days to a few weeks," the website notes.
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306.
