Anchorage leaders move to change 'site access' rules they say hamper new housing development
May 29—The Anchorage mayor's office and members of the Assembly are pushing for a package of changes to zoning rules that they say are impeding development and stalling new housing construction the city desperately needs.
"Anchorage needs to build more housing, but some of our tools are broken. To build the future we want, first we need to fix our tools," Mayor Suzanne LaFrance said in a statement released alongside two influential members of the Assembly, a signal the administration is aligned with legislators on the measure.
The ordinance from the administration, Assembly Vice Chair Anna Brawley and member Daniel Volland is 51 pages of technical adjustments to a set of policies loosely labeled "site access." Those are the rules scattered throughout Title 21, the building code, that cover requirements for various access routes people use to get into their homes and other buildings.
"The proposal is complex but could be summarized as a simplification of standards for driveways, parking areas, and building frontages, with an emphasis on flexibility while providing for better physical definitions of private property and the street," according to a staff report from the municipality's Planning Department.
The proposed reforms, which are up for public testimony in June, came out of a monthslong working group that brought together developers, planners, community advocates, elected officials and others to address building rules that were hindering new projects.
"I would characterize this one less as 'unlocking a bunch of new housing.' This is fixing something that isn't working in the code now," Brawley said in an interview.
Over the last several years, elected officials from all different political backgrounds have been trying to change planning and zoning rules in ways that make it easier to build new residential units. But not all those adjustments have worked. Brawley said there are big sections of the building code that are so technical, cumbersome, and hard to understand that simply parsing it has become a delay for builders.
"If the code is too complicated to read, then it's not working," Brawley said.
The new proposal simplifies code around site access development. It also grants more administrative discretion for the many instances where projects, especially in-fill development and new multifamily structures, involve nuances and variables that are hard to completely square with written regulations.
"What problem were we trying to solve here?" asked Daniel Mckenna-Foster from the city's Long-Range Planning Division during a February meeting hosted by the Federation of Community Councils. "It's really about the interaction between private properties and the street...and how people get from one to the other."
Many of the requirements addressed in the new ordinance have been on pause since the Assembly passed a moratorium on implementing them several months ago. That pause is set to expire this November. The working group proposal, which was endorsed by the Planning and Zoning Commission in March before it went along to the Assembly, would replace the previous site access rules.
"It is more expensive and challenging than ever to build housing in Anchorage," said Tyler Robinson, Vice President of Cook Inlet Housing Authority, in a statement released after the working group made it's recommendations. "The changes to code introduced by the Site Access ordinance fundamentally broke our ability to provide more housing to the community — from single-family homes to large apartment buildings."
LaFrance has made housing a policy priority for her administration, emphasizing that the municipality and Assembly need a multi-prong approach to add 10,000 new housing units in the coming decade. The administration, along with allies on the Assembly who are pushing for better development strategies, say one piece of that is promptly scrapping policies that aren't working.
"This is fixing problems we already know about, this isn't new policy," Brawley said of the new proposal. "I think it's both the product and the process we wanted to highlight."
The Assembly will hear public testimony on the ordinance at its June 10 meeting.
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