A design competition identified the key barriers to expanding great multifamily options in Alaska’s largest city.

There’s not much consumer choice in the Anchorage housing market. Single-detached homes, or “one-plexes,” are the norm, even though residents want more options to accommodate their different life stages and budgets. So, some of Alaska’s top architects and builders teamed up with Fairview residents in a neighborhood design contest to imagine a future inspired by historic housing norms, when cities allowed a wider array of homes in American neighborhoods.

In the Fairview design contest, teams proposed plans for a hypothetical triplex on a real-life vacant lot. The entries included:

a coworking residence for remote workers looking to split housing costs with roommates;

a duplex-plus-backyard-cottage option perfect for multigenerational families;

a modern triplex that could work for people who aren’t into paying for a suburban house (not to mention lawncare); and

underground apartments that might attract avid gardeners and avant-garde urbanites.

Unfortunately, Anchorage city code, as written, makes every one of these designs either impossible or much harder to build than a single-detached house. A thicket of zoning rules, including parking requirements, setbacks, and onerous site preparation for triplexes, ensures that inefficient land use will continue in Anchorage for the foreseeable future. But changes may come soon. The contest helped spur the city to reconsider some of the zoning regulations that impede triplex construction, skew the market, and squash innovation.

A HOUSING REFRESH ON A FAIRVIEW LOT

Cook Inlet Housing Authority (CIHA, pronounced “see-ha”) stands out among the many groups working to make Anchorage’s housing stock more appealing to a broader group of renters and homebuyers. In 2019 CIHA partnered with the Fairview Community Council to sponsor a triplex design contest—a contest that ended up highlighting the biggest regulatory obstacles to expanding home choices. Local planning officials have since used these insights to move toward modest reforms to parking rules and other parts of the Anchorage land use code.

The contest, dubbed COMP/act, was a community endeavor. (The name is a play on “competition” and the need for “action” that will allow construction of more compact housing styles.) The Rasmuson Foundation provided a grant to run COMP/act and award cash prizes. The Anchorage Museum featured the contest at an event in its SEED Lab. And the Anchorage Economic Development Corporation’s Live.Work.Play. committee helped to promote the contest.

Four teams made the finals. Each consisted of a designer, a builder, and a neighborhood resident, with a vacant property in Fairview serving as the blank slate for their designs. The rectangular, 7,000-square-foot lot at 820 Nelchina Street is covered in vegetation and sits between a blue ranch house and a fourplex. The property is remarkable not for what it is but for what it represents: a way to envision how Anchorage might modernize the city’s housing stock, meet consumer appetites for more price points and housing styles, and use land more efficiently while preserving the intimate scale of the neighborhood.

Historically, Fairview was one of only a few Anchorage neighborhoods where Alaska Natives and Blacks could own land. White neighborhoods, including Turnagain and Rogers Park, put in place racial covenants barring the sale of homes to non-whites. Following the exclusionary tactics used by Berkeley, California, and countless other American cities throughout the twentieth century, Anchorage created socioeconomic walls around desirable neighborhoods through zoning laws that made building more than one unit per lot relatively difficult.

Today, the covenants are illegal, but the zoning laws live on. Rules like lot size and square footage minimums have made the real estate market less affordable over time and helped create the housing shortage we see in Anc...