What do you intend to do about Juneau’s housing crisis?

Jeff Jones

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

The city’s going to have to release some land. We need to get a developer in that can build some smaller, starter homes – 1,100 or 1,200 square foot homes. We don’t need the Taj Mahals, but we need some small, lower priced – I won’t say lower income because that’s not fair – but I think lower priced homes. There are other ways we can do it, but it’s not an overnight fix. It’s definitely a long process. We can start to increase our mill rate a little bit – I know it’s set at a cap of 12 – but if you increase it a little bit and start lowering property values so the city doesn’t lose tax revenue but we stabilize our property values. I think they’re a little out of hand, but that’s just my opinion.

Nano Brooks

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

I have a few plans, but the one that I think would give the greatest benefit to every facet of the community would be a land raffle. It’s in the city charter that we can do $25 per ticket, and if you raffled off just undeveloped acre plots, and if everybody in the age group applied for it, it could be upwards of $630,000 per raffle, per parcel. Then you do one each month in the year, and that could be $7.6 million for the city to be able to invest in more programs that can alleviate that. And then you have 12 new property owners. It’s not necessarily that they’ll go instantly living on that undeveloped plot, but you can leverage that plot and put it up as collateral, and invest in some other home that’s possibly already built or another business endeavor that would put you in a better economic position to purchase a home down the road.

Ella Adkison

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

Housing in Juneau has been a crisis for many, many, many years, and it’s certainly not going to be solved by one Assembly. But I think we can push a lot harder on the housing issue than we have been. First step to that, I think, is making use of the little land that we have. That’s the biggest problem, that Juneau doesn’t have a lot of land to build on. That might mean really higher-density housing in certain areas and looking at the zoning for residential. Also applying that to our current projects, like Pederson Hill and Telephone Hill, and be sure that we’re making the best use of that land of our community. And if you want to look to the future, I think the Douglas second crossing will be really vital to that, which will open up more land and expand our limited resource there for residential and commercial use.

JoAnn Wallace

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

I feel like the housing crisis is due to a very difficult permitting process. I think we need to open up density in our community and allow people to build more apartments and, if you have a large lot, make it easier for them to build a bungalow home. I feel like that’s where the key is to building more housing. We’ve got to build more, period. More housing. Apartments, accessory dwellings, and if we do that, it will solve the problem. But we’ve got to make it easier for people to do it.

Paul Kelly

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

I would like to see some zoning changes to encourage more high-density housing and mixed use housing. I would like to see more affordable housing and middle-income housing brought to Juneau. I think that would be a boost to our economy – bring more professionals here, doctors, nurses, mental health professionals and other services that we need here in Juneau. I think one key to making houses affordable in the long-term is energy efficiency, having heat pumps and EV charger stations something that comes standard, so that it’s easy for people to save money. I have an electric vehicle myself. I pay $20 a month to drive that vehicle. With the price of gas, I think that could be a big cost savings for people.

Emily Mesch

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

There isn’t one answer, I don’t think. There’s a multi-pronged approach that we need to take, and that’s kind of been my mantra for a couple different issues. But housing is one where, anything that’s on the table that can help alleviate housing, whether it’s opening up new areas for development, whether it’s the initiative the Assembly put forth to help people expand their current housing and build additions. We can investigate non-market housing where it’s rent-controlled or subsidized. There are so many different possibilities we can do. We need to explore every possible avenue. But I know more than one person who is living in a hotel right now, just because they can’t find an apartment. They can afford it, they just can’t find it. And we can’t have that situation.

Laura Martinson McDonnell

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

This, obviously, is a huge topic that’s not a new one. I’ve learned a lot about this market just from serving on the housing and development committee with the Chamber of Commerce for the last couple years, so I’ve really spent a lot of time listening to both the development community and also the CDD – the planning and development department with the city. This is a really nuanced issue, but the really easy answer is we need more housing. We need more housing at every level. We need more housing at every single price point, and anything we can do to develop more housing to loosen up this market and make more space for folks to move around is going to be helpful. We need to incentivize builders, we need to incentivize development, we need to look at what kind of red tape we can pull back to make the permitting process easier. We are in a housing crisis and we need to treat it as such, so I think any ideas should be on the table, but the main thing is we’ve got to move quickly.

Ivan Nance

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

I talk to people who basically cannot afford housing on the wages that they make here. And that’s in particular during the summer. So somehow we need to match the housing with the resources the people who need housing have. It’s going to require government assistance, government involvement in the planning and putting together a plan. And then it’s going to require some type of public funding.

Michele Stuart-Morgan

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

That is one of the reasons I am wanting to be on the Assembly. I would like to work with people who have been looking at this. I would like to look at other ways. I own a home and I also own a rental, and I know on both sides of that that our taxes have gone up. I know what it costs to maintain a rental – the utilities and all those things. I also have my two sons who don’t own a home yet, and I see their struggles. I don’t think I have the answer by myself but I think I’m the type of person that would work with other people. I do focus in, I do like to get things done, and I think that’s one of the things I’d like to focus in on the most. We can’t grow our housing market and our tourism and our business without looking at those individually and then putting them together. You can break them down into small pictures and that would be the way to tackle that.

Dorene Lorenz

Candidate for Areawide Assembly

I think affordable housing is a self-made crisis. I think that if the city were more diligent in opening up land so that housing could be developed, if we were more supportive in streamlining the permitting process, if we made it more easy for housing to be created for people who are either just starting in the world or just ending in the world – so you’re new to the marketplace, you have an entry level position, you just got out of college, or you just retired and you’re looking for something smaller – that’s the segment that affordable housing is really made for. Unfortunately, we have a huge bunch of that housing market being taken up by folks who are using it for VRBO or AirBnb, for folks who are settled in their careers and have families and are established. And those people really need to be on different tracks. We need to be segmenting our housing situation more and then focusing on building to what the community actually needs, and making sure people are being paid an amount that they can afford the homes they really should be in.

David Morris

Candidate for District 2 Assembly

Nano Brooks is a friend of mine. He came up with a really good idea. It’s in our charter to let that land go and put it out for bid to individuals. And we shouldn’t make bids based on who wants it, it should be open to everybody. And there’s no special deals. And if they did that, no matter what housing they built, it would change. If you built high-end housing here, the people that are middle housing that are ready to move up would go take those houses. And with those vacancies, people that are in low-income housing that are ready to move up would move into those spaces. Then that would leave open low-income housing, and you could also build that, also. So it’s always a shift, depending on whatever you’re building.

Christine Woll

Candidate for District 2 Assembly

We need a multi-prong approach. I think there are lots of different things the city can do to tackle housing and really to help build more housing, which is really the solution. We’ve seen some success providing financial incentives to property owners and to developers to make sure they’re building higher-density housing. I think we can be opening up more city land for housing projects. We’ve done some of that but can do some more. And then I think our codes and our zoning are really not serving us when it comes to building higher-density housing. I know people who want to put a tiny home on their property to rent out, and they can’t right now. So we need to clean up our code and our zoning to make sure that we can have a diversity of housing options.

Alicia Hughes-Skandijs

Candidate for District 1 Assembly

We’re actually doing a lot right now, even though it may not feel like it. Housing is, for me, my number one issue. I think we need to do a combination of things. We are using our affordable housing fund, that’s back on the streets right now, and we’ve been spending from it. We need to continue really aggressive subsidization until we can kind of catch up with the state of the crisis that we’re at. 

We need to really rip into our land use zoning code. I think everyone agrees it’s not great, so find those things that are kind of a hindrance to development, see what we can do about those. Some of the projects we have in the pipeline with our additional dwelling units, making those sorts of changes. The city also has a couple of key parcels downtown that I would like to see us, with a public-private partnership, develop ourselves.

Joe Geldhof

Candidate for District 1 Assembly

What I intend to do is work with at least four other members of the Assembly and actually come up with an action plan to address a couple things. First and foremost, affordable, entry level housing. We have an imbalance in Juneau where we’ve got too much of the wrong kind of housing and not enough starter homes. 

We also need to vigorously pursue people who are not maintaining commercial properties and residential properties. There’s wonderful homes in Juneau, but there’s a lot that are dumps, and we are not doing much to enforce. 

We also need to infill existing lots on the sewer lines, the water lines, the bus lines. And we can encourage that. 

So it’s a two-part process – both encourage sensible development and basically get on people who are basically allowing blight to continue and get that back into good service.