An Anchorage housing ordinance does more than its title says

The ordinance the Anchorage Assembly takes up Tuesday is titled for shop-houses, meaning homes where the garage or workshop is bigger than the living space. It would also cut the minimum lot size in the city's general business district from 6,000 square feet to roughly 2,700, and remove the minimum lot width altogether.

The municipality said as much in July. Melisa Babb told the Planning and Zoning Commission that the sponsor's original idea was a single type of dwelling in that zone, and that staff then proposed changes supporting all kinds of housing there. It "does not quite match the title," she said. The summary filed with the ordinance does not mention the lot changes either. The 2,700-square-foot figure comes from a commenter, Jason Norris of South Anchorage, reading across to the code section that would govern.

Assembly Chair Anna Brawley and Vice Chair Daniel Volland sponsor it. Beyond the lot dimensions, it would let a single residential unit qualify a project as mixed-use in the Anchorage Bowl, where two are required now, though Girdwood and Chugiak-Eagle River would keep the two-unit threshold. Townhouses would become a permitted use in the zone rather than needing a planner's sign-off on the site plan. The rear setback would become a flat 10 feet, down from 15 next to a residential district and up from as little as zero elsewhere.

The Planning Department's argument for concentrating on that zone is that it has already produced more senior housing than any zone in the municipality, and more apartments than two zones the city created specifically for housing. Those two have never produced a single unit since the land use code was adopted in 2014.

Cook Inlet Housing Authority supported the ordinance and asked that a clause requiring mixed-use dwellings to meet residential design standards be removed, arguing it burdens residential buildings in ways it does not burden commercial buildings with similar uses, "such as hotels." Staff deleted the section.

The paperwork has its own problems. The memorandum lists a purpose-statement rewrite and conditional-use changes for parking lots, self-storage and storage yards, all of which belong to a companion ordinance introduced the same night, and its background section reverses the two cases and both sponsors' titles.

The commission recommended approval 7-1 on July 13. Commissioner Scott Pulice was the lone no, and the minutes record no reason. The public hearing is set for Oct. 20.