Anchorage planners count 21 stalled projects as Assembly weighs housing overlay

Anchorage is close to a decision that could reshape where and how new housing gets built. On July 7, the Assembly takes up a zoning change aimed at the "missing middle" — the duplexes, townhomes, and smaller-lot homes that sit between single-family houses and big apartment complexes, and that the city's rules have largely kept out of its neighborhoods.

The overlay would loosen the rules along transit corridors the city has already invested in. On lots now zoned for single-family homes, builders could cover more of the lot — up to 70 percent, instead of today's 40 — and build on much smaller lots, with a minimum of about 2,133 square feet. The idea, planners say, is to finally line up the zoning with the comprehensive plan the city already adopted, which pointed to these corridors as the place for added density.

Planning staff pointed to 21 real projects around town — in Spenard, Abbott Loop, and south-central Anchorage among them — that they say ran into the old rules or could have used the reform, and builders backed the changes as workable. Assembly Member Erin Baldwin Day, who has carried the proposal, framed it as long overdue: the city has said for years this is where density belongs, she noted, but never changed the code to match. She also pushed back on critics who say the plan has drifted from its original form — "this is not a bait and switch," she said, but the normal work of refining a bill.

How much the overlay would actually change on the ground — and how much pushback surfaces from those wary of more density — will come into focus when the Assembly takes it up next week.