Anchorage takes another run at 'missing middle' housing

Anchorage is weighing another push to loosen its housing rules — this time letting owners along major bus routes build duplexes, fourplexes, townhomes, and small cottage clusters on lots now limited to single-family homes.

The idea, from Assembly members Erin Baldwin Day and George Martinez, is the "missing middle" — the modest, multi-unit housing that sits between a single house and a big apartment complex, and that Anchorage has very little of.

Their proposal is opt-in: owners in designated transit corridors could build these denser housing types under more flexible rules, but no one is forced to. "The goal is more housing at more price points for more people," Baldwin Day said.

It's a narrower second try at an idea that hit resistance before. An earlier, broader version last fall — which also folded in commercial mixed-use development — was paused for more community input.

This one strips that back to just transit corridors and neighborhood-scale housing, a deliberately smaller ask after the first effort stalled.

The tension is the familiar one in these fights: supporters say easing the rules is how a housing-short city adds homes people can afford, while some neighborhoods worry about density changing their streets. The Assembly takes up the missing-middle proposal July 7.