Anchorage tore down the Big Timber, a downtown blight a decade in the making

The Big Timber Motel is gone. Crews took the derelict building at 5th Avenue and Unga Street down last week, ending a saga that had run for more than a decade, a vacant downtown eyesore that drew emergency responders for years and that city code officials had been fighting to fix since 2011.

The motel had sat empty for about ten years, and in that time it became the kind of property a neighborhood learns to dread, piling up code violations, poorly secured, its safety repairs left unfinished, until the city declared it a severe public nuisance. Mayor Suzanne LaFrance started the demolition herself.

"Tearing down the Big Timber is a huge win for nearby neighborhoods," LaFrance said. "Not only was this building unsafe, but it was a community concern and a strain on our first responders for years." She said clearing it protects the surrounding blocks and leaves a utility-ready lot for whatever gets built there next.

The city is fronting the cost of the teardown and will put a lien on the property to recover the full amount from the owner.

The Big Timber is one of many. Anchorage tore down 10 high-nuisance buildings in 2024, paid for through a fund the Assembly set aside for the purpose, and last year the city shifted toward legal enforcement against the worst nuisance-property owners, trying to build faster paths to force cleanups and recoup its money. A property on Kona Lane came down earlier this year, and four more teardowns are slated for 2026.

That enforcement push has a flip side the city is still working through. Owners of vacant buildings must register and secure them, with escalating fees the longer a property sits empty, and roughly 180 residential properties now sit on Anchorage's vacant-and-abandoned registry. Property-rights advocates argue the rules load heavy obligations onto owners. LaFrance has also proposed the carrot to go with the stick: a 10-year property tax break for owners who put real money into health and safety repairs on older homes.

The account of the demolition comes from the municipality, which did not include any response from the building's owner or from neighbors near the site.