Anchorage wants city land sales weighed by housing, not price alone

Every sale of city land in Anchorage will now come with a written case for the housing it produces. Under guidance the Assembly adopted this month, price is no longer supposed to be the whole test.

The guidance is nonbinding, and selling city land still requires an ordinance. What changes is what officials weigh when they compare offers: how many homes a proposal produces, whether they are affordable, and how long they stay that way. Multifamily and compact housing get preference over detached houses, and community land trusts and nonprofit housing partners get preference over other buyers.

School Board property declared surplus now has to go into the Heritage Land Bank, the city's inventory of uncommitted land, unless the Assembly waives that by resolution.

Assembly Chair Anna Brawley and Member Erin Baldwin Day sponsored it. The findings tie the city's fiscal problems to "decades of inefficient, low-density housing development patterns," and cite an Anchorage housing market analysis concluding that mid-rise multifamily and mixed-use rental projects do not pencil out without subsidy.