Senate panel will take up Native housing bill co-sponsored by both Alaska senators

The federal law that pays for housing in Alaska Native villages is up for renewal, and both of Alaska's senators are behind the bill.

The Senate Indian Affairs Committee takes it up Wednesday at 2:30 pm Eastern, in a hearing titled "Examining Housing Needs in Native Communities." Sen. Lisa Murkowski introduced the measure last month with six colleagues from both parties, including Sen. Dan Sullivan.

What's at stake is the Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act, passed in 1996, which folded a tangle of federal programs into a single block grant and handed tribes and Alaska Native villages the authority to decide how to spend it. In Alaska, that money flows to regional housing authorities — Bristol Bay, Cook Inlet, the Interior — that build, repair and finance homes across communities the private mortgage market largely doesn't reach.

The need it addresses is more acute in Alaska than almost anywhere. Murkowski has cited federal findings that while about 16 percent of Native households on tribal lands nationally live in overcrowded housing, the rate in Alaska Native villages is roughly double that. In rural villages, she has said, 36 percent of households have incomplete plumbing, incomplete kitchens, or are overcrowded. HUD has estimated that eliminating overcrowding and replacing physically deficient homes across Native communities nationwide would take some 68,000 new units.

Building in rural Alaska is also simply harder and costlier than in most of Indian Country — no road access, short construction seasons, everything barged or flown in.

The bill would reauthorize the program and adjust how it works: changes to environmental review, procurement, development cost caps, lease requirements and reporting, along with provisions on student housing, housing counseling, 99-year leases on trust land, Native veterans' rental assistance, homeless assistance and tribal continuum-of-care grants.

Three witnesses are scheduled — Cherokee Nation Deputy Principal Chief Bryan Warner, a HUD official from the Office of Public and Indian Housing, and a Government Accountability Office director.

Wednesday's hearing is testimony, not passage. The bill remains in committee.