How will Anchorage hit 10K homes in 10 years? Q&A with new community and economic

As the city struggles with a housing crunch, Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance has made a push to build more homes one of her top priorities. Anchorage Office of Community and Economic Development director Bob Doehl is a key figure helping lead the project, described as an effort to bring online 10,000 homes in 10 years.

A multi-department shuffle is intended to break the goal into more bite-size pieces. The LaFrance administration recently combined the planning, development, real estate and GIS departments under one senior manager: Doehl. During his confirmation hearing in January, LaFrance said bundling the departments together would increase the “level of coordination” needed to stimulate Anchorage’s housing market.

Meeting the mayor’s housing target comes with growing urgency. Similar to many housing markets across the country, the cost of homes and rentals in Anchorage has continued to climb since the pandemic. The average cost of a single-family home in Anchorage surpassed $500,000 in 2024, and many first-time buyers have found themselves priced out of homeownership.

As the municipality’s former building official and Development Services Department director, Doehl is intimately familiar with the tedious journey building permits make as they churn through the municipality’s systems. The antiquated process still requires builders to drive to public works offices at 4700 Elmore Road to fill out a worksheet by hand. It is then reviewed and manually entered into a computer, he said.

During his first year as director, Doehl said he hopes to streamline the customer experience by launching a new online permit system and addressing inconsistencies in the municipality’s land use code, a document inches thick. Many other local jurisdictions don’t require those manual steps, which, he said, “really gums and slows things up” when a developer decides to submit a building permit.

The Daily News spoke to Doehl in January about the reorganization that created the Office of Community and Economic Development, the barriers to building in Anchorage and progress made to reach LaFrance’s 10,000 homes goal. Here’s part of the conversation, edited for length and clarity.

ADN: Why reorganize? What kind of issues did the municipality struggle with beforehand?

Bob Doehl: This position was restructured into catching the core groups — Development Services, the Real Estate Office and the Planning Department — that are integral to increasing housing and construction activity in the municipality. It’s also having a direct line up to the mayor in doing it. I say it was focused because you don’t want to get too broad, either. Were this position to also oversee Public Works, during a snow event, the snow wins out over being able to focus on this (housing).

ADN: During your confirmation hearing, you said Anchorage is “out of money, out of land and out of time.” Which do you think is the largest barrier to building right now?

Doehl: The thing that probably concerns me the most is that time factor in terms of the ongoing outflow we have of young, working-age adults — the 18- to 21-year-olds who go off for college and don’t come back. Those are the ones long term that we need to slow that flow and reverse it because it’s hard when somebody settles down with a career and a family to get them to move to Alaska. We all have our great origin stories, but it’s really hard to do that.

ADN: We’ve heard it’s increasingly frustrating for local developers to build here. What is the municipality’s current relationship with the development community?

Doehl: We have a more positive relationship than we do in the past. … You’re seeing partnership now on projects like Holtan Hills, where the municipality is committing its resources to it. We have an ongoing monthly meetings between leadership in this building and Anchorage Home Builders Association. Those meetings are, frankly, some of the most productive discussions I’ve seen compared to when I was here before.

I’d say it’s better. We’re working to improve it all the more as we go forward this year with a new permit system that will allow for online permit applications, and, more importantly, makes sense to people who don’t live behind the permit counters like you see there.

We’re trying to improve the customer experience. You may have (seen) the signs when you came in. We’ve reduced operations for Tuesday and Wednesday this week for customer service training for our staff. … Similarly, we’re looking at Title 21 — there’s just some language that there’s some inconsistencies that we’re making a concerted effort to this year clean up and make consistent. … (Before), the biggest thing, honestly, was just the transaction experience.

[Mayor orders review of property tax appraisals after ‘unusually’ high increases]

ADN: It’s been almost a year since Mayor LaFrance announced her 10,000 homes goal. How many homes have been built so far?

Doehl: We track by building permits. For last year, it was over 400, the most in years. And that’s living units. So a four-plex is four units, a single-family is one and a duplex is two. … That’s our best measure, generally also, and that’s the highest we’ve had in, I think, over a decade. It’s a good start. The value of construction activity was also up significantly.

ADN: What do you think is driving that?

Doehl: We all know we need more housing, but that sense of “Let’s work this out together” has been something that I think has been evasive in the past. … When I’ve been in this space as the building official or when I was involved in construction activity with/for the state of Alaska or with the National Guard, when we were doing some big projects, there’s a sense of cooperation or shared effort as we realize that housing is the most critical economic challenge we’re facing as a city. I think that’s a huge part of it. Also, after COVID, things are kind of settling down, there’s a sense of we got to get on with it, and we are.

(It’s) the realization the lack of housing is strangling our economy and in the process of that, strangling our city. When a two-bedroom apartment goes for $1,900, that makes it really, really, really difficult for somebody with an entry-level position to actually live here. … If you go to a gathering of entry-level workers, they complain about housing. If you go to a gathering of managers, they complain they can’t hire entry-level workers because they can’t afford the housing … And it’s a limit for (the) ability to bring doctors and other skilled necessary professionals, and it’s creating a tremendous drag on us.