Last year, housing prices in Alaska hit a record high, with the average sale price of a single-family house topping $388,000. The average cost of a rental rose 8% this spring, These increases aren’t isolated to Alaska but have been exacerbated here by a decline in new-home construction. Since 2014, the number of home construction permits for three or more units has fallen from more than 600 per year to less than 200.
He noted that the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation, a state-owned agency, pays a dividend to the state treasury each year. He suggested the corporation keep that money and invest it back into housing, coordinating with tribal, nonprofit and private housing groups. “If everybody’s doing it on their own, maybe they don’t realize that there’s one solution, and all three of them don’t have to do it. And maybe one of them can leverage federal funding that another one can’t,” he said.Walker, who served as governor from 2014 through 2018, noted that he created a housing summit in 2015 that did much of what Gara hopes to accomplish, “but we found ourselves, shortly thereafter, with a $4 billion hole in our budget” that made addressing the issue impossible.
He said that in many cases, he believes that a lack of buildable land, not just funding, is hampering home construction. To that end, he believes the state should create a land trust, similar to There, the trust builds affordable houses and sells them but keeps ownership of the land and three quarters of any increase in the home’s appraised value. , if someone buys a house at $200,000 and its value rises to $300,000, the homeowner would get $225,000 when they sell it back to the trust.
“All communities want to solve this problem,” Walker said of the housing shortage. “I haven’t seen a single one that said, ‘We don’t want to solve our housing problem.’ They’re just limited on what they can do as a community.”Incumbent Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy did not attend the housing forum, but his campaign spokesman, Andrew Jensen, outlined the governor’s position by email.
Jensen said Dunleavy “has and will continue to press for legislation” to get more state land in Alaskans’ hands.
AlaskaBeacon Walker is pretending to be Independent when he is actually a Republican.