What is affordable housing and why doesn’t Sitka have more of it? At Tuesday night’s assembly meeting (5-14-24), Sitka Tribe of Alaska Communications Director Robin Sherman and Planning Director Amy Ainslie presented a report on affordable housing, with information gathered from a recent housing summit, that attempted to answer those questions and explore possible approaches the city could take to addressing the problem.
Sherman said the average price of a home in Sitka is now over half a million dollars, which is out of reach for Sitka’s median income earners.
“A Sitka household earning that median income of about $95,000 is going to struggle with the monthly cost to own this house, especially if it needed repairs. Without paying more than 30% of your income toward housing costs, you’d need a household of income of about $140,000 a year to afford that average price home in Sitka,” Sherman said. “And that’s assuming you’re eligible for the state homeownership subsidy program, which starts to phase out around that level of household income, depending on household size.”
Sherman said a $342,000 dollar house would be more in-reach for someone making the median income–but houses in that range are tough to come by or build in Sitka. Ainslie said that’s due to a few things: lack of infrastructure, lack of available land, and the high cost of development.
“We live in a very high cost environment,” Ainslie said. “We’re an island community, everything that comes in has to be flown in or barged in…Cost of living is high, which also means the cost of labor is high, and so that high cost environment sort of begets itself and creates more and more of that high cost environment for itself.”
Sherman and Ainslie noted that several organizations in Sitka are trying to find solutions to the affordable housing crisis. The Sitka Community Land Trust is working on the second group of cottages in its first affordable housing community, and has won grant funding to build a fourplex. The Baranof Island Housing Authority is constructing an eight plex and extending Herb Didrickson Street to open up new lots for Tribal Citizens, and the Sitka Homeless Coalition in building a tiny home community for unhoused Sitkans. The city has also commissioned a study of city-owned land to identify opportunities for housing development.
“So we do have some new subsidized housing in the pipeline as well as some other development. Believe it or not, Sitka is actually building more housing than any other region of the state, with the exception of the Mat Su,” Sherman said, citing data from a 2021 report from the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce development.
Mayor Steven Eisenbeisz thanked them for the work they’d done so far to break down a challenging problem.
“In a way, it’s a good thing that it’s not just a Sitka issue, but it’s a hard thing that it’s not just a Sitka issue, I kind of wish it was, because then there would be some way we could solve this. However, when the nation is going through the exact same things, it makes it a little bit harder,” he said. “So thank you for looking into the keys of Sitka, and maybe we can unlock one of these doors to to help provide our citizens housing.”
Sherman said the Sitka Tribe of Alaska will focus on affordable housing in a June work session with BIHA. The first meeting of the Sitka Housing Network will convene later this year.
