Anchorage Mayor launches 10,000-homes plan to combat housing crisis

Homelessness in Anchorage has risen by 53 per cent between 2019 and 2024

Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance has launched a ten-year housing plan to put an end to homeless camps like the one in the Mountain View neighbourhood of the city. (Photos: Alaska’s News Source)

May 2025: Alaska’s largest city, Anchorage (popl 292,000), faces a growing housing crisis. According to the ‘Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness’, there are some 3,000 people homeless, and more than 1,000 households are at risk of eviction due to rising rental costs and lack of available affordable housing. A charity spokesperson said that emergency housing shelters are full, and more and more people are forced to sleep in the open.

When Anchorage’s Mayor Suzanne LaFrance assumed office in July 2024, she announced that easing the housing and homelessness crisis would be a top priority of her administration. “If we care about building a strong workforce, keeping young people here, and seeing fewer people sleeping outside, we simply need more housing," the mayor said. She has now announced a plan to build 10,000 homes in 10 years.

“10,000 homes in 10 years is a bold strategy to bring more housing to Anchorage,” LaFrance explained. ”We won't fix a housing crisis like ours through a single action. We need to be committed to a series of actions that make it cheaper and easier to build or renovate.”

The mayor’s ’10,000 homes in 10 years’ strategy involves tax breaks to build multi-family housing, zoning reforms and preventing the appeals process from being used to stop or delay new housing.

LaFrance added that she will introduce additional changes to make it easier to build more housing across the municipality. The Anchorage City Assembly has already approved actions to cut red tape, encourage construction and repair, streamline permitting and approval processes, and deal with abandoned and neglected properties.

“We're fixing every issue we can identify to help more housing get built," said Mayor LaFrance. “From reforming land use barriers to making multi-family housing pencil out, these changes will immediately start helping our community meet its needs."

Data shows homelessness in Anchorage has been rising in recent years. Overall, homelessness climbed more than 53 per cent between January 2019 and 2024, and the number of people living and sleeping outside rose by more than 256 per cent, according to Anchorage’s point-in-time count data. (The count is an annual federal survey conducted by cities and states across the US and attempts to tally everyone experiencing homelessness on a single night each January.)

Over the last few years, large encampments have formed in several of the city’s neighbourhoods. The ‘Mountain View’ camp has persisted for years.

Mayor LaFrance said her administration is “actively working now to move the community to a year-round shelter system with more beds this year to avoid situations of seasonal shelter crisis.” She added that her administration needs to introduce rental assistance to keep people housed and rapid rehousing resources to help those who have already fallen into homelessness find stability again.

The mayor’s ten-year plan also has its critics, who are not convinced that the public sector can solve a crisis that many consider a “deeply complex social crisis that involves mental health and chronic substance abuse.” Suzanne Downing from ‘Must Read Alaska’ wrote that there are not 10,000 lots in Anchorage, which means the mayor intends to increase density, creating more low-income housing, much of which will be provided to people at no cost or greatly subsidised cost. Property taxes will increase to offset what some real estate professionals predict will most likely become tax-exempt residential units.

Suzanne LaFrance was elected on 14 May 2024 when she defeated the Republican incumbent mayor, Dave Bronson. She ran as an independent.

Sources: Municipality of Anchorage, Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness, Sightline Institute, Alaska Public Media, Alaska’s New Source, Anchorage Daily News, Must Read Alaska

Follow

| X​ (Twitter) | Instagram | Facebook | BlueSky | Threads |

BACK TO TOP