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Progressive Anchorage council members have expressed righteous indignation over racist land-use planning as part of an effort to loosen zoning regulations and encourage more housing construction, but their fight has little to do with Anchorage.
On Monday, proponents toned down the proposal, but even the version to be considered June 25 would be a major change that would eliminate single-family home zoning.
I no longer live full time in Alaska and am not involved in this dispute – residents should be informed and make their own decisions.
But I know more about the city’s past than most people, having served on the City Council for six years and written the city’s official centennial history. I’ve also written extensively about redlining and racist zoning across the country, most recently in a book about health equity that was published two years ago.
There is no doubt that white leaders of the past used community planning to promote racial segregation, creating inequalities that persist to this day.
There aren't many in Anchorage.
It is possible to find counterexamples to this point. Some of the oldest zoning districts in the city have racist covenants. There have been some horrific cases of racism related to housing.
Going back to the city's founding as a small settlement, we find boundaries that exclude certain areas because they are Alaska Native, black, Eastern European or Scandinavian, but these rules are largely unspoken and part of the racism that pervades society.
It happened a century ago, when the Delaney Park Strip was a firebreak on the southern edge of town.
The ordinances targeted recently by progressive lawmakers are generations old: Most of Anchorage was zoned and built after the civil rights movement and the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which banned housing discrimination, including racial covenants, and its growth was driven by anti-racist leadership that was just as progressive as the current lawmakers.
[Assemblymembers Volland, Brawley and Zaletel: What we heard about the HOME Initiative and residential zoning reform]
Anchorage's first community planner was Vic Fisher, who began the position in 1951. Looking south from 15th Street at night, you couldn't see any lights.
Fisher, who died last year at age 99, spent his life on earth fighting for equality and human rights. In the 1950s and '60s, he helped enshrine equality in the Alaska state constitution, fought for housing opportunities for minorities at the local and federal levels, marched with protesters on the streets of Washington and heard the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech on the National Mall.
The late Jack Roderick, along with Planner Jane Anvik, were even more instrumental in creating our city's land use zoning system. As mayor of the Borough of Greater Anchorage in the early 1970s, Roderick established the People Mover bus system, created Community Councils and spearheaded the first comprehensive plan that shaped the city's major development patterns.
This comprehensive planning process included everyone. Every community met and had a say in its future. Special features in the newspapers covered every detail. Progressive ideas dominated the discussion, including how to slow the city's growth and limit population to maintain quality of life.
These leaders wanted racial equality and grassroots democracy. Their opponents, the conservatives of the time, supported unplanned development that allowed landowners and builders to make money as quickly as possible without playing by the rules.
Planners made mistakes, too. Anchorage faced a dire housing shortage during its population boom from 1973 to 1977, the years of the pipeline's construction. The council opted for a solution: comprehensive rezoning, allowing more housing units on each lot.
Mountain View, once a proud working-class neighborhood of cottages on tiny lots, has become one of the city's roughest and most in flux, with apartment buildings sprung up on tiny lots with no room for children to play or cars to park.
But the city as a whole has grown into an integrated community that is rare in the U.S. While many other cities are more diverse, Anchorage is uniquely integrated, with many neighborhoods having people of different races living and attending school side by side in roughly equal numbers.
Cities in the Lower 48 states are working on zoning accordingly to provide more housing and better integration. Minneapolis was a pioneer in changing citywide zoning and eliminating all single-family home zoning districts, as is currently proposed here.
But to reach that conclusion, Minneapolis employed a comprehensive, multi-year planning process with full community involvement. Not everyone agreed with the results, but residents were informed, and the final product was overwhelmingly supported. The result is the Minneapolis 2040 Plan.
Anchorage has been through a similar process since the 1990s, with broad community consultations to create the Anchorage 2020 Plan, which envisioned building higher density housing in town centers and along transit corridors, with infrastructure to maintain the quality of life for those who live there, and protecting lower density areas with less transit access and different housing mixes. Many neighborhoods also developed community plans around that time.
Anchorage's problem wasn't planning, it was execution, and it's been through a long economic downturn and a decade of stagnant population migration.
I'm skeptical that Anchorage's housing problem has much to do with zoning. Developers will build housing if they feel they can make a profit and have some confidence in future economic stability.
But even if relaxing the rules is the answer, the fundamental decision to eliminate single-family zoning should be part of a plan that involves everyone, respecting the public process that is the legacy of long, hard-fought battles by progressives of the past.
In our polarized country, both the left and the right are overconfident. Both are quick to grasp ideological solutions based on national rather than local perspectives.
I hope Anchorage's new mayor can unite the city and move it forward. Part of that may require major zoning changes. If so, they should be based on a shared vision for the entire community, not a scapegoating of a past that is not reality.
Charles Wohlforth was a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News from 1988 to 1992 and wrote a regular opinion column from 2015 to 2019. He served two terms in the Anchorage Assembly. He is the author of 12 books about Alaska, science, history and the environment. For more information, visit wohlforth.com.
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