The MAPP Housing Workgroup held a regular meeting on Tuesday, July 2, at Kenai Peninsula College to discuss affordable housing in Homer and the greater Kenai Peninsula, with reports by Julie Engebretsen, community development director for the City of Homer, and Borough Mayor Peter Micciche. MAPP stands for “Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnership.”

Attendees included members and representatives from several organizations in the region including the Homer Economic Development Advisory Commission; the Alaska Commission on Aging and the Brain Injury Council; new City Manager Melissa Jacobson; and Meg Friedenauer, coordinator of the Homer Comprehensive Plan Project.

Engebretsen provided updates from the city, regarding work on a comprehensive plan followed by a zoning code rewrite. She noted that one of the ways the city can influence housing in the community is by allowing more housing units per acre, and certain zoning districts are looking at those regulations. Zoning district details are identified on map provided by the City of Homer at https://www.cityofhomer-ak.gov/planning/map-resources. Zoning districts include areas such as “rural residential”, “urban residential”, “general commercial”, “residential office”, “conservation”, “marine commercial”, “medical” and others.

One of the topics that came up in Engebretsen’s portion of the meeting was the difference in water and soil for the purpose of housing construction compared to the drier, gravel landscape available for building in the more northern communities of the peninsula. The wetlands in the Homer area require more regulatory permitting than Soldotna.

She also discussed housing and construction costs related to building single family homes versus duplex or triplex structures and variations in housing height regulations in different areas of the community.

“I think some of the biggest things that the city can do is increase or encourage more housing to be built closer together, and that is a concept that a lot of people are not comfortable with. We have a lot of people that move here with the vision of being on a 1-acre or a 5-acre lot with city water and sewer and a maintained road and fire police services, but they don’t want neighbors,” Engebretsen said.

That can make it difficult to provide affordable water and sewer infrastructure if there aren’t enough users per mile of pipe, she said.

As an example of what maximum density looks like in the community, Engebretsen noted the small cottages, behind AJs and the Bunnell Street Gallery. Another example was the Conifer Woods apartment complex on Ben Walters Lane.

Nona Safra asked Engebretsen about home property construction on land owned by the Homer Senior Citizens Center, Inc. The organization is considering construction of facilities for seniors who use the center and who may be able to live in more independent, personal units rather than group housing.

Engebretsen responded by saying that in that case, it may be more practical and serve more seniors to have a single larger building perhaps with elevator access to higher floors rather than multiple small structured units.

Micciche noted that although the meeting was focused on Homer, Seward is experiencing an even more critical real housing shortage. During recent attempts at housing construction in Seward there was not adequate housing for work crews.

“It’s kind of an evil spiral if your workforce has nowhere to stay. They can’t build new places to stay, to make it easier for work future workers to have a place to live,” he said.

Micciche noted that VRBOs and Airbnbs have always existed and been popular on the southern region of the Kenai, but said that “29% of the southern Kenai Peninsula is owned by people who live somewhere else.”

“The borough is not going to do a VRBO/Airbnb policy. That is a landowner’s private choice, but we would like to encourage that you make your land available, and if that land is not being made available, the borough is willing to respond with additional land on the market in key areas where there are critical problems.”

Micciche also discussed road development and the role of access to properties on the peninsula.

“We have about 1,500 miles of road and only about half of that is maintained. Where it’s not maintained, it’s an impediment to responsible development. Folks want to live on a maintained road. We also have a lot of roads that are planned but not in existence,” he said.

Micciche noted that Homer became the most expensive per unit housing market in Alaska last year — at $494,000, surpassing Juneau.

One relatively close location alternative to Homer is Anchor Point, where a manufactured home can be purchased at closer to $250,000, he said.

“Manufactured homes aren’t what they used to be. It’s not a trailer house. They’re actually very nice, built to local spec, same insulation and roofing capacity and the kinds of things that we would build now,” he said.

Other topics Micciche addressed included state residency tax variation, senior tax rates and urban versus rural housing preferences.

The session ended with a series of questions and comments from the participants.

The housing workgroup will hold another meeting the first Wednesday of August and then a larger meeting in September that will bring some of the other MAPP work groups together. Minutes from this meeting are available on the MAPP website at https://mappofskp.net/mapp-housing-workgroup/.