June 13, 2024
Aromas of chicken wings, pizza, and frybread wafted through the air of the community center in Unalakleet, Alaska, as a dozen or so community members gathered on a bone-chillingly cold December evening in 2023 to weigh in on design options for desperately needed housing.
While below-freezing temperatures could deter public engagement in some towns, midwinter is the best time to reach these predominantly Native Alaskans. In spring and summer, they are busy catching fish, collecting berries, and hunting moose as part of the region's vibrant subsistence heritage.
With options playing on a projection screen next to a bingo board, community members mulled over ideas pitched by Arctic housing specialist Jack Hébert. Some liked tiny houses, while others insisted on at least three bedrooms. But all agreed that the designs should include an Arctic entry (an unheated space for transitioning from indoors to outdoors where you can leave outerwear, snow boots, firearms, and the odd moose carcass) and not be oriented east-west along the prevailing wind pattern, which would risk huge snow drifts near the front door.
While Hébert, founder of the Fairbanks-based Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC), is fond of drawing on traditional Arctic dwellings like sod igloos that rely on permafrost for insulation, most Native Alaskans prefer Western housing typologies like one-story ranches.
"The building practices of our ancestors don't always equate to our way of living today," says Colleen Dushkin, former executive director of the Association of Alaska Housing Authorities (AAHA) and currently vice president of culture and strategy for Cook Inlet Housing Authority in Anchorage.
A radio station building is nestled among the typical housing found in Unalakleet, a town of about 750 in Alaska. Photo by Kari Duame.
The design charrette was organized by the Unalakleet Housing Authority as it seeks to tackle its share of rural Alaska's housing shortage. Officials across the Last Frontier's small, sparsely populated villages, which are home mostly to Alaska Natives, are exploring creative ways to leverage planning resources and address the local manifestation of the national housing crunch while facing geographic isolation, climate concerns, and cultural needs vastly different from anywhere in the Lower 48.
It's a clear need: the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation's 2018 Alaska Housing Assessment found the state required over 16,000 new housing units to alleviate overcrowding while about 12,600 existing homes lacked indoor plumbing or complete kitchens. The report did not disaggregate those numbers between urban and rural, but it noted that both overcrowding and inadequate facilities occur at higher rates in rural Alaska.
"The rates of overcrowding that exist in rural and remote Alaska are many orders of magnitude higher than they have been in the rest of the U.S. for a generation or more," says Griffin Hagle-Forster, AAHA's executive director and former CEO of the Taġiuġmiullu Nunamiullu Housing Authority, which serves Alaska's North Slope.
Dushkin, an Unangax̂ (Aleut) originally from King Cove in the Aleutian Islands, holds a bleak view of what the next assessment will show. "It has gotten worse," she says.
An excavator demolishes a derelict structure in Point Lay, Alaska. Nearly 10 percent of the remote community of 300 people had been sheltering in this and two nearby buildings for decades. Photo by Craig Bell.
Finding solutions to construction challenges
AAHA conducted its own report in 2019 and found that most homes in 31 remote villages lack running water and sewer service. Housing officials in Unalakleet feel the shortage acutely: 2023 data from HUD reports the village needs 67 more units.
And while that might sound like a small number, traditional housing finance is largely out of reach in this area. No private homebuilders serve a remote market like Unalakleet, nor does the local government have much of a tax base to support traditional subsidized housing. The community's annual funding from HUD's Indian Housing Block Grant would barely cover half the construction cost of one unit.
Unlike more urbanized parts of the U.S., neither the price of land nor restrictive zoning are major hurdles. Many families have plots, whether inherited from relatives or allocated by the local government. Villages as small as Unalakleet don't have zoning codes and rely on the state's, although larger communities like Nome and Utqiagvik do have zoning.
The biggest challenge is the cost of construction. Nearly every toilet, cabinet, and drywall sheet arrive by barge from Seattle, with some communities in western Alaska and along the North Slope seeing only a single barge delivery annually during the ice-free summer months. That logistical logjam requires planning upwards of a year in advance and adds a 100 percent markup to every screw, nail, and two-by-four. There also is a dearth of skilled labor.
Workers guide an insulated wastewater tank onto a loader in Utqiagvik, Alaska. Housing materials are shipped from the mainland and then sent by barge during the ice-free summer months to remote Alaskan communities, increasing housing construction costs. Photo by Griffin Hagle-Forster.
As Unalakleet's housing director, Kari Duame's job is to chip away at the problem. Traditional stick-built housing is out of the question at a price of $650,000 to $750,000 for a three-bedroom house. Instead, she enlisted CCHRC's help to investigate prefabricated styles like modular, panelized, and manufactured homes. A careful comparison of construction methods and consultations with fellow housing authorities pointed to manufactured housing as the most reliable and cost-effective option for Unalakleet. If the village developed a housing design suitable to the residents' needs, then those who qualify for mortgages could order a hypothetical "Unalakleet model" from a manufactured home builder to ship to the village via barge.
"Planning and building your own home is so intimidating and difficult," Duame says. "We want to have a relationship with a manufacturer for a design that everyone can use, optimized for affordability and local conditions."
Climate change risks drive relocation
Nevertheless, Duame and her counterparts around the state are planning out of necessity. Relocation inland to higher ground has become increasingly necessary in coastal Alaska, with villages like Newtok amid a multiyear process to move the entire community. Erosion and storm surge increasingly threaten Unalakleet's precarious perch on a gravel spit, one which Typhoon Merbok nearly wiped off the map in September 2022. Even before that natural disaster, the City of Unalakleet has been laying the groundwork for relocation and published the Foothills Subdivision Master Plan in 2011. But erecting houses just a few miles upland from sea level requires different techniques, as foundations may be built into permafrost.
A $290,000 long-term resilience planning grant helped fund a charette for housing needs research in Unalakleet, Alaska, which took place in December 2023. Photo by Kari Duame.
CCHRC, which serves as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's subarctic campus, helped the village secure a $290,000 long-term resilience planning grant from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to educate residents about building on permafrost. The grant also funded the community process, including the December charette, to research and design a house type suitable for Unalakleet. And while direct funding was not included in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law or the Inflation Reduction Act, money from both pieces of legislation financed a $120 million boost to the Tribal Climate Resilience Program last year, which communities like Unalakleet have shown can work in concert to build new housing that will be resilient to a warming Arctic.
Unalakleet was also the beneficiary of a grant from the Denali Commission, a federal agency that funds Alaskan infrastructure, to plan where and how to build roads to every lot in the subdivision where relocation will occur. "A lot of construction grants want your project to be shovel-ready, so having planning grants is hugely helpful," says Duame.
Those projects are primed for funding, as the March 2024 Congressional appropriations bill included a record $1.34 billion allocation under the Native American Housing Assistance and Self Determination Act, the first substantial increase in over a decade that may boost the size of the Indian Housing Block Grant. It came just a few months after the then HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge traveled to Anchorage to meet with Alaska Natives on housing at the invitation of Senator Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska). The federal tribal housing funding boost "is huge for our communities," says Dushkin, but "as far as how much it's going to spur, that's yet to be seen."
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