By Zachariah Hughes
Anchorage Daily News
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A lot of buildings in the Municipality of Anchorage are falling apart.
Specifically, multifamily residential buildings like apartments, triplexes and long-stay hotels, which are degrading at an “an exponential rate,” according to the city’s chief of inspections.
The extent of the problem is not well-quantified, but it’s bad enough that it was flagged as a concerning trend by the Anchorage Fire Department in its transition report to Mayor Suzanne LaFrance’s administration this summer.
“The MOA continues to experience a deterioration in the maintenance and quality of multi-family housing. Many apartment owners are failing to maintain minimum housing standards including standards for fire and life safety,” wrote Fire Chief Doug Schrage in the document.
The Development Services Department, which inspects homes across the municipality, does not have an exact count of how many multifamily residential structures there are within the city, let alone how many are in troubling states of disrepair. Of the approximately 11,000 parcels of land zoned for commercial use — a broad category that includes multi-unit buildings like triplexes and apartment complexes — some 2,600 host residential structures. But a single lot might hold more than one multifamily building, each with several or even dozens of potential housing units.
The buildings in question tend to house some of the city’s lowest-income residents, many of whom have few alternative options if their homes are neglected, unrepaired or unsafe. Unlike most single-family houses or duplexes, lots of the larger residential buildings are owned by landlords and companies who do not live on-site or nearby.
“A vast majority of all of our multifamily properties are owned by out-of-state corporations,” said Scott Campbell, the chief of inspections for Development Services.
What inspectors from the city’s code abatement team and fire department are seeing is more and more housing stock degrading to the point that it is dangerous for residents to live there — with a higher risk of deadly fires, property loss, displacement and chronic health problems like asthma.
The factors driving that are the middling quality of the original construction, much of it now decades old, Campbell said, and the fact that many building owners are not maintaining or reinvesting in the properties.
“We’re seeing a deterioration of multifamily residential housing,” said Fire Marshal Brian Dean.
The Anchorage Fire Department has a total of six inspectors. They look at triplexes and bigger, which are regulated separately from duplexes, trailers and single-family houses, none of which are subject to mandatory fire safety inspections.
“Our inspection resources are not adequate for a community of our size,” Dean said.
Buildings that are poorly maintained or lacking basic upkeep are more prone to fires, he explained. What might look like simple shabby disrepair is often indicative of underlying safety problems.
Within city code are construction measures designed to contain a blaze, Dean said. A door to a stairwell or laundry room that doesn’t close all the way, for example, might at first blush seem like a nonissue. But if a fire breaks out in one resident’s kitchen or within a malfunctioning dryer, Dean said securely closed doors serve as barriers that can keep a blaze from spreading from floor to floor and unit to unit.
Dean’s inspectors regularly see blocked exits, holes in drywall, busted doors, broken or missing fire alarms, and open electrical work. All of which can lead structure fires to turn more destructive and lethal.
Decay outpacing new construction
Alaska as a whole has one of the highest rates of fire deaths of any state in the country. The National Fire Protection Association assesses fire fatality rates in five-year periods, and as recently as 2015 to 2019, Alaska had the fourth-highest rate, following Mississippi, Arkansas and West Virginia.
Last year, Anchorage saw 12 deaths and 25 injuries from fires, according to the 2023 fire report from the state’s Department of Public Safety. Though the statistics fluctuate from year to year, Dean said Anchorage’s fire fatality rate is about twice the national average.
The majority of those deaths happened in single-family homes, according to Dean, which the fire department is not statutorily mandated to check on a regular basis like they are with multifamily structures.
But the city’s code abatement crews do go inside the full range of homes and apartments to follow up on complaints, and Campbell draws similar conclusions about the deteriorating conditions in Anchorage’s multifamily housing stock.
“I started going out on calls with (city inspectors) and seeing what they did, and that’s kind of what made me have an ‘oh shit’ moment,” Campbell said. “The ‘oh shit’ moment came from walking into some of these multifamily units and seeing the degradation.”
Campbell said much of the problem goes back to the pipeline boom, when tens of thousands of housing units were thrown up all over town, many with substandard materials and shoddy construction that was insufficiently inspected at the time.
“All those buildings ... are now coming to the end of their life. So 40 years later, now we’re dealing with the inadequacies of what happened during the big expansion in the ‘70s and ‘80s,” Campbell said.
“The biggest impact that we have seen from code abatement is the impact to our multifamily housing units,” he said.
His inspectors see widespread neglect from many apartment and multiplex owners. In a conference room in the Development Services building off Tudor Road , he clicked through photos of recent examples: waterlogged carpets, open drywall with asbestic mud poking out, plumes of rot on ceilings. The most common issues he said they encounter are mold, failing roofs, deficient heating, faulty wiring and vermin.
“Cockroaches everywhere in these places,” Campbell said. “We have a huge cockroach problem.”
The larger structural problem, Campbell pointed out, is that more old homes and multifamily buildings are aging faster than comparable new units are being brought online. When he’s studied what local homebuilders in Anchorage have put up in recent years, it is largely upscale, single-family houses, not big multiplexes, apartment buildings, trailer parks, or other high-density, less expensive stock.
“What they’re producing isn’t keeping up with what we’re losing,” Campbell said.
Tradeoffs and bad options
Local officials face a predicament when properties degrade to the point that inspectors have to shut them down: The tenants often have no comparable alternatives where they can afford to move.
“What happens to all those people?” asked Chris Constant , chair of the Anchorage Assembly. “Where do you move them to?”
He pointed to a 15-unit apartment building off of Minnesota Drive at the edge of his Assembly district, which he called “a frustrating situation.” After extensive water damage at the property, a complaint from a tenant triggered an investigation by the Environmental Protection Agency, which found high levels of asbestos that shut the whole building down. Dozens of tenants had to move out.
Particularly in larger apartment complexes, Constant said, demanding that people vacate while basic safety repairs are made can put dozens of people into a precarious housing situation.
But those situations are rare. Conditions in a building have to be extremely dire for officials to go that far, which Constant and others framed as a last resort.
“Our code enforcement tools are pretty limited,” he said.
He pointed to daily fines that can accrue against building owners who fail to bring properties up to code. But compelling them to pay is a more tricky matter, with few mechanisms available in local statutes for officials to penalize even flagrant scofflaws.
“We have just a long history of laissez-faire enforcement across these kinds of places and structures,” Constant said, adding that Alaska’s laws and customs grant a great deal of deference to individuals and property owners.
Some other communities have a housing authority that issues permits for rental properties and can make that licensure conditional on passing health, fire and building inspections. Anchorage does not have that.
“There’s some bad, bad stuff out there that people are living in, and they don’t think they have any other avenue,” said Dean, the fire marshal. “If anything, we’re just seeing more neglect.”
He and Campbell are both requesting more inspector positions for their departments from the new administration so there is at least more bandwidth for identifying and following up on problems.
That might add more bodies, but not many more tools to penalize brazen code breakers and ignorers.
The Assembly could adjust local building and permitting requirements, but as recent efforts at revising the zoning code have laid bare, passing even modest changes to the rules governing development are extremely contentious.
Since bigger residential structures like multiplexes and apartments are regulated under commercial zoning codes, the municipality has far more elaborate requirements for them, which homebuilders and some development-minded Assembly members say makes them unduly expensive to construct.
Dean is clear-eyed that with more regulatory oversight comes more costs, but said the city could find a better balance.
“There are tradeoffs,” Dean said. But the status quo, he said, is bad. “Because what we provide is substandard housing.”
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