Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Outlaws podcast.
Speaker 3: I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: So, Tracy, I get why, like a city like New
Speaker 2: York City, it's housing is really expensive. It's really difficult
Speaker 2: to build. I mean, there's not a lot of space
Speaker 2: right in New York City. Like, I don't really blame
Speaker 2: New York City for not building a lot of new housing,
Speaker 2: Like where would you put it exactly right?
Speaker 3: Manhattan is an island, seems somewhat limited. Plus it has
Speaker 3: a giant park taking up a good chunk of it.
Speaker 2: So what's that It seems NIMBYs are keeping it so
Speaker 2: that we can't develop on a central park. But yeah,
Speaker 2: like I sort of get my housing is really strand
Speaker 2: in New York City. I don't blame anyone really for it,
Speaker 2: but it always seems like in the more rural locations,
Speaker 2: especially where there's not a lot of population growth, it
Speaker 2: should be really easy to you know, just build more
Speaker 2: houses or you know, use the houses that people left
Speaker 2: when they moved. And yet our impression is from past trips,
Speaker 2: et cetera, that there's a lot of strand on rural
Speaker 2: housing as well.
Speaker 3: That's right. So we've done a few field trips to
Speaker 3: places like North Carolina and we learn that even in
Speaker 3: an area that certainly is not as densely populated as Manhattan,
Speaker 3: there are housing issues. And now we are up here
Speaker 3: in Alaska, which you know, if there's one thing I
Speaker 3: know about Alaska, it's that it is big. It's big,
Speaker 3: but twice the size of Texas. Is that the stat that.
Speaker 2: People do think like that, it's incredible, something like that,
Speaker 2: There's got to be some empty space to build houses,
Speaker 2: you would.
Speaker 3: Think, right, And yet we're up here and one of
Speaker 3: the things that people keep talking about over and over
Speaker 3: again is this idea of housing strains within Alaska in
Speaker 3: Anchorage too, which is where we are right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, and we have heard that multiple times. And
Speaker 2: so whatever the issue is that sort of the story
Speaker 2: that we tell about Manhattan, there must be something more
Speaker 2: to it, because it's not just a man or of
Speaker 2: no space, because even places that are swimming in space
Speaker 2: have strands, and so I want to understand what that is.
Speaker 2: We've been up in Alaska. Listeners will remember our episode
Speaker 2: we did with Mary Daily and maybe some other ones
Speaker 2: that came out by the time this episode is coming out.
Speaker 2: But there's no way to understand a state without understanding
Speaker 2: its housing economy.
Speaker 3: Absolutely not, and also just because it's Alaska. The other
Speaker 3: thing I'm really interested in, and I think you might
Speaker 3: be interested in it too as a relatively new homeowner,
Speaker 3: is just the idea of maintenance on a house in Alaska.
Speaker 3: It must be insane, right, Like, imagine how often you're
Speaker 3: replacing a roof in a place like that gets like,
Speaker 3: you know, feet and feet and feet of snowfall every year.
Speaker 2: No, totally, all right, Well, we do, in fact have
Speaker 2: the perfect guests. We are at the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation.
Speaker 2: We're going to be speaking with Jimmy ord He is
Speaker 2: the director of Research and Rural Development, as well as
Speaker 2: Daniel Delfino, director of Planning and program Development. So Jimmy
Speaker 2: and Daniel, thank you so much for coming on odd Lots.
Speaker 4: Oh, thank you. This is Daniel. It's nice to be here.
Speaker 4: We appreciate the invitation to chat with your highly sophisticated group.
Speaker 5: This is Jimmy, happy to be here.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you both for having us at your office.
Speaker 2: What are you just for listeners? What do you do.
Speaker 2: And what is the Alaska Housing Finance.
Speaker 5: Corporation Alaska's in fliance corporation. This is Jimmy. We are
Speaker 5: an organization that addresses safe, quality, affordable housing in Alaska.
Speaker 5: That's our mission. In the early nineties in the state
Speaker 5: of Alaska, they took the different housing departments and the
Speaker 5: Housing Finance Agency and they put them under one roof.
Speaker 5: So in many other states you can have housing departments
Speaker 5: maybe in the Department of Commerce, or under revenue or
Speaker 5: under some other function of the state where we get
Speaker 5: to walk across the hall and talk to our counterparts
Speaker 5: in the mortgage department or the finance department, public Housing division.
Speaker 5: So we're an organization that is all things housing in
Speaker 5: the spate of Alaska. It's really helped with collaboration and
Speaker 5: getting programs and services out the door.
Speaker 3: So Joe and I tried to do this in the
Speaker 3: intro a little bit, But why don't you contextualize for
Speaker 3: us what are the actual housing issues in the state
Speaker 3: of Alaska. How would you describe some of the problems
Speaker 3: that you're trying to solve.
Speaker 4: So there are a lot you said earlier, go into
Speaker 4: the details. The housing issues used to be a lot
Speaker 4: simpler when I started in two thousand and eight. It's
Speaker 4: kind of like the algebra problems that evolve the more
Speaker 4: Matthew take.
Speaker 2: You solve for C.
Speaker 4: And you're only dealing with one unknown variable, and you're
Speaker 4: able to triangulate that and solve it pretty simply. And
Speaker 4: it's like, Okay, now you have two unknone variables, and
Speaker 4: you use a substitution rule, and now you get up
Speaker 4: to three or four unknown variables, and now all of
Speaker 4: a sudden you have to start using one of your
Speaker 4: equations and it just gets to this level of complexity
Speaker 4: where you need a computer. And that's kind of what
Speaker 4: we're dealing with in terms of the issues as they've
Speaker 4: kind of emerged over the state. We have some places
Speaker 4: that are dealing with population grain. We have some places
Speaker 4: that are dealing with an aging contracting base where the
Speaker 4: people are retiring and there's no new people coming up
Speaker 4: behind them. We have other communities that are struggling with
Speaker 4: the cost of housing development. I mean, you mentioned the
Speaker 4: cost of housing and the intro There are a lot
Speaker 4: of things that drive housing costs and housing Cholen just
Speaker 4: guess and we'll get into here. But they have the
Speaker 4: housing stock itself when I started, it used to be
Speaker 4: you had apartments, you had houses, and you had hotels.
Speaker 4: Now all the three things are effectively linked thanks to
Speaker 4: the emergence of vacation renals and a lot of our
Speaker 4: communities where the hospitality industry is now inextricably linked to
Speaker 4: the housing industry because you have inventory that is taking
Speaker 4: a multipurpose nature throughout the year. So there are a
Speaker 4: lot of things moving all at once. And the old
Speaker 4: days of being able to focus on one or two
Speaker 4: issues and try and understand how it's affecting the housing
Speaker 4: market at large, those are largely gone, and we're left
Speaker 4: in this layer of complexity that's very difficult to conceptualize
Speaker 4: and even harder to communicate to other people but that
Speaker 4: don't live and breathe this stuff.
Speaker 5: And adding to that, Daniel, I just want to make
Speaker 5: sure folks understand the vastness of the state of Alaska.
Speaker 5: Like you talked about there in the introduction, Imagine a
Speaker 5: state where you can get on a plane and fly
Speaker 5: three hours west and still be in Alaska, Okay. So
Speaker 5: there's so much in this state that is going to
Speaker 5: be varied because of the location and the community. And
Speaker 5: you have communities in rural Alaska that have several dozen
Speaker 5: people in them and they still need housing and services,
Speaker 5: and the cost to make sure that they have safe, quality,
Speaker 5: affordable housing is going to be extreme. So they have
Speaker 5: to ensure that the housing that they're building is appropriate
Speaker 5: for that space and climate. Now, if you were going
Speaker 5: to start in southeast Alaska and you wanted to travel
Speaker 5: to the North Slope, you're going to leave a wet rainforest,
Speaker 5: marine climate and you're going to head to the North Slope,
Speaker 5: which is up in Nukyavik area, and you're going to
Speaker 5: see extreme temperature changes from fifty to sixty foos zero,
Speaker 5: you know, to fifty sixty degrees fahrenheit above freezing, you know.
Speaker 5: So it's quite a state, and when you're thinking of
Speaker 5: housing in that space, it's not a magic silver bullet.
Speaker 4: One of the things that you'll find as you go
Speaker 4: on this journey from Southeast Alasta up to Uktyavik is
Speaker 4: if you flip a coin, probably about half of the
Speaker 4: merchants that you find online that you may take for
Speaker 4: granted on Amazon won't ship to you in Alaska. So,
Speaker 4: when you talked about some of the housing challenges, people
Speaker 4: don't all do business in Alaska, and those that do
Speaker 4: tend to charge us gouging prices to get things up here.
Speaker 4: Jimmy mentioned flying three hours to western Alaska to get
Speaker 4: to one of the communities. We did that last year
Speaker 4: for a board meeting. And when you get to that place,
Speaker 4: when you go down the runway, you see a plane
Speaker 4: off to the side of the runway and it's a
Speaker 4: plane that broke down that just stayed there. There are
Speaker 4: things in that harbor that have rusted out because they
Speaker 4: don't they don't come out and pick them up. I mean,
Speaker 4: there are certain things that people take for granted, like
Speaker 4: a shipping services that you're going to be able to
Speaker 4: get new parts in, You're going to be able to
Speaker 4: take things away that are dilapidated in your community. That
Speaker 4: aren't a reality for a lot of the people that
Speaker 4: we work with in this state. A lot of our neighbors,
Speaker 4: especially in the places off the road system, which is
Speaker 4: the majority of our communities, don't have a lot of
Speaker 4: the things that most people take for granted.
Speaker 2: So, never having been there, I can only imagine the
Speaker 2: sort of weirdness and difficulties of trying to, you know,
Speaker 2: commerce in housing, et cetera. In some of these extreme,
Speaker 2: far flung locations. Let's just start though, with like the
Speaker 2: relatively major urban centers. You know, we're in Anchorage right now,
Speaker 2: the biggest city in the state. Like, what's happened on
Speaker 2: the affordability front here and what's happened on the construction
Speaker 2: front here over the last several years.
Speaker 4: Sure, so I take a shot this one on affordability.
Speaker 4: I've seen a bifurcation in the market. The interest rates
Speaker 4: a couple of years ago were down in the twos
Speaker 4: for people that wanted to refinance, and the homeowner market
Speaker 4: was going gangbusters, and the prices when interest rates were
Speaker 4: low reflected that there was a huge price acceleration in
Speaker 4: the cost of homes. Fast forward to now. Instead of
Speaker 4: at two percent interest rate, I think our rate that
Speaker 4: we publish for first time home buyers on our website
Speaker 4: checked it this morning at six point two percent. So
Speaker 4: a couple of years ago things were much cheaper. Same
Speaker 4: thing for renters, cheaper for renters. It's just the growth rates.
Speaker 4: When I talk about the lines going up at different
Speaker 4: angles homeowners and Anchorage, the cost has gone up by
Speaker 4: over sixty percent in the last couple of years. Versus
Speaker 4: close to thirty percent for renters, So both have it bad,
Speaker 4: it's just one one has a much steeper curve. So
Speaker 4: what we're seeing is a lot of folks could not
Speaker 4: afford to buy their own home again at today's interest rates,
Speaker 4: and that's affecting their willingness to sell them because they
Speaker 4: can't afford to buy something new in another community or
Speaker 4: even within the same community at the interust rates that
Speaker 4: they charge. So you have folks that are maybe stuck
Speaker 4: or less mobile in homes that are really expensive. Now
Speaker 4: you have renters that don't have people freeing up a
Speaker 4: home ownership sock. So it's getting a little bit more
Speaker 4: congested there. And a lot of things are moving in
Speaker 4: terms of the development. The inflation chaos that we were
Speaker 4: seeing in the construction industry where no one would do
Speaker 4: guaranteed maximum price contract anymore and it was all time
Speaker 4: and materials. Some of that craziness in terms of the
Speaker 4: escalations that we're seeing year of year, like twenty thirty percent,
Speaker 4: that seems to have died down. It's still expensive, don't
Speaker 4: get me wrong, but that's moderated a little bit. What
Speaker 4: hasn't changed is the availability of land. I mean you
Speaker 4: look around and you see, Wow, you're huge. You see
Speaker 4: we bragle all the time, where twice of as big
Speaker 4: as Texas. Why can't you build housing everywhere? Well, the
Speaker 4: land here isn't the easiest to build on. Like you
Speaker 4: can look at a hill and it will be considered
Speaker 4: a federal wetland because there will be a specific type
Speaker 4: of plant that's on the side of the hill, or
Speaker 4: the hill is owned by the federal government or some
Speaker 4: other entities. So what you see versus what's available to develop.
Speaker 4: There can be a disconnect in some communities. And Anchorage
Speaker 4: is one of our older communities, so it's been built
Speaker 4: out with a lot of the easy and the good
Speaker 4: land taken first. There are other places to build outside
Speaker 4: of Anchorage, and we do see that sprawling a little
Speaker 4: bit more outside of the main community. But for the
Speaker 4: communities that have been developing for twenty or thirty years,
Speaker 4: they're starting to reach the more mature stage where they're
Speaker 4: running into the harder things to develop given what's left.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So what I hear you saying, Daniel, is that
Speaker 5: in many ways Anchorage is somewhat similar to other larger
Speaker 5: communities throughout the country where they're facing cost of construction,
Speaker 5: labor shortage is.
Speaker 3: The lock and effect.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but I still prefer to live here.
Speaker 3: Okay. One thing that I know is unusual about Alaska
Speaker 3: and Anchorage specifically, is that you have a large turnover
Speaker 3: of the population. Right you have a lot of people
Speaker 3: who are leaving every year, and you have a lot
Speaker 3: of people who are coming in. And on the whole,
Speaker 3: you have seen I think a slight maybe not for
Speaker 3: Anchorage per se. You'll have to correct me, but there's
Speaker 3: been an overall population decline in the state for sure.
Speaker 3: How does that turnover in the population and the idea
Speaker 3: that you know, for the most part you have seen
Speaker 3: a decline in total numbers, How does that feed into
Speaker 3: the housing situation?
Speaker 4: Not the way that you might think. Okay, So in
Speaker 4: twenty ten, shually after I started, we were talking about
Speaker 4: a housing plan here and Anchorage, and there were projections
Speaker 4: that Anchorage was going to grow. As far as I
Speaker 4: could see, We're going to have all these people coming in.
Speaker 4: Six years later, the population peaked and then it started falling.
Speaker 4: So it's like, okay, we peaked in twenty sixteen, and
Speaker 4: then we started going down to a base around twenty
Speaker 4: twenty twenty twenty one, and then we start coming back up.
Speaker 4: So we have about two thousand more people now in
Speaker 4: the last recorded population year than we did in twenty sixteen. Well,
Speaker 4: the vacancies have gone up, and it's when we see
Speaker 4: that people leave, you would expect, Okay, the vacancy rates
Speaker 4: should go up, right, That's not happening. So it's like
Speaker 4: some of the things when I talked earlier about you
Speaker 4: used to have one variable or two variables explaining things,
Speaker 4: and now we have a sort of multipurpose inventory. Why
Speaker 4: is that there are people? To me a huge question
Speaker 4: are people changing their living arrangements? Do we have housing stock?
Speaker 4: Because I mean, if you go from the supplying demand,
Speaker 4: if you reduce the supply, you can you can get
Speaker 4: back to a tighter vacancy rate by doing that, even
Speaker 4: if the demand is falling. I don't know if that's happening.
Speaker 4: We're trying to track the vacation rental data as best
Speaker 4: we can. We go through a company. I don't want
Speaker 4: to name a company in case I guess meant some
Speaker 4: commercial issue here, but we get proprietary reports where we
Speaker 4: track the growth in vacation rental listings across the state,
Speaker 4: and we see that those have gone up, They've almost
Speaker 4: doubled since I want to say, twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen
Speaker 4: when we started tracking them. Is that just the data
Speaker 4: set being completed, or is that legitimate growth? I mean,
Speaker 4: these are questions that we're asking because these are new issues.
Speaker 4: If it's legitimate growth, and the vacation rental stock did
Speaker 4: actually double, and now we're looking at seven thousands that
Speaker 4: have come online across the state in the last couple
Speaker 4: of years, that's a big number. If that's just counting
Speaker 4: what the data set wasn't recording in the earlier years,
Speaker 4: then I don't know. So we're seeing a lot of
Speaker 4: these things that offer explanations, but there's still such new
Speaker 4: issues in the data and in housing in general that
Speaker 4: we're really reluctant to come out forward and say determined skill,
Speaker 4: Yes it's this, Yes it's that. But we do see
Speaker 4: things that don't make sense because usually housing is a
Speaker 4: function of people. If you have less people, you should
Speaker 4: probably be less housing, and that's not what we're seeing
Speaker 4: in the data.
Speaker 3: And so Joe, it's unironically our fault as some of
Speaker 3: the visitors coming to inncreation in hotels though, Yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: but we might go to Aridamba later this weekend.
Speaker 2: That's true.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, seven thirty nine for the state and a
Speaker 4: couple of years ago, and now we're at seven forty one. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so two thousand more people.
Speaker 5: I came to Alaska in the late nineties, and I
Speaker 5: feel that that was the number back then. It just
Speaker 5: it just hasn't really changed that much. And so to
Speaker 5: your point, Tracy, where you have people moving to the state,
Speaker 5: they work for a period of time and then and
Speaker 5: then they move out. You know, they've they've kind of come,
Speaker 5: they've experienced the wildness of Alaska, and then they're moving
Speaker 5: on to do a different things.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and we used to be a countercyclical state and
Speaker 4: that the people would come up here when there was
Speaker 4: a downturn in the Lower forty eight as we refer
Speaker 4: to the rest of the country.
Speaker 2: We've probably heard the term lower forty eight more in
Speaker 2: the last three or four days.
Speaker 4: They had not a pejorative. It's just a geographical distinction
Speaker 4: where we are.
Speaker 3: No one calls Alaska the like Upper one.
Speaker 2: The Upper one, the forty nine state.
Speaker 4: That would sound elitas.
Speaker 3: Okay, So my other question in terms of housing stock
Speaker 3: in a place like Anchorage. Was just how much is
Speaker 3: lost through like sheer attrition, I guess, and like depreciation depreciation,
Speaker 3: And I could kind of I could see arguing this
Speaker 3: both ways. So on the one hand, because construction costs
Speaker 3: are so high here, if you have a house, even
Speaker 3: if it's aging and falling apart, you probably want to
Speaker 3: hold on to it, try to fix it up and
Speaker 3: keep it. But on the other hand, just looking at
Speaker 3: the environment here, just looking at the weather, you must
Speaker 3: have rapidly, rapidly depreciating housing stock.
Speaker 5: That's one of the biggest challenges that Anchorage housing faces
Speaker 5: is its resilience. Most of the housing and Anchorage was
Speaker 5: built during the seventies and eighties when Alaska. You may
Speaker 5: have heard of this thing called the Alaska Pipeline, right, Yeah,
Speaker 5: And a lot of the housing was thrown up with
Speaker 5: two by four construction based on construction techniques and practices
Speaker 5: that were appropriate for somewhere down south. How's that for
Speaker 5: not saying lore for you? And what that means is.
Speaker 2: We're this third part of the United States here, and
Speaker 2: when we go back to New York, the housing's really
Speaker 2: not built appropriately for this climate. I mean it was
Speaker 2: built where you don't have a consideration for the long
Speaker 2: term sustainability and resilience of that housing. So we find
Speaker 2: ourselves in a situation where when people come in and
Speaker 2: they're a homeowner to a new house, they have to
Speaker 2: spend a lot of their resources improving that existing house because,
Speaker 2: like Daniel said, we don't have that much land to
Speaker 2: build in new places in the Anchorage area, So a
Speaker 2: lot of what we have to do is fix the
Speaker 2: current housing stock that we do have. So an investment
Speaker 2: in energy efficiency installation, making sure you have an appropriate
Speaker 2: heating system, making sure that the windows and doors are
Speaker 2: in the right place is what we focus our time
Speaker 2: and effort on to make sure that a housing is appropriate.
Speaker 2: Can we talk a little bit more about this essentially
Speaker 2: supply side, like how many active developers are there in
Speaker 2: terms of like companies that do housing development, and then
Speaker 2: the specific supply chain constraints that the inherent nature of
Speaker 2: Alaska poses to construction and repair.
Speaker 4: Sure, so I'll take a shot at this the development community.
Speaker 4: It's a very dangerous thing for a person like me
Speaker 4: that works in US or a quasi government agency to
Speaker 4: try and speculate about the true population developers because There
Speaker 4: are all kinds of people that I don't talk to
Speaker 4: that do very important things in the state. We operate
Speaker 4: about ten different housing programs that build or buy things
Speaker 4: that people will live in that's consistent with their mission
Speaker 4: across the state. We have roughly seventy partners that we
Speaker 4: work with across the state that are various nonprofits. Will
Speaker 4: have maybe thirty or forty different developments going on at
Speaker 4: an't given time across the state. So I mean, is
Speaker 4: it ten, is it twenty? It depends on the year.
Speaker 4: And what are we talking about? Are we talking about
Speaker 4: people that work with government money like the lowcome Housing
Speaker 4: tax credit program or grants or are we talking about
Speaker 4: individual home builders. Is it a person who's building a
Speaker 4: multiplex downtown that it's going to be an eight figure
Speaker 4: development or more, or is it a person who's building
Speaker 4: a duplex? So who's a developer? It's sort of a
Speaker 4: loaded question, sort of like when people ask us how
Speaker 4: much does it cost to develop per door? When we're
Speaker 4: reporting what we're doing on the public side with building
Speaker 4: housing in its we're looking at a complete budget. So
Speaker 4: when we say it costs three hundred and fifty thousand
Speaker 4: dollars a door to deliver new housing to a community
Speaker 4: in the state. We're talking about the cost of acquisition,
Speaker 4: the cost of construction, paying an architect, picking a developer fee,
Speaker 4: all these other things. If you're talking to a contractor
Speaker 4: who might also consider themselves a developer, they might just
Speaker 4: be reporting the vertical construction costs and they're keeping things off.
Speaker 4: So the language when we define these terms really affects
Speaker 4: the answer. So the developers that we work i'd say
Speaker 4: about ten to twenty work with our agency to develop
Speaker 4: multi family housing through our grant programs. There are a
Speaker 4: ton of people that build housing all across the state
Speaker 4: that I think would equally be called developers by other people,
Speaker 4: including their banks and their community partners. So it really
Speaker 4: depends on who you talk to.
Speaker 3: So just on this note, I take the point about
Speaker 3: permitting and where you're building in a place like Anchorage,
Speaker 3: but talk a little bit more about what the constraints
Speaker 3: actually are on new construction. So there's the high cost
Speaker 3: of materials, I imagine, there's probably labor, and in many respects,
Speaker 3: you know, if you're building residential in a place like Anchorage,
Speaker 3: you might be competing for contractors with I don't know
Speaker 3: an oil and gas company that's probably paying more money
Speaker 3: for them to build something else. So what exactly are
Speaker 3: the exact constraints, you know, whether it's materials, construction, labor, permitting,
Speaker 3: land availability, finance, how would you describe those?
Speaker 4: Sure, so there's you said to get technical. So Cobb Douglas,
Speaker 4: do you remember the production function from economics class where
Speaker 4: like what you can do as a function of labor
Speaker 4: and capital, right, there's also something that involves technology that
Speaker 4: transforms that curve. So there are labor inputs, there are
Speaker 4: capital inputs in terms of money, but it's also what
Speaker 4: you do with technology and the system behind it. So
Speaker 4: your question about development constraints, it is part labor, it
Speaker 4: is part capital, it is part logistics. Because these are
Speaker 4: huge issues. But with the aging sort of group of
Speaker 4: people that we have that are starting to retire and
Speaker 4: the people that are spread out all across the different
Speaker 4: our flung reaches of Alaska, the capacity is as much
Speaker 4: of a constraint for a lot of these folks. And
Speaker 4: this is something I think Jimmy's team works with our
Speaker 4: partners a lot on as well. The capacity is as
Speaker 4: much of an issue to some of them as funding
Speaker 4: or construction materials. Because we can put money out there,
Speaker 4: there can be resources to build housing, but if no
Speaker 4: one knows how to do anything with it, that can
Speaker 4: stop a community from actually developing housing. So that's one
Speaker 4: of the things that we've been doing with some of
Speaker 4: our development initiatives is not just coming forward with some
Speaker 4: of the needed things like money or some of the
Speaker 4: other better resources, but saying, hey, we know some of
Speaker 4: the things that maybe your community doesn't. Because in addition
Speaker 4: to being spread out community wise, our skill base as
Speaker 4: a state is also spread out. We have people all
Speaker 4: over the state who understand things. There are people who
Speaker 4: are great at procurement that are located off the road
Speaker 4: system that don't have running water. There are people that
Speaker 4: understand finance. You'll find stand for grads in some of
Speaker 4: these communities. But you need to put together a team
Speaker 4: of people that understand a lot of things to make
Speaker 4: housing happen. So when we see that they have three
Speaker 4: of the five things that they need to make a
Speaker 4: housing development move forward, there may be the missing two
Speaker 4: things that we have that we need to bring into
Speaker 4: the community. That's as much a part of the development
Speaker 4: equation as capital is.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Daniel, I think that speaks to Alaska's and finance
Speaker 5: corporations partnerships with a lot of entities in the states.
Speaker 5: You know, I think of the Alaska Association of the
Speaker 5: Housing Authorities. It's a fourteen member organization of different regional
Speaker 5: housing authorities in the state, and you know how we're
Speaker 5: able to communicate with them and bring additional resources to
Speaker 5: bear so that we can be in this together, right
Speaker 5: because like I said earlier, there's there's no magic bull.
Speaker 5: There's no one size fits all, and you know, to
Speaker 5: be effective, you have to provide that assistance as a
Speaker 5: team member.
Speaker 2: I think there's just like a really interesting idea that like,
Speaker 2: you know, in a place like New York City, like
Speaker 2: of course, any new housing development is going to take
Speaker 2: lots of people with lots of different skills, whether it's
Speaker 2: the person who knows how to put in plumbing the
Speaker 2: electrical knows how to deal with permitting. And you know,
Speaker 2: I'm sure many of the big developers in New York
Speaker 2: City are like one stop shops or maybe it's a
Speaker 2: two stop shop or whatever. And the idea that in Alaska,
Speaker 2: like all that knowledge is there, but it's just so
Speaker 2: spread out, so you don't have that sort of like
Speaker 2: knowledge density or those network effects which we don't really
Speaker 2: think of. I think a lot when it comes to housing,
Speaker 2: but it's very intuitive when you talk about it in
Speaker 2: this context and.
Speaker 5: Think about right back to the population of the state.
Speaker 5: We still have to do all the same things. Yeah,
Speaker 5: there's still all the same jobs. There's just over seven
Speaker 5: hundred thousand people, right, But if you're in a place
Speaker 5: like New York, there's millions of people to do the job, right.
Speaker 5: So there's much greater opportunity here in the state for
Speaker 5: individuals to step into a role and learn new things,
Speaker 5: but there's not as many of us to do the
Speaker 5: things that need to get done.
Speaker 4: That's I think one of our strengths because there are
Speaker 4: a lot of things that are challenging about building housing
Speaker 4: in Alaska. But I'm trying to make it sound like
Speaker 4: it's all doom and gloom. We have a lot of
Speaker 4: things that do go for us.
Speaker 6: Well.
Speaker 4: I was just in a fairly small community. It's a
Speaker 4: hub off the road system and the Mari Wason a
Speaker 4: job site with us, and one of the carpenters referred
Speaker 4: to they're affectionally and where probably HR wouldn't like, but
Speaker 4: they're very jovial, and this selected leader runs a gift
Speaker 4: shop in town and she's on a first name basis
Speaker 4: with the contractor. She punched the utilities director in the
Speaker 4: arm when he got out of the truck. I mean
Speaker 4: they know each other when we go in with this
Speaker 4: sort of connection where their neighbors and these are people
Speaker 4: that live right next to each other, They're willing to
Speaker 4: help each other in a way that I don't know.
Speaker 4: If Mayor Adams has that relationship with carpenters in New
Speaker 4: York City, I'm sure.
Speaker 5: Would say.
Speaker 2: What the nature of it is, we don't exactly know, but.
Speaker 4: But they care and they are a lot more predisposed
Speaker 4: to work with each other because they live in a
Speaker 4: way that's probably difficult for people in major cities with
Speaker 4: hundreds of thousands of people to understand the relationships between
Speaker 4: the elected leaders that we may work with and the
Speaker 4: people on the ground that are actually going to be
Speaker 4: able to do the work. And that's what's made some
Speaker 4: of the initiatives that we've been doing recently actually work,
Speaker 4: because these are people that actually know their neighbors and
Speaker 4: they have a really vested, a joint vested interest as
Speaker 4: a community and making something happen. So that is one
Speaker 4: of the things that we have a lot of challenges,
Speaker 4: but that's one of our greatest strengths when we go
Speaker 4: into the communities is being able to leverage those relationships.
Speaker 3: Just to hone in on this point, can you give
Speaker 3: us an example of, you know, a project that you
Speaker 3: did in I don't know, like a Sitka or something
Speaker 3: like that, that you know where you were trying to
Speaker 3: bring in the requisite skills or the requisite construction workers
Speaker 3: and expertise in order to get something off the ground,
Speaker 3: and like, in excruciating detail, walk us through what that
Speaker 3: process actually looks like.
Speaker 4: Okay, So there are a lot of places in Alaska
Speaker 4: where housing is such a challenge that local employers have
Speaker 4: resorted to actually building housing for their employees. State workers
Speaker 4: don't really have that option because the state doesn't have
Speaker 4: deep pockets like some of the big health client student
Speaker 4: to do all these other things like banks. So what
Speaker 4: we started seeing was our executive director, Brian Butcher, was
Speaker 4: reaching out to some of the other commissioners in the
Speaker 4: state and they had positions that had been vacant for
Speaker 4: a long time and they were in danger of losing
Speaker 4: the positions because they had been vacant for so long
Speaker 4: because there was nowhere for these people to live. And
Speaker 4: so if you go out to these communities, the person
Speaker 4: who takes care of the runway and the winter, which
Speaker 4: is your main source of transfer for logistics, might not
Speaker 4: be able to find housing. Like this is a really
Speaker 4: this is a life and death issue for some of
Speaker 4: these communities. So we like, well, why aren't we we
Speaker 4: have programs, why aren't these communities utilizing our programs to
Speaker 4: develop housing? Well, we decided to get a little bit
Speaker 4: more direct. We're like, well, we're they're local governments, we're
Speaker 4: a QUASEI state agency. We can work with them on
Speaker 4: a government to government basis and say what is it
Speaker 4: going to take to get housing developed in your community?
Speaker 4: Because this is like a critical issue for community and
Speaker 4: we need to come together and figure out a way
Speaker 4: to solve it. So we developed something that we came
Speaker 4: up with. We called it the Last Terunt to Your
Speaker 4: Housing Initiative after our state's motto, and we approached local
Speaker 4: governments with about five million dollars each, just a couple
Speaker 4: of them, and said, we want X number of housing
Speaker 4: units to go up in your communities. Some professional workers,
Speaker 4: some affordable housing. We tried to make it big enough
Speaker 4: so that it would be a big enough dollar amount
Speaker 4: that would be attractive for the community and have generate
Speaker 4: some interest. But that's all we did. We didn't come
Speaker 4: and say it has to be at two bedroom, it
Speaker 4: has to be this, X, Y or Z. We allowed
Speaker 4: asked to the community to come from a place where
Speaker 4: we could be responsive to what they wanted to do,
Speaker 4: because some of them wanted to help out municipal people.
Speaker 4: We didn't know what kind of land they'd have, what
Speaker 4: kind of capacity they'd have, and all the conversations with
Speaker 4: the five partners that we approached were extremely different. One
Speaker 4: community was down twenty people and this is a small community,
Speaker 4: so down twenty people for a municipal staff is big.
Speaker 4: They didn't even have a city attorney. They're like, we
Speaker 4: basically need you to do almost everything for us. We'll
Speaker 4: be on a review committee for you, but that's about
Speaker 4: all we can do. Another community they had land, and
Speaker 4: they're like, uh, yeah, we have a procurement department. It's great,
Speaker 4: we have land. We don't know how any of this
Speaker 4: stuff works with your program. So we flew down there
Speaker 4: and we did training with them and all this other
Speaker 4: stuff another community. They didn't understand a lot of it.
Speaker 4: We had to go up there and it was like
Speaker 4: an episode of Shark Tank, sitting there for a couple
Speaker 4: of hours while everyone from the community started asking questions
Speaker 4: about the resource, because a lot of these people are
Speaker 4: sold a bill of goods from folks that fly in
Speaker 4: and offer probably well intentioned help, saying, oh, Alaska, we'll
Speaker 4: show you the way. Well, let us lead you out
Speaker 4: of the wilderness and.
Speaker 2: To jump in there.
Speaker 5: That is what Alaskans do not want to hear somebody
Speaker 5: from the Lower forty eight coming here and telling us
Speaker 5: what we need or how to do something.
Speaker 3: We're from New York and we're here to help.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because that conversation does not go over well. I mean,
Speaker 4: we're flying into the community of maybe a thousand people
Speaker 4: and a bunch of the community elders are at the table.
Speaker 4: We're the guests in the community. So it's like, here's
Speaker 4: our resource, we want to help you, and that's pretty
Speaker 4: much just laying the conversation play out. So the approaches
Speaker 4: were very different based on what the community wanted from us.
Speaker 4: But the thing that underpinned all of it was we
Speaker 4: were coming to them with the resource and a promise
Speaker 4: of support that we would stand behind, and everything else
Speaker 4: beyond that was the community's decision as to what they
Speaker 4: wanted to do. Do they want to take a more
Speaker 4: active role did they not want to? Like some of them,
Speaker 4: we're dealing with city managers who are dealing with sewer lines,
Speaker 4: things like this, any number of issues. They don't know
Speaker 4: how to negotiate with the contractor. They have no idea
Speaker 4: if a contractor asking for this payment request is reasonable
Speaker 4: based on the facts and circumstances. So for some of them,
Speaker 4: we were just a lifeline saying we have lots of
Speaker 4: developments and we any given point in time, we have
Speaker 4: hundreds of millions of dollars in developments that are going
Speaker 4: on across the state. So this is second nature for us,
Speaker 4: and we can provide that technical expertise from a place
Speaker 4: that they trust because they've worked with us for a
Speaker 4: number of years. This isn't the first conversation that we've
Speaker 4: had with a lot of the communities. They know that
Speaker 4: the agency that we represent doesn't have a history of
Speaker 4: burning them. So when they call and say is this reasonable,
Speaker 4: let me say, well, have you thought about this? Have
Speaker 4: you thought about this? Have you thought about this. They're
Speaker 4: having a conversation that anyone else could have with them,
Speaker 4: but they trust us to provide them the truthful answer
Speaker 4: and we were able to do a lot with that one.
Speaker 2: Since you mentioned one hundreds of millions in development, let's
Speaker 2: actually talk about the finance part of finance, and we're
Speaker 2: very interested in various financing models for housing and are
Speaker 2: there way given especially given where interest rates are, etc.
Speaker 2: And who bears the burden? Well do you talk to
Speaker 2: us about like how you find out it's yourself, whether
Speaker 2: you use the municipal bond market and our creative ways
Speaker 2: of financing the construction of housing in Alaska that are
Speaker 2: not maybe those of us in the lower forty eight
Speaker 2: don't appreciate.
Speaker 4: So I'm not the CFO, and our CFO hockey player
Speaker 4: that he is would probably come down here very aggressively
Speaker 4: if I tried to explain what he did. We're a
Speaker 4: self supporting corporation, so we have a mortgage department that
Speaker 4: provides mortgage financing. Our finance department is active in the
Speaker 4: bond market making sure that our programs have capital.
Speaker 5: A lot of the.
Speaker 4: Programs that Jimmy and I operate are funded from hfc's earnings.
Speaker 4: We're under the Executive Budget Act, so our budget goes
Speaker 4: to JUNO every year and it's allocated and usually there's
Speaker 4: a recommendation of what to do with the earnings from
Speaker 4: the corporation for some of our programs. So like our
Speaker 4: department in the Planning department, we manage roughly twenty programs
Speaker 4: and it's a combination of state, federal, and foundation grants
Speaker 4: and tax creds from Treasury, and then Jimmy has other
Speaker 4: funding sources from a bunch of different places, so it's
Speaker 4: a self supporting corporation. Sometimes there are foundations that come
Speaker 4: in and match other things like that. There are financial
Speaker 4: tools that we use in housing, some of them more
Speaker 4: more relevant than others when you're looking at development that
Speaker 4: costs a I don't know, five hundred thousand dollars to
Speaker 4: develop unit off the road system. Going from a six
Speaker 4: percent interest rate down to five and three eighths doesn't
Speaker 4: really make that five hundred thousand dollars a door something
Speaker 4: less prohibitive. So what we tend to see in terms
Speaker 4: of the things that are driving housing in the mission
Speaker 4: spaces that Jimmy and I think work in a lot,
Speaker 4: it's not usually these things like people throughout terms like
Speaker 4: mezzanine financing or these other weird types of debt products.
Speaker 4: Those don't usually move the market for the multifamily stuff
Speaker 4: in the space that I see at the corporation. But
Speaker 4: there's an entire world of home ownership and lending in
Speaker 4: the relationships with the banks that we don't really touch
Speaker 4: that I don't want to speak too because that's probably
Speaker 4: really out of our area of expertise.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I would say that's true.
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, sort of a related question. But I imagine,
Speaker 3: no matter what's going on with your finances, you are
Speaker 3: limited in some way and what you can do. And
Speaker 3: you have housing needs in relatively large urban centers within Alaska,
Speaker 3: so whether it's Fairbanks or Anchorage or whatever, and then
Speaker 3: you have lots of housing needs in lots of different
Speaker 3: rural communities. How do you decide where you need to
Speaker 3: intervene and how you actually prioritize a project.
Speaker 5: As Daniel mentioned last, Housing Finance Corporation is a quasei
Speaker 5: state governmental entity, so we take our direction from the
Speaker 5: legislature and the Governor's office essentially, right, So there's a
Speaker 5: lot of the initiatives that we work on are coming
Speaker 5: with that direction in that intent. For example, one of
Speaker 5: the areas that I work on and we work on
Speaker 5: our team is improving the housing stock in rural communities
Speaker 5: through weather'zation and making sure that the individuals in those
Speaker 5: communities again have housing that is appropriate for their climate,
Speaker 5: because you know, they you know, the people that have
Speaker 5: lived in Alaska for long durations and over the generations,
Speaker 5: you know, they've always had this can do attitude and
Speaker 5: I'm going to put some sweat equity into something that
Speaker 5: really shines through in their lifestyle and their community. But
Speaker 5: oftentimes they you know, they don't necessarily have the resources
Speaker 5: to do that. And Daniel was talking about the Last
Speaker 5: Frontier Housing Initiative program, and I think that's a wonderful
Speaker 5: way to help the community is providing those resources. So
Speaker 5: when we go into a community with our weather'zation program,
Speaker 5: we're not just going in to do one house. We're
Speaker 5: going to come in and we're going to do the community.
Speaker 5: Because we need to take advantage of economies of scale.
Speaker 5: We need to make sure that if we're going to
Speaker 5: put materials, ination, windows and doors, things of this nature
Speaker 5: on a barge to then ship them up to the
Speaker 5: Norton Sound and maybe up a river to get to
Speaker 5: the community, so that we can do an overall weather'sation
Speaker 5: project in that whole community and impact seventy eighty percent
Speaker 5: of the housing units there.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 5: So I think having the ability to take advantage of
Speaker 5: economies to scale and then work with the community to
Speaker 5: make that housing more resilient is very appropriate.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So on the subject of prioritizing, we're a stay
Speaker 4: weight agency, So it's kind of like asking a parent
Speaker 4: to choose their favorite child. We try and make sure
Speaker 4: that our resources are allocated in a way that responds
Speaker 4: to the instire state in a way that's relevant. So
Speaker 4: one of the things that we do, so we operate
Speaker 4: a lot of programs over twenty in our department alone.
Speaker 4: We get a lot of information from the operations of
Speaker 4: these programs of how much homeless housing interventions cost, how
Speaker 4: much developments cost, operating cost, trends, things like this, And
Speaker 4: then we all so commissioned primary data on the rental market,
Speaker 4: and then we do a quarterly survey of lenders to
Speaker 4: try and understand what is the market doing on its
Speaker 4: own that we don't need to do because it's already
Speaker 4: taken care of it, so we try to make sure
Speaker 4: that we're not being redundant to what's already happening, and
Speaker 4: we're actually serving an unmit need in our state with
Speaker 4: the housing resources. So that's a big part of it.
Speaker 4: But then the other thing, and one of the things
Speaker 4: that makes the last run to your housing initiative work
Speaker 4: and some of our COVID responses, we talk to our partners.
Speaker 4: We have seventy different partners all across the state, and
Speaker 4: we engage with them on a fairly regular basis and
Speaker 4: we just ask questions like what's going on in your community.
Speaker 4: I mean, technology has been able to do a lot
Speaker 4: about expanding access to programs and things like that, but
Speaker 4: the old school way of actually connecting and engaging with
Speaker 4: partners face to face, going out to their communities, like
Speaker 4: what we've been doing over the summer, that is really
Speaker 4: where we learn a lot of what we need to
Speaker 4: do to reposition our programs, because especially with our state programs,
Speaker 4: these are our own word documents that we can change
Speaker 4: upstairs if Brian gives us the go ahead or tells
Speaker 4: us that we need to change direction. A lot of
Speaker 4: our homeless response initiatives from COVID. We're developed based on
Speaker 4: feedback that we'd heard from our homelessnes support of housing
Speaker 4: partners over the last decade, the last turn into your
Speaker 4: Housing initiative. The same thing when we're going through revisions
Speaker 4: to some of our writing programs, we actually call people
Speaker 4: and say, well, how do you make a decision on
Speaker 4: when it's time to renovate your project or when you're
Speaker 4: looking at a development? What do you actually walk us
Speaker 4: through the process. We try and understand things from them,
Speaker 4: so it's not so much us making a decision from
Speaker 4: our low for story building here and Anchorage for the
Speaker 4: entire state. We really do try and inform that based
Speaker 4: on the data that we get from our programs and
Speaker 4: the conversations from our community partners.
Speaker 3: Let me ask a related question, how do you judge
Speaker 3: the success of one of your programs, Because again, I imagine
Speaker 3: in a rural area like an anchorage, maybe you could
Speaker 3: measure it in sort of, you know, traditional ways. So
Speaker 3: we built a bunch of housing and then we saw
Speaker 3: a bunch of people move in, and we saw economic
Speaker 3: growth increase by whatever basis point are percent or whatever.
Speaker 3: But if you're talking about a remote community where you know,
Speaker 3: maybe a large chunk of the population is basically subsistence living.
Speaker 3: How do you actually measure the difference that your housing
Speaker 3: initiatives have made for that particular community quantitatively?
Speaker 4: It's very difficult to come up with a benchmark that
Speaker 4: doesn't basically redline communities because if you look at it
Speaker 4: on a quantitative standpoint and say it has to be
Speaker 4: this growth rate or this unit thing, you're going to
Speaker 4: disadvantage in one community or not. I'd say, over the
Speaker 4: seventeen so years that I've been here, what I've come
Speaker 4: to view success from in terms of our initiatives is
Speaker 4: we do a lot of benchmarking when we design these things,
Speaker 4: and whether or not the outcome delivered more than I thought,
Speaker 4: that's usually what I see a success. Was there something
Speaker 4: that we didn't account for that we captured in the
Speaker 4: process that drove the outcome further than we thought it would.
Speaker 4: The last run to your housing initiative, we thought we
Speaker 4: were going to get fifty three units. We got over sixty.
Speaker 4: So our leverage rates for the units were in excess
Speaker 4: of what I did or what we were modeling when
Speaker 4: we set that up. We were able to get broad
Speaker 4: based support that led to other new programs. So we
Speaker 4: got more than we thought we were going to and
Speaker 4: people seemed happy with it. That tends to breed success
Speaker 4: that has support for our programs going forward in the future.
Speaker 4: So and it's a kind of a fuzzy thing and
Speaker 4: quantitative world, but it's really more of a qualitative thing
Speaker 4: that drives whether or not what we did works, at
Speaker 4: least from my perspective.
Speaker 5: And I'm going to take a little different approach in
Speaker 5: thinking some of the space that my team and I
Speaker 5: operate in, and that's focusing on the existing housing stock.
Speaker 5: And I talked a little bit about the weather'sation aspect.
Speaker 5: So what we've done in Alaska housing since the early
Speaker 5: nineties is developed an energy modeling software which is unique
Speaker 5: to the state of Alaska. We call it aqwarm Akworm,
Speaker 5: And what this tool allows you to do is assess
Speaker 5: the building's energy efficiency level from a performance standpoint. So,
Speaker 5: if we're going to go into a community and whether
Speaker 5: is it like I talked about earlier, you know, we
Speaker 5: do an energy modeling of that home to determine and
Speaker 5: benchmark its performance. So if we're going to then do
Speaker 5: insulation and air ceiling and some other aspects to improve
Speaker 5: its resilience. We can then measure that on the back end.
Speaker 5: Thinking back to two thousand and h two thousand and nine,
Speaker 5: the state of Alaska made a very large investment in Weather'sation.
Speaker 5: I mean had two big programs. One was targeted more
Speaker 5: towards the low income residents and it was weather'zation services
Speaker 5: provided by many of our partners throughout the state at
Speaker 5: no cost to the participant. And the other one was
Speaker 5: a rebate of up to ten thousand dollars for homeowners
Speaker 5: making improvements of the house. And what this allowed us
Speaker 5: to do was create a database of more than one
Speaker 5: hundred thousand housing units throughout the state. Right And there's
Speaker 5: what was correct me if I wrong, Daniel, But in
Speaker 5: the neighborhood like two hundred and sixty thousand occupied housing
Speaker 5: units somewhere in that neighborhood.
Speaker 4: I tried never do math in public, but that sounds.
Speaker 5: Right, yeah, and at least owner occupied. And you know,
Speaker 5: so you think about having a database of over one
Speaker 5: hundred thousand of these buildings in one centralized location, and
Speaker 5: you have information on how much installations in there, the
Speaker 5: square footage, the location, the building performance. I mean, that's
Speaker 5: an incredible wealth of information they then can use to
Speaker 5: make decisions.
Speaker 2: One of the things that we've heard is that Alaska
Speaker 2: has particularly high quality public data in part due to
Speaker 2: the dividend that people get from the Permanent Income Fund,
Speaker 2: and the people are willing to hand over some data
Speaker 2: in order to get that check. So it sounds like
Speaker 2: it sounds like you guys have it pretty hand better
Speaker 2: than many in terms of having sort of some visibility
Speaker 2: inter yourn state. I want to ask about one of
Speaker 2: the things in New York City is that you know
Speaker 2: there's a fair amount of public housing, but there's this
Speaker 2: perception that's not kept up well, that it's in disrepair,
Speaker 2: that elevators go and fix, et cetera. Public housing is
Speaker 2: under your purview here at the Housing Finance Corporation. Talk
Speaker 2: about your how that works, and also maybe maybe we
Speaker 2: could use some lessons or what you've learned about, like
Speaker 2: how to keep the housing stock there good.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so the public housing is a different department than
Speaker 4: what Jimmy and I manage. What I can say is
Speaker 4: that the units that we operate, that HFC owens do
Speaker 4: tend to be kept up better than a lot of
Speaker 4: the other folks. So the stories that you may have
Speaker 4: heard or read about in other cities. I think our
Speaker 4: units tend to be kept up very well. It's one
Speaker 4: of the benefits of being the type of agency that
Speaker 4: we are. If there's an issue with one of the units,
Speaker 4: it's very easy to get through to someone at HFC
Speaker 4: to connect with it. And I don't know the relationship
Speaker 4: that other housing authorities have in other states. I'm guessing
Speaker 4: they have a different reporting structure than what we have
Speaker 4: here at HFC, where Brian has a very close relationship
Speaker 4: with the folks in the elected government the other things,
Speaker 4: so it's a they tend to look nice relative to
Speaker 4: the other ones. We read the same stories that you
Speaker 4: do about other places like that wouldn't happen here, But
Speaker 4: maintenance is an issue in Alaska.
Speaker 3: Sorry, did you want to say something?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So in the room here, we also have a
Speaker 2: Stacy Barnes, Director of Government Relations and public Affairs here
Speaker 2: at the Housing Finance Corporation, come into the conversation.
Speaker 6: Well, thank you. So you've had some really great dialogue
Speaker 6: and a couple of things that I was thinking about
Speaker 6: as you're talking about is as it relates to public
Speaker 6: housing and the work that we do statewide. You know,
Speaker 6: we're one of thirty nine of the original Moving to
Speaker 6: Work Agencies, which is a designation moving to Work. It
Speaker 6: was a designation that was authorized by Congress for US
Speaker 6: when Senator Stevens was still in the US Senate, and
Speaker 6: that gave us great flexibility to accommodate many of the
Speaker 6: needs that we see across the state. So as a
Speaker 6: result of this designation, we've been able to provide a
Speaker 6: lot of flexibility and meet the needs of Alaskans where
Speaker 6: they're at. So we have public housing in sixteen communities
Speaker 6: across the state. We own and manage more than two
Speaker 6: thousand properties ourself, and we also work really closely with
Speaker 6: landlords across the state. And on the question of funding,
Speaker 6: of course, there's never enough HUD funding to meet all
Speaker 6: of the needs in New York or elsewhere. Our state
Speaker 6: augments the funding that comes in because of the success
Speaker 6: that our mortgage and our finance business have and as
Speaker 6: a result, we pay a dividend to the State of Alaska.
Speaker 6: Jimmy mentioned being under the Executive Budget Act. That means
Speaker 6: that we get authority to spend some of the dividend
Speaker 6: toward our public housing maintenance, and that has been really
Speaker 6: successful in helping us to maintain the units.
Speaker 3: All right, So, as we're wrapping up this conversation, I
Speaker 3: guess one thing I would be really interested in hearing
Speaker 3: from you is what do you think is like the
Speaker 3: big takeaway from the Alaska experience that could pertain to
Speaker 3: the lower forty eight What should people know about the
Speaker 3: housing market here and your housing initiatives that could possibly
Speaker 3: have some insights for housing bottlenecks elsewhere in America.
Speaker 5: I thought a little bit about this question as we've
Speaker 5: been talking over the last hour or so, and I
Speaker 5: take a lot of what Daniel talked about with regard
Speaker 5: to how we are working with our partners in specific
Speaker 5: communities and meeting the needs of those community members where
Speaker 5: they're at. You cannot have one big magic policy to
Speaker 5: fit every situation throughout the state, and I honestly think
Speaker 5: that other places throughout the country can take that to heart.
Speaker 5: That you have to recognize that giving the power to
Speaker 5: the people to make the decisions and giving them the
Speaker 5: resources to determine the path forward for their situations is
Speaker 5: a best approach and a best practice that we've taken
Speaker 5: here in Alaska, and I think that's something that others
Speaker 5: can take away from this conversation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, from the lessons I think I've learned from our
Speaker 4: implementation of some of the COVID initiatives and what we
Speaker 4: did with the Last Runtier Housing Initiative and say that
Speaker 4: there's a change in terms of how we do work
Speaker 4: as housing professionals. That feels like it's happening at different
Speaker 4: speeds all across the country. Through the pandemic, we were
Speaker 4: able to develop systems that really connected us to our partners,
Speaker 4: and we used a shared space, and through the Last
Speaker 4: Rountier Housing Initiative, we're connecting partners to our institutional infrastructure
Speaker 4: here at Alaska Housing, and people are able to and
Speaker 4: other communities do things that used to take self contained
Speaker 4: agencies with the staff and a finance department and all
Speaker 4: these other things because they're able to connect with our resources.
Speaker 4: So they're able to do more in a sort of
Speaker 4: cohesive community framework now than they could a couple of
Speaker 4: years ago. When you think about vacation untls, we talked
Speaker 4: about that earlier people have wont houses for a long
Speaker 4: time that they could have rented out, but now with
Speaker 4: platforms online, they can connect to some corporate infantry structure
Speaker 4: and someone traveling here from Japan can find their house
Speaker 4: and the Keennine Peninsula and rent it for the weekend
Speaker 4: that they're in Alaska. So the people on the Keene
Speaker 4: Peninsula that are doing that are able to leverage some
Speaker 4: corporate infrastructure that exists somewhere else to have market opportunities
Speaker 4: for them in their community. These sorts of connections can
Speaker 4: apply to some of the housing programs, and we're starting
Speaker 4: to see that happen where we're connecting communities that are
Speaker 4: off the road system with communities that are on the
Speaker 4: road system within our state. So Alaskans in Juno are
Speaker 4: helping Alaskans Innme operate some of our programs. And these
Speaker 4: barriers that have historically been there through technology for any
Speaker 4: number of reasons are starting to come down. And technology
Speaker 4: is really helping us expand access to some of our
Speaker 4: programs to people and communities that may not have had
Speaker 4: all of the necessary tools to utilize them in the way.
Speaker 4: And that's a really exciting thing. It's bringing a lot
Speaker 4: of people together and doing more for our state than
Speaker 4: we could have a decade ago.
Speaker 6: And I'm just probably closed by saying that, you know,
Speaker 6: our bonds are rated double A plus and higher on
Speaker 6: Wall Street. We had more than six hundred million dollars
Speaker 6: in single family mortgage activity last year, and the delinquency
Speaker 6: rate on our loans is less than one third of
Speaker 6: one percent. We are doing exceptionally well there. So you
Speaker 6: heard Daniel and Jimmy talk a lot about partnership, but
Speaker 6: we heard Mary Daily talk a lot about resilience as well,
Speaker 6: and the people of Alaska are very resilient and we're
Speaker 6: very optimistic as well. As we work together in the
Speaker 6: smallest and most remote communities to attempt to tackle these
Speaker 6: many challenges.
Speaker 2: I think for me listening to you, it's like one
Speaker 2: of these things is by necessity, you have to have
Speaker 2: a lot of collaboration, which is a word everyone uses
Speaker 2: all the time. But you're literally, you know, so many
Speaker 2: different sort of entities and vehicles under one roof, and
Speaker 2: that seems like a sort of necessity, But it also
Speaker 2: seems like the type of structure that you know in
Speaker 2: other states, or like New York City where a lot
Speaker 2: of authority is extremely vulcanized, or other fights about who
Speaker 2: has authority, Like maybe merge some departments and actually put
Speaker 2: them under one roof could be a pretty useful takeaway anyway, Jimmy, Daniel,
Speaker 2: and Stacey, I'm glad. I'm glad you also joined us.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for coming on AVLAS. That was
Speaker 2: really fascinating and really educated.
Speaker 6: Thank you allanting me to pop in.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, happy to be here.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much, Tracy. I love that conversation. I love
Speaker 2: the detail. I love you know. In our conversation we
Speaker 2: talked with Mary Daily and she talked about Alaska's economies
Speaker 2: and listening to housing is like very clear what that
Speaker 2: means that this is just a very diverse state in
Speaker 2: terms of the challenges and the nature of living arrangement.
Speaker 3: You definitely get a sense of it from that conversation.
Speaker 3: The other thing I was thinking about was in terms
Speaker 3: of like the usefulness of this type of program. I
Speaker 3: can imagine having dealt with a bunch of contractors that
Speaker 3: just being able to call someone up a government agency
Speaker 3: or quasi agency and ask, like, I just got a
Speaker 3: quote for the following activity. Does this sound reasonable to you?
Speaker 3: As someone who has been involved in many, many of
Speaker 3: these projects, that would be a huge helping point just
Speaker 3: when you're getting started.
Speaker 2: I think another takeaway from me from this conversation and
Speaker 2: others is that like infrastructure bottlenecks or choke points in
Speaker 2: the lower forty eight everyone started paying attention to them
Speaker 2: in the second half of twenty twenty, and that they
Speaker 2: feel like endemic to the nature of living in Alaska.
Speaker 2: The idea that if the person who clears the runway
Speaker 2: can't find a house right then that that is an
Speaker 2: open position, and then that is the threatens the lifeline
Speaker 2: of an entire community. That is not like a twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two story. That's a story that's like endemic to
Speaker 2: how Alaska operates. And so it feels like all these
Speaker 2: things that we've just sort of like woken up to
Speaker 2: are like the core like challenges of you know, operating
Speaker 2: the economy here.
Speaker 3: Alaska is truly an odd thoughts themes.
Speaker 2: Yea, yeah, it really is.
Speaker 3: All right, shall we leave it there.
Speaker 2: Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3: This has been another episode of the Authoughts podcast. I'm
Speaker 3: Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Speaker 2: Check out the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation. Maybe some lessons
Speaker 2: to be learned in your state. Follow our producers Carmen
Speaker 2: Rodriguez at Carmen armand dash Ol Bennett at Dashboud and
Speaker 2: Kilbrooks at Kilbrooks. For more Odd Lots content, go to
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Speaker 2: and all of our episodes. You can chat about these
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Speaker 3: Lots and if you enjoy odd Lots, if you like
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Speaker 6: In