Fairbank's remarkable construction season.

• Author: Jones, Patricia
• Position: Fairbanks, Alaska

Last year was a great year for Fairbanks' residential and commercial construction industries. This year is even better.

Each year, Fairbanks-based general contractor David Miller plans to build three homes, all within the upper end of the local real estate market. Usually, one of the three is built on speculation, and Miller finds a buyer once the project is done.

But this year he found buyers for all of his $250,000-plus homes before the first piece of lumber came on site.

And yes, Miller is tempted to build more homes, in what is shaping up to be a banner construction season in Fairbanks. But it's easy for the active outdoorsman, who is president of DJM Inc., to say no.

"You've got to keep your sanity and enjoy the summer," he said. "There's only 16 good weekends in this part of the country, and you don't want to be missing out because you're working on weekends."

Other residential builders have taken a different tactic, bulking up their construction crews and lining up subcontractors to knock out more homes being built on speculation.

"We're seeing more builders who are going out on a limb because the markets are very good now," said Miller, a member and past officer of the Interior Builders Association in Fairbanks. "We're still on a really good building trend."

Statistics kept by the Fairbanks North Star Borough back up that statement. Both the number and the value of building and zoning permits sought by area contractors are on track to be a record high in Fairbanks for this decade.

And it's not just new home construction. A number of large commercial and government projects have propelled the value of this year's construction in Fairbanks to $92 million, the strongest start to a construction season since 1993.

That $92 million doesn't include building and zoning valuations for the second half of the year, from July through December. Bottom line, a half-year of construction this year has nearly matched the total value of construction permitted throughout all of 1998.

Last year's construction season - tallied at $95 million-set a record itself, nearly doubling the value of building and zoning permits sought in 1997.

"This seems to be the most construction we've had since the downturn in 1986," said the Greater Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce executive director Pam Held, referring to the post-pipeline economic bust that hit the Interior hard during the mid-1980s.

"There's a lot of new housing starts, and more in the upper price ranges...