Cook Inlet Housing Authority investing in Anchorage: CIHA is constructing homes, mixed-use building in Mountain View and other areas.

• Author: West, Gail
• Position: BUILDING ALASKA

Investment in the renovation of Anchorage's Mountain View neighborhood is currently easing toward $100 million. Some of that investment will be made with federal funding--in the form of grants and loans to the Municipality of Anchorage--and approximately $40 million is slated to come from private investment in the form of a new shopping mall. Another $40 million will have come from Cook Inlet Housing Authority (CIHA) and its funding partners by the end of summer 2006.

Building in Phases

"Our investment is definitely significant," said Carol Gore, CIHA's president and chief executive officer. "This is our third, and probably final, phase in Mountain View. With each phase, we've tried to step up the menu, building more and more toward home ownership, then on to mixed-use. We want to offer a variety of housing options to meet the variety of housing needs in our community."

According to Jeff Judd, vice president of development, CIHA began Phase I in Mountain View in 2004 by building 12 new rent-to-own homes and renovating four fourplexes. "In 2005, we added home ownership," Judd said. "We built 15 single-family homes and eight duplexes, all rent-to-own, and four more fourplexes, for a total of 47 units. In addition to that, we built 10 homes for immediate home ownership."

In 2006, Judd added, CIHA is building 24 rent-to-own homes, adding another eight homes for immediate sale, and constructing a mixed-use building on Mountain View Drive, combining retail and residential space.

At the completion of this third phase, Judd figures, CIHA will have acquired and redeveloped 86 scattered-site units--totaling 131 new homes and rental units--in Mountain View. "When we say 131 units," Gore added, "it sounds huge, and it is. But it's only 7 percent of the housing stock in Mountain View. We've attempted to buy the most deteriorated and dilapidated housing stock in the neighborhood, then demolished it and replaced it with new, high quality affordable housing.

"The fact that our construction has been scattered also is significant," Gore said. "It defeats segregation--both in terms of ethnicity and income--and seeds revitalization throughout all areas of the neighborhood. It's extremely challenging from a development standpoint to do that, but it is the right thing to do in Mountain View."

Gore noted that CIHA's partnership with two of Anchorage's most respected builders, Hagmeier Homes and The Petersen Group, has helped to ensure the quality of the new homes...