Sep. 16—There hasn’t been a new mobile home park built in Anchorage in more than three decades, a recent report found, and most of the existing mobile home stock is deteriorating or outright decrepit.
The city has about three dozen such mobile home parks, formally designated “Mobile Home Communities” in municipal code, and accounting for approximately 4,600 housing units.
Mayor Suzanne LaFrance’s administration is preparing two separate ordinances that aim to slow the disappearance of one of the city’s biggest reservoirs of low-income housing.
One huge reason new mobile home parks aren’t being built is expense. Mobile homes exploded in popularity because setting them up was cheap, and served as “an avenue for homeownership for hundreds of thousands of Americans in the post-war decades,” according to the report, prepared for the Municipality of Anchorage by the McKinley Research Group.
Nowadays, permitting, building and developing new mobile homes would cost about the same as constructing a single-family house or townhome. In the McKinley analysis, each new mobile home in the municipality would cost $226,000 to $332,000 — and that’s if you could even get ahold of the land and receive the right permits.
To address the underlying factors, the administration’s two measures are intended to better use the property available in existing mobile home parks and make it easier to add small, affordable, potentially unconventional houses onto those properties.
“We must take care of the housing we have, especially when it’s lower-cost housing. We need to make it easier to repair existing homes. And we need to allow all forms of safe housing in mobile home parks,” Mayor Suzanne LaFrance said in an emailed statement. “That’s exactly what these two reforms do.”
Red tape and repairs
One of the new ordinances provides flexibility for adding new, small housing models, both in mobile home parks, as well as on other residential properties.
The second eliminates red tape around repairs and renovations to all kinds of residential properties, but it would be particularly applicable to the kind of older structures that don’t align with today’s building codes.
Both measures have been working their way through the Planning and Zoning Commission process this summer, and could go before the Assembly for approval later this fall.
“As you drive around, you just see the awful conditions a lot of these trailer parks are in, and we know it’s a source of affordable housing,” said Graham Downey, a special assistant to the mayor who has worked closely on the new measures. “These ordinances are really about making it easier to repair existing housing.”
In the latest draft of the first ordinance, a copy of which was provided by Downey, the term “mobile home” is replaced in city code with “relocatable dwelling units.” The broadened term includes single- and double-wide trailers, but also “any manufactured home … tiny home, or other type of small dwelling that can be moved and certified as safe for permanent occupancy” by either Housing and Urban Development standards or by a local building official.
It could also include intermodal shipping containers, typically called conexes in Alaska, if they can be modified in a way that meets residential safety standards.
Essentially, the ordinance adjusts Title 21 to add greater flexibility to what kinds of structures can go into the mobile home parks that are already scattered across town.
“It does not change where trailer parks are allowed,” Downey said. “What we’re doing is allowing these other types of units to be used in the trailer parks.”
The other significant change is code density, boosting the maximum number of units allowed in a mobile home park from eight per acre to 25 per acre.
The measure would not permit new mobile home parks or “relocatable dwelling unit communities” to easily be added in other residential zoning districts.
But it would give property owners more options if they want to add a tiny home or converted shipping container to their private lots.
“Relocatable dwelling units may be used as an accessory dwelling unit only if placed on a permanent foundation,” the draft ordinance states.
The second ordinance allows “more flexibility for the reconstruction or rehabilitation of nonconforming structures.” In the world of planning and zoning, “nonconformity” has a specific technical definition: It means elements that were legal and up to code when the home was built, but through revisions to local rules and standards, they would not be allowed today. Houses or buildings with those older design elements have been grandfathered into legality, but they are officially “nonconforming.”
One problem identified by the LaFrance administration in the city’s housing shortage is that building owners are sometimes leery of renovating aging structures because in seeking permits to update one part of the property, they become liable for bringing it fully into compliance.
For example, the owner of a house or a traielr from the 1960s may want to replace the roof, but to get the permits to do so, they may have to also bring the driveway and heating system up to code, too. That raises the price tag significantly.
The new measure extends beyond just mobile homes and would apply to a fuller range of property owners, Downey said, and is “really about helping people repair their own properties without having to address unrelated zoning issues.”
According to a memorandum submitted to the Planning and Zoning Commission by Daniel Mckenna-Foster, head of the city’s Long-Range Planning Division, the ordinance would allow more renovation work to occur without requiring a zoning code review.
“While previously only small internal changes were allowed, now, any internal changes are allowed as long as they don’t increase the footprint of the building,” Mckenna-Foster wrote in the memorandum from June.
Likewise, the measure would raise the financial threshold on a renovation project that would require a review by the city.
Currently, if a renovation at a commercial or multifamily structure is projected to cost 10% or more of the property’s assessed value, the owner must also fix the unrelated zoning issues, even if they’ve established grandfather rights. The new ordinance raises that threshold to 50% of the property’s value. A building owner could repair their roof without being required to also modernize the driveway or landscaping.
Code, cost squeeze out mobile homes
The new proposals come as the LaFrance administration is pursuing a number of policy changes aimed at making it easier to build new homes, fix up old ones and encourage new forms of development.
“We know Anchorage needs to build and rehabilitate a lot more housing, and that’s why my administration developed our 10,000 Homes in Ten Years strategy,” LaFrance said in a statement Monday. “Around half of those homes should come from rehabilitating aging properties in the Municipality. And it’s clear our community needs many more affordable and entry-level housing options like mobile homes.”
Part of the reason Downey and others who are focused on housing policy say they are digging into Title 21 is because restrictive measures in recent iterations of the code effectively zoned certain forms of housing out of existence in Anchorage.
Mobile home parks are perhaps the starkest example.
“In Anchorage, and nationally, a backlash against (Mobile Home Communities) began in the 1980s and centered around the often poor maintenance of these neighborhoods, the concentration of poverty, and the unsightliness of communities that were not built to the same standards as other subdivisions,” the McKinley report states. “Regulations to make the construction of (Mobile Home Communities) more difficult have proliferated, and in Anchorage these regulations were written into the revised Title 21 Housing Code passed by the Anchorage Assembly in 2012.”
Of the 38 mobile home parks in the municipality, 12 of them are big enough that they account for 80% of the overall mobile home units, and “the average build year of units … is 1977,” said the McKinley report.
The smaller parks, with fewer than 100 units, tend to be older, on average built in 1966.
When the McKinley analysis broke down why no new mobile homes and mobile home parks have come to market in Anchorage since 1990, they found a number of factors making the proposition prohibitively expensive.
There’s far less easily developable land available in the Anchorage Bowl than there was in the 1960s and 1970s. The last local business that built “prefabricated houses in Anchorage closed in 2022,” and the cost of buying similar units in the Lower 48 and shipping them to Alaska adds “more than 40% to the total cost of each unit,” the report said.
In terms of infrastructure, local rules require that “developers bear the cost of installing or extending water and wastewater, road, and other utility” components, the report said.
“New (Mobile Home Communities) would likely not be able to provide housing units for sale at rates much below what is currently available in the condominium and townhouse market,” the report found.
But one of the biggest factors was the overhaul of the Title 21 code that happened between 2009 and 2012, which made it “exceedingly difficult” to build new trailer parks, the report said. One nail in the coffin was density: New developments couldn’t have more than four units per acre, which, the McKinley report concluded, “precludes any efficient construction” of a trailer park.
Since basically all of the trailers and trailer parks in Anchorage are older, just about every home is out of compliance with modern codes and standards.
“Consequently, redevelopment of older (Mobile Home Communities) is a costly proposition, as the entire development would have to conform to the new standards,” the McKinley report notes. That would mean increasing the space between units, widening roads, adding landscaping — expenses that most landowners are not able or willing to finance.
Because new parks are not being built, and there are few new mobile homes being added to the overall housing stock, once a mobile home goes away it is typically not replaced.
That presents an additional liability for municipal housing officials because roughly a quarter of the mobile homes in Anchorage have five or more people living in them, according to the McKinley analysis.
Factoring in all of the costs associated, potential new buyers of mobile homes in Anchorage would be paying a minimum of $3,375 a month in the cheapest scenario, the McKinley analysts calculated.
“The resulting available housing units, while representing new construction and new homeownership opportunities, would nevertheless be more expensive than most low- to moderate-income households could afford,” the report states.
Among the policy changes recommended by McKinley are infrastructure subsidies, targeted investment funds and greater allowable density in mobile home communities.
Correction: This article has been updated to better reflect requirements in the non-conformity review process with respect to residential and commercial properties. The financial threshold for requiring nonconformity updates applies to commercial properties, not internal renovations to residential units.
