If there is one lesson that has emerged from the debate over the proposed Holtan Hills development in Girdwood, it is that the phrase “I’m not a NIMBY, but…” will almost always be followed by a declaration of textbook NIMBYism, and that “I’m not anti-development, but…” will almost certainly precede a claim that the speaker of course supports development… just not this development, in this place, at this time, for these people.

Nearly everyone who has visited Girdwood in recent months has seen the “Halt Holtan Hills” signs along roadways. The Halt Holtan Hills crowd has packed Assembly meetings, written op-eds, organized letter-writing campaigns, and carpet-bombed social media in an attempt to convince the Anchorage Assembly not to approve the project. Bizarrely, several leading members of the group have even begun lobbying various Anchorage community councils to pass resolutions opposing the development. They are clearly committed. They are also, unfortunately, responsible for spreading an enormous amount of misleading and false information about a significant housing development at a time when Anchorage, like many other communities, is in the grips of a housing crisis.

The Holtan Hills development is located in the small resort hamlet of Girdwood, on the edge of Anchorage, but what happens here will set a precedent for development throughout the Municipality.

To recap: as currently proposed, the Holtan Hills development would take 60.4 acres of Girdwood land owned by the Municipality of Anchorage’s Heritage Land Bank (HLB) and partner with a developer to subdivide it into a mixture of “shovel-ready” single-family and multifamily lots, with at least one lot set aside for eight or more units of affordable housing. The development would be denser than what is called for under current zoning, which means that more families could be housed. The sale would almost certainly turn a profit for the HLB, immediately help alleviate Girdwood’s acute housing crisis, and provide the first significant opportunity in decades for the creation of affordable housing in Girdwood.

So what’s not to like about this project? Well, not much—it creates the type of housing the Municipality desperately needs and makes money while doing so. Which is probably why those aligned with the Halt Holtan Hills campaign have increasingly turned to misinformation in order to rally the opposition. A few of their claims are worth addressing one-by-one:

1. “The plan was developed illegally and in secret.” This is flat-out untrue. The project was put out for a public competitive bid. The developer met or exceeded all requirements to interface with the public, and correctly followed existing development requirements, including those created by Girdwood residents in their own Crow Creek Neighborhood Land Use Plan.
2. “There’s no way to know how much land will be developed or what will be done with it.” There is no mystery here. The answer is: 60.4 acres; mixed density development including land set aside for affordable housing. The Girdwood Board of Supervisors (GBOS) would have the authority to manage the development of the affordable housing portion, or delegate that authority to another entity. This is all public information.
3. “We don’t want to sell our land to a foreign developer.” The developer, CY Investments, is based in Anchorage. The owner, Connie Yoshimura, is a longtime Anchorage resident who happens to be of Japanese descent and who has a Japanese surname. Yeah… yikes.
4. “This is the last land available to develop in Girdwood!” This false claim creates the impression that the Holtan Hills development must suit every community need now, lest opportunities be lost forever. In fact, the Heritage Land Bank owns thousands of acres in Girdwood, of which over 500 were deemed suitable for residential development under current zoning in the December 22, 2022 Girdwood Area Plan Update.
5. “HLB lands are public lands and must be used for maximum public benefit.” This is a misleading oversimplification. The HLB is a division of the Municipality and one of its primary purposes is disposing of land for private development. HLB is not a housing authority, nonprofit, or charity. It does not receive funding from the Municipality and must turn a profit from sales of land under its control. Many residents of Anchorage–including Girdwood—currently live on land that once belonged to the HLB. Creating new market-rate housing during a housing crisis is exactly the kind of thing HLB was designed to do.
6. “Only current residents or employees working in Girdwood should be able to purchase new housing in Girdwood.” This would be a discriminatory legal and administrative nightmare, and given the demographic makeup of Girdwood, would come dangerously close to creating a legally-mandated whites-only neighborhood. Would anyone find it acceptable if, say, lots in a new South Anchorage subdivision could only be purchased by current South Anchorage residents? Housing discrimination is reviled (and illegal) for good reason.

Probably the most consistent refrain from Holtan Hills opponents is that much of the new housing would be expensive (starting, perhaps, around $500k), and that only affordable housing should be built in Girdwood. This argument, while sounding well-intentioned, is misguided. First, housing has become expensive throughout the Municipality. The average cost of a home in Anchorage has now risen to $456,000. Of course new market-rate housing will be expensive, particularly in a resort community. New housing is expensive everywhere. The point of creating new housing isn’t to immediately house currently-unhoused people but to increase supply for the market as a whole, which puts downward pressure on housing prices at every level. This is a well-understood, evidence-backed principle of housing policy.

Moreover, there is nothing inappropriate about the type of housing planned in Holtan Hills. Every neighborhood in Anchorage—including Girdwood—has single-family and multifamily lots and housing sold at market rates. It is what the vast majority of Anchorage residents live in.

As to the argument that development in Girdwood should exclusively be affordable housing: affordable (ie, below-market-rate) housing does not create itself. There is no nonprofit entity waiting in the wings to build below-market rate housing in an upscale racially homogenous resort community. The genius of the current Holtan Hills proposal is that it creates buildable land for affordable housing by tethering it to economically-viable market-rate single family and multifamily units, and then turns that land over to Girdwood so that the community can guide the creation of the affordable housing it claims it wants.

So what is really going on here? Why are so many Girdwood residents opposed to Holtan Hills?

Some of those who have spoken against the project in public forums seem to be victims of the Halt Holtan Hills misinformation campaign. But many seem, on some level, to just want Girdwood to stay the way it is. Some testified to the Assembly that Girdwood cannot handle new residents—a tacit admission that they simply don’t want more people housed in the community. While understandable (who wouldn’t want that big wooded plot down the road to remain undeveloped?), it would be a grave mistake to give in to this naked self-interest at any time, let alone during a housing crisis.

Now, we need to be blunt about something: there is an intense undercurrent of hypocrisy in some of the opposition to Holtan Hills. Many opponents of the project, including several of those leading the Halt Holtan Hills campaign, categorically decry single-family housing while owning million-dollar-plus single-family Girdwood homes. They condemn AirBNBs while renting out their Girdwood properties on AirBNB. They denounce rental properties while owning multiple rentals. They claim that the Holtan Hills properties will just be bought as second homes, while acknowledging that their Girdwood properties are, get this… second homes.

Notably, the wealthy and powerful members of the Halt Holtan Hills crowd have not set their sights on rezoning existing residential areas for higher density, or on curtailing their own ability to rent their properties on AirBNB, or on limiting their own right to own vacation homes. In fact, those who have run Girdwood for the last several decades have done virtually nothing to support denser, more affordable housing in the community. To the contrary, they have used their positions of power to impose arbitrary restrictions on developers and shut down attempts to develop more accessible housing.

Take, for example, attempts to develop the twelve-unit Powder Run Multi-Family Housing Project. Due to the loud opposition of the landed residents nearby, the project was cut from twelve units to nine. In 2020, the Girdwood Board of Supervisors (GBOS) filed a unanimous letter of objection to the project, asking that it be further reduced to six units and capped at two stories, and demanded that the project include unneeded additional on-site parking. These actions caused two years of delays, drove up costs, and sent a strong message that denser housing would be met with fierce resistance from existing property owners–and that this resistance would be backed up by Girdwood’s leadership.

Powder Run is not an isolated incident. In 2016, GBOS unanimously passed a resolution mandating that residential housing be removed from the Ski Inn development on Hightower Road. In 2018, GBOS unanimously passed another resolution requiring that a four-unit development on Taos Road remove its third-floor and west-facing decks because existing landowners could see them, and also imposed needless parking and snow removal requirements in excess of those required by code.

Imagine having the audacity to wield your political power to ban someone’s deck, merely because someone who owns land nearby doesn’t want to look at it. But as absurd as that is, there is an underlying claim here that is important to note: I was here first, so I get to limit what you can do on your own property. This blatant NIMBYism and sense of entitlement forms part of the backdrop to the anti-development sentiment animating Girdwood today.

So, back to Holtan Hills. In response to criticism, the developer has bent over backwards to address community concerns. The most recent version of the plan disallows short term rentals in single-family residences, effectively granting a lucrative monopoly on AirBNBs to existing owners of single-family housing in Girdwood. But this still hasn’t been enough to placate critics.

Now, opponents of Holtan Hills are demanding that the project “pause” until the community can create a new Girdwood Area Plan. Let’s be real: the notion that a developer can or should adhere to a nonexistent plan that may or may not be created at some undetermined future time is ridiculous. The Holtan Hills proposal correctly followed the legally-mandated public process—including parts of the process put in place by the community of Girdwood itself—at the time that it was created.

Several opponents of Holtan Hills testified before the Assembly that Girdwood now wants the better part of a decade to commission new research and determine how to proceed with the land currently under consideration for Holtan Hills. This is what is often called a “dilatory tactic” in legal and public policy circles. Or, in layman’s terms, “trying to shut something down by wasting a lot of time.”

Many of those who testified against the project claimed to have extensive expertise in real estate. Surely, then, they are familiar with urban planning research showing that protracted delays to construction and development increase risk and costs for developers, the consequences of which are ultimately borne by homebuyers and renters in the form of significantly increased prices. Halting Holtan Hills in favor of years of needless “research” would set a damaging precedent for those attempting to develop in the Municipality of Anchorage, and would contribute to higher—not lower—prices for everyone in all types of housing.

The housing shortage in Girdwood has been apparent for decades. Housing affordability was identified as a “major concern” in the 1995 Girdwood Area Plan, almost thirty years ago. Since then, the contours of the community remain remarkably unchanged. Girdwood’s current housing crisis is due, in no small part, to decades of self-interested anti-development, anti-affordable-housing, anti-density policy championed by the wealthy landed residents who have largely controlled Girdwood’s government for a generation, and who are now spearheading the opposition to Holtan Hills. This policy has been hugely lucrative for these residents, many of whom have watched the values of their properties appreciate to stratospheric levels while they make small fortunes operating rentals in a deliberately constricted market. It has been disastrous for everyone else.

The Municipality of Anchorage does not need to indulge another decade of NIMBY excuses, needless work sessions, and dilatory foot-dragging. All Anchorage residents, including the residents of Girdwood, deserve and need housing. We are in a housing crisis, and the solution is more housing. Development in Girdwood is long past due, and housing delayed is housing denied.

The Editors of the Alaska Landmine urge the Anchorage Assembly to approve the disposal of HLB land and proceed with the Holtan Hills development.

For more about the Holtan Hills controversy, watch Jeff Landfield’s interview with Girdwood resident Christina Hendrickson and Eric Visser, President of the Anchorage Homebuilder’s Association, here.

Correction: This article initially stated that the Holtan Hills plan called for multiple lots to be earmarked for affordable housing. The current plan calls for a minimum of one lot for affordable housing, which would contain a minimum of eight units.