2,700 military families are coming

and Anchorage doesn't have the houses to put them in.

The city's economic development team dropped their big annual report this week, and it's a mixed bag with one massive bright spot. The military is planning about two billion dollars of investment at the base, and with it, more than twenty-six hundred new active duty members and their families.

Here's the squeeze. The report says we're already short about thirty-five hundred homes, and the average Anchorage house now runs four hundred eighty-one thousand dollars. That's up more than forty percent in a decade. The Valley isn't much cheaper anymore either, at about four hundred seventy-four thousand.

The rest of the report is honest about the rough patches. Federal jobs in town fell more than eight percent in a year, and consumer confidence is sitting near its lowest mark on record.

But the growth engines are real. Health care keeps expanding, logistics could add a thousand jobs by twenty twenty-nine, and construction crews are busier every year. City hall says home permits this year have nearly passed all of last year already.

So if you own a home here, demand is walking in the front gate. And if you're trying to buy one, you just got thousands of new competitors. Either way, this report is worth knowing.