220 acres for free

and the state is the one giving it away.

Alaska's land department wants to hand two hundred twenty acres near the Rosie Creek Trail to the state housing agency, plus another thirty acres out by Ester. The price is nothing. It's what they call a charitable sale. That's a lot of ground to hand over in one motion.

The idea is affordable housing, the kind Fairbanks keeps saying it needs. The housing agency says it's early, and their planning director put it plainly. The first step is seeing whether this can even be done.

Not everybody is thrilled. Trail users say that ground is in use year round, and heavy in the winter, and that handing it over means losing public access to it.

One trails advocate made a practical argument instead of an emotional one. He said the land sits several miles from town with no public transportation, which is a strange place to put affordable housing.

Free land is the cheapest way to make a housing project pencil, and the cheapest land is usually the land nobody built on for a reason.

The public comment window closes September twenty first. If you use those trails, or you want the housing, that's the same deadline.

Where to comment is in the description below.