anchorage is building more rentals

Anchorage just broke ground on its first new rental project in years.

On Friday, workers started building a new development called Raspberry Townhouses on the west side of town. When it opens in 2027, it will add fifty-eight new market-rate rental units to the city.

This project is the first to break ground under a new city program. The program gives developers a property tax break if they build eight or more rental units.

Under the deal, developers do not pay property taxes on the building itself for at least twenty years. They still owe taxes on the land, but the savings on the building can make projects financially possible.

The mayor says the old approach simply was not working. Anchorage has not been seeing new multi-family buildings go up, and the city needs roughly a thousand new units every year just to keep up with demand.

Assembly leaders also suspended some zoning codes to help the project move forward. Those codes had made it hard to fit enough units on a piece of land to make development financially worthwhile.

The developer said this project would not have happened without those changes. The combination of the tax break and the adjusted zoning made it possible.

When Raspberry Townhouses opens, one-bedroom units are expected to rent for around twenty-four hundred dollars a month. Two-bedrooms are projected at around twenty-eight hundred.