Revitalizing Downtown as the Key to Reinvigorating All of Anchorage

The luncheon was held in the Dena’ina Civic and Convention Center, a building Begich championed as mayor. To build the center, he transformed the Anchorage Parking Authority into the Anchorage Community Development Authority (ACDA). The authority’s current executive director, Mike Robbins, also spoke at the luncheon, describing his role as “government but not government.” ACDA is empowered to negotiate directly with businesses and banks, something Robbins says is happening more frequently.

“We field calls on a regular basis from people who say, ‘Hey, we want to invest in Downtown; what’s going on?’ We get those calls almost weekly now, whereas the first six months [Robbins was appointed in June 2021], it was a very lonely place. We’re talking to a lot more folks now,” he told SMPS. He figures the recent investments total close to $750 million.

Radhika Krishna, executive director of the Anchorage Downtown Partnership, has also noticed the shift in momentum. “I know there’s a little bit of doom and gloom,” she said at the luncheon, “but there are a lot of people investing in Downtown. There’s certainly more new development happening now than in the last twenty years.”

As examples, Krishna listed the opening of Block 96 Flats, a market-rate apartment building developed by Debenham Properties in partnership with ACDA. At an earlier stage, the Block 41 development has progressed as far as demolition of the Fourth Avenue Theatre and a neighboring building, with ambitious plans to construct new commercial and residential space.

Reimagining Connections

Even more ambitious than Peach Investments’ plans for Block 41 is the “reimagining” of D Street. ACDA has embarked on an area-wide planning study for the corridor between Sixth Avenue and Ninth Avenue, encompassing six city blocks. The area is anchored by the JCPenney parking garage and vacant Nordstrom building, both under ACDA ownership since 2020. Surrounding smaller office buildings, though, is a plethora of surface parking. Converting horizontal pavement into vertical structures is part of the motivation behind the Anchorage Assembly’s recent revamp of parking mandates.

Robbins says thousands of public comments informed the D Street reimagining, leading to concepts for denser housing in the “attainable” price range, which is the focus of a draft Housing Strategic Plan that the Assembly is working on. Robbins considers the D Street project a continuation of what Begich is doing a few blocks away.

Public comments are also being gathered through April 7 on the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities’ Seward to Glenn Connection pedestrian and environmental linkages study. The proposed alternatives would restore Gambell Street as a low-speed neighborhood thoroughfare, while highway-to-highway traffic would route along Hyder Street, Ingra Street, or a new bypass south of Merrill Field airport, possibly involving an elevated viaduct over Chester Creek.

While the highway junction is on the edge of Downtown, the study addresses the movement of freight from the Port of Alaska. Trucks roar up C Street and must turn sharply onto Sixth Avenue to reach the Glenn Highway and points north. Proposed alternatives could bypass narrow streets and flow more smoothly into the highway junction.

Finding the Way

“This is a game changer for our community, depending on how this choice gets made,” says Jonny Hayes, chief design officer for the Anchorage Museum. “If it has people’s input, I’m fairly certain it will be a more successful project than if it were a top-down process.”

As lead organizer of Design Week, Hayes coordinated various architecture, engineering, and visual arts events centered on the Seward to Glenn Connection. The Design Week series opened last week with a presentation at the museum’s SEED Lab, across Sixth Avenue, by Chuck Marohn, a former traffic engineer and the founder of urban advocacy nonprofit Strong Towns.

And Marohn immediately cast aspersions on the highway-to-highway alternatives. “I don’t like any of these plans,” he stated bluntly. In his opinion, prioritizing the flow of highway traffic leaves the project’s other stated goals, such as neighborhood revitalization, as afterthoughts.

Marohn even pointed out the window at Sixth Avenue, with freight traffic rumbling by, as an example of a stroad, a term he coined to describe a facility trying to combine the mobility of a road with the accessibility of a street but failing at both. Even Anchorage’s most walkable grid doesn’t measure up to Strong Towns standards.

To improve walkability, part of the parks and recreation bond proposition on the April ballot includes funding for “wayfinding,” which was among the recommendations in a report compiled by “secret shopper” evaluations of Anchorage.

Also coming soon is a major remodeling of the municipal transit center on Sixth Avenue, which ACDA owns. For years, developers have planned to revive the storefront while adding a deluxe hotel. Robbins admits the project has seen “false starts,” and while he told SMPS that he wasn’t ready to make any official announcements, he’s “very, very confident” that the project could move ahead before 2024 is over.

Robbins also points to a subdivision bringing close to 1,000 homes to Eagle River, as well as the first-ever comprehensive plan for Midtown. “We are not just Downtown; we are the Anchorage Community Development Authority,” Robbins said at the luncheon.

But ACDA focuses on Downtown because that area is, in a sense, all of Anchorage’s front parlor. Robbins says, “We spend about 60 percent of our attention on Downtown—that’s where our tax base is, and we believe that Anchorage needs a vibrant and growing downtown.”