The Juneau Assembly is considering offering a portion of the future Telephone Hill redevelopment to house U.S. Coast Guard families moving to Juneau. The city expects more than 100 families to join the community when a U.S. Coast Guard Icebreaker homeports in the coming years.
At a committee meeting Monday night, City Manager Katie Koester said both the city-owned Telephone Hill and Pederson Hill subdivisions could meet the Coast Guard’s housing needs.
“We have been meeting with Coast Guard leadership and Coast Guard staff here on what their needs are for homeporting the Storis, knowing that housing is a major obstacle and that there’s a high priority for the community to bring that ship home,” she said.
The Coast Guard announced last summer that Juneau would be the homeport for the new polar icebreaker Storis. The 360-foot ship is built to operate in the Arctic and is meant to increase U.S. presence in the region.
Coast Guard officials say it will likely be a few more years before the ship is officially homeported in Juneau. But it will bring at least 110 personnel and their families to town.
Koester says Juneau’s housing stock is not enough to take care of its current housing needs. The crisis will only be exacerbated once Coast Guard families begin to arrive.
She suggested the Assembly look to sign an agreement with the Coast Guard that a portion of the housing at the Telephone Hill and Pederson Hill subdivisions would go to its personnel. She says that would make the land more attractive to developers.
The historic Telephone Hill neighborhood downtown is slated to be demolished beginning in December. Renters are still living there, and have until Nov. 1 to move out. The plans open up the area for newer, denser housing in response to the city’s housing crunch. The city does not yet have a developer signed on to the project.
“Telephone Hill has an opportunity to provide a lot of multi-unit housing that’s really conveniently located across from the subport,” she said. “So, for those service members that maybe don’t have a car, maybe they’re single — close to public transportation, close to work — it could provide a really attractive option.”
Pederson Hill is about 26 acres of city-owned land, a half mile past Brotherhood Bridge on Glacier Highway. In 2017, the Juneau Assembly approved developing the 86-lot subdivision to create more housing. Since then, private developers and individuals have bought some of the lots to build single-family homes. Tlingit Haida Regional Housing Authority is also working on developing housing on a portion of the land.
The Assembly voted to direct Koester to work on creating a memorandum of understanding to potentially offer land at Pederson Hill and Telephone Hill for private developers to build Coast Guard housing.
