Alaska News

Landslide that killed 3 may also be a blow to Sitka housing hopes

SITKA -- Standing on a gravel pile overlooking the landslide that claimed three lives last week, Mayor Mim McConnell said the thousand-foot landslide down Harbor Mountain may have also done serious damage to Sitka's hopes for more housing.

"It's going to have to take some serious reexamination of the terrain," she said last week, looking over massive debris piles left behind as the slide swept away one home, damaged another and threatened others in the new Kramer Avenue neighborhood.

The city of Sitka didn't just permit developer Sound Development to build on the benchlands between the mountain and the ocean -- it has spent years and millions of dollars doing everything that it could to get those lands developed.

The hope was that the benchlands could help alleviate a decades-long land shortage in town.

That was the hope of Sitka's Andrew Friske, too, until the slide last week.

"I don't know what our future is up there," he said. "At this point I would never be comfortable having my family living there knowing there's an active landslide."

Construction on his house was nearly complete, with an expected October move-in date. His house was damaged, while a neighboring house in which two painters were killed was completely demolished.

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McConnell said the city has spent years trying to open up the benchlands.

First, the city engineered a multi-agency land swap involving the state and the University of Alaska to get ownership of the land, at a cost to the city of $3.1 million, McConnell said.

Then the city got state grants to build a new water tower to allow the city to provide water to the benchlands, which can be as high as 400 feet above sea level.

Finally, it sold the land on which the slide hit to Sound Development and approved its subdivision.

Sound Development's owners, including Jeremy Twaddle and Todd Fleming, did not return messages to their home phones or left on their office door.

McConnell said the city had hoped that even more houses would be able to be built on the benchlands, finally bringing new housing to Sitka.

"That's all up in the air now," she said. "We are going to have to rethink the benchlands and how buildable they are."

In Sitka, homes prices are already high and rental markets are tight.

"We've got a shortage of housing and we have always had one," said Nancy Davis, who has spent 15 years selling houses following 30 years financing houses as Sitka manager for First National Bank Alaska.

The median value of a home with a mortgage in Sitka is $334,200, 30 percent more than the statewide median value of $256,900, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Those high costs mean Sitka has too many renters who would prefer to be homeowners and not enough rental housing, McConnell said.

It makes it hard to attract, and especially retain, employees, she said.

"Even if they come thinking they're going to buy a home, they can't find anything they can afford and they wind up leaving," McConnell said.

Now, that benchlands property, including where the city and private developers have made significant investments in infrastructure, look like they may not be the solution. Kramer Avenue wasn't in the steepest area, and the fatal landslide is likely to raise questions about other areas as well.

Davis, too, fears the slide will be a major setback for Sitka housing.

"Any place where there's a hill, somebody's going to have to make the decision -- 'Am I OK with that?'" Davis said.

Friske said he never even thought about landslide risk when he bought his Kramer Avenue property. Born and raised in Haines, he's lived in Sitka for 15 years, where he's the residential and activities principal at Mt. Edgecumbe High School, the state-run boarding school.

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"If we would have known there was any risk of landslide I never would have put my family at risk," he said.

"The only thing that we ever thought was that if there was ever a tsunami we were pretty high up" and probably safe. "We never thought about behind us," he said.

State engineering geologist Mitch McDonald hiked the side of Harbor Mountain with Sitka search-and-rescue team members after the slide to assess the danger to rescuers. He said the Kramer Avenue slide area was in an existing slide path.

But McDonald, who works for the Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, said he wasn't trying to figure out what triggered the slide, just future risks.

Municipal engineer Dave Longtin said it wasn't obvious that there was a slide risk, though in steep Alaska terrain he knows that's always a possibility.

Longtin accompanied building inspector William Stortz to look at newly installed drainage systems the day of the landslide and had to run for his life from the deluge of mud, rocks and trees that claimed Stortz. But he said he'd not anticipated a landslide coming down off the mountain.

"There's no obvious scars up there from previous landslides -- it's just not something you worry about when you go out and look at drainage," he said.

Friske and other homeowners are now trying to figure out what to do. He invested most of his savings in the new house. His parents, retired teachers who were going to live in the other half of the duplex, invested most of their savings.

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"I don't know about other people, but for us that was the house we were planning on living in the rest of our lives. We'd been waiting for a long time for a lot we thought was good," he said.

But it's now clear to Friske that Kramer Avenue is too dangerous.

"It's a high-risk area now, no question," he said. "I've got a landslide that goes through my front yard, and half the house."

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