Housing Is a Problem Even in a State With Declining Population

25:01The capacity is as much of an issue to some of them as funding or construction materials, because we can put money out there. There can be resources to build housing. But if no one knows how to do anything with it, that can stop a community from actually developing housing. So that's one of the things that we've been doing with some of our development initiatives is not just coming forward with some of the needed things like money or some of the other of like federal resources, but saying, hey, we know some of the things that maybe your community doesn't. Because in addition to being spread out community-wise, our skill base as a state is also spread out.

25:34We have people all over the state who understand things. There are people who are great at procurement that are located off the road system that don't have running water. There are people that understand financial, fine, Stanford grads in some of these communities. But you need to put together a team of people that understand a lot of things to make housing happen. So when we see that they have three of the five things that they need to make a housing development move forward. There may be the missing two things that we have that we need to bring into the community. That's as much a part of the development equation as capital is.

26:06Yeah, Daniel, I think that speaks to Alaska Housing Finance Corporation's partnerships with a lot of entities in the state. I think of the Alaska Association of the Housing Authorities. That's a 14-member organization of different regional housing authorities in the state. and how we're able to communicate with them and bring additional resources to bear so that we can be in this together, right? Because like I said earlier, there's no magic bullet. There's no one size fits all. And to be effective, you have to provide that assistance as a team member. I think there's just like a really interesting idea that like, you know, in a place like New York City, like of course, any new housing development is going to take lots of people with lots of different skills, whether it's the person who knows how to put in plumbing, the electrical, knows how to deal with permitting.

26:57And, you know, I'm sure many of the big developers in New York City are like one-stop shops or maybe it's a two-stop shop or whatever. And the idea that in Alaska, like all that knowledge is there, but it's just so spread out. So you don't have that sort of like knowledge density or those network effects, which we don't really think of, I think, a lot when it comes to housing. But it's very intuitive when you talk about it in this context. And think about, right, back to the population of the state. we still have to do all the same things. There's still all the same jobs. There's just over 700 ,000 people, right?

27:28But if you're in a place like New York, there's millions of people to do the jobs, right? So there's much greater opportunity here in the state for individuals to step into a role and learn new things. But there's not as many of us to do the things that need to get done. That's, I think, one of our strengths, because there are a lot of things that are challenging about building housing in Alaska, but I'm trying to make it sound like it's all doom and gloom. We have a lot of things that do go for us well. It's just in a fairly small community. It's a hub off the road system. And the mayor was on a job site with us, and one of the carpenters referred to her affectionately in a way that probably HR wouldn't like.

28:07But they're very jovial. And this elected leader runs a gift shop in town, and she's on a first-name basis with a contractor. She punched the utilities director in the arm when he got out of the truck. I mean, they know each other. When we go in with this sort of connection, where they're neighbors and these are people that live right next to each other, they're willing to help each other in a way that I don't know if Mayor Adams has that relationship with carpenters in New York City. I'm sure he would say he did. He has some relationship with carpenters. What the nature of it is, we don't exactly know.

28:37Oh, you've heard of our mayor? But they care and they're a lot more predisposed to work with each other because they live in a way that's probably difficult for people in major cities with hundreds of thousands of people to understand the relationships between the elected leaders that we may work with and the people on the ground that are actually going to be able to do the work. And that's what's made some of the initiatives that we've been doing recently actually work because these are people that actually know their neighbors and they have a really vested, a joint vested interest as a community in making something happen.

29:05So that is one of the things that we have a lot of challenges, but that's one of our greatest strengths when we go into the communities is being able to leverage those relationships.

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31:22Visit metronome.com to see how companies like OpenAI and Anthropic launch billing as fast as they launch products. That's metronome.com. Just to hone in on this point, can you give us an example of, you know, a project that you did in, I don't know, like a Sitka or something like that, that, you know, where you were trying to bring in the requisite skills or the requisite construction workers and expertise in order to get something off the ground? And like in excruciating detail, walk us through what that process actually looks like. Okay. So there are a lot of places in Alaska where housing is such a challenge that local employers have resorted to actually building housing for their employees.

32:04State workers don't really have that option because the state doesn't have deep pockets like some of the big health clinics do to do all these other things or like banks. So what we started seeing was our executive director, Brian Butcher, was reaching out to some of the other commissioners in the state, and they had positions that had been vacant for a long time. And they were in danger of losing the positions because they had been vacant for so long because there was nowhere for these people to live. So if you go out to any of these communities, the person who takes care of the runway in the winter, which is your main source of transport for logistics, might not be able to find housing.

32:36This is a life and death issue for some of these communities. So we're like, well, why aren't we? We have programs. Why aren't these communities utilizing our programs to develop housing. Well, we decided to get a little bit more direct. We're like, well, we're, they're local governments. We're a quasi-state agency. We can work with them on a government-to-government basis and say, what is it going to take to get housing developed in your community? Because this is like a critical issue for community and we need to come together and figure out a way to solve it. So we developed something that we came up with.

33:06We called it the last run to your housing initiative after our state's motto. And we approached local governments with about$5 million dollars each, just a couple of them, and said, we want X number of housing units to go up in your communities, some professional workers, some affordable housing. We tried to make it big enough so that it would be a big enough dollar amount that would be attractive for the community and generate some interest. But that's what we did. We didn't come and say, it has to be a two bedroom. It has to be this X, Y, or Z. We allowed the ask to the community to come from a place where we could be responsive to what they wanted to do.

33:40Because some of them wanted to help out municipal people. We didn't know what kind of land they'd have, what kind of capacity they'd have. And all the conversations with the five partners that we approached were extremely different. One community was down 20 people, and this is a small community, so down 20 people for a municipal staff is big. They didn't even have a city attorney. They're like, we basically need you to do almost everything for us. We'll be on a review committee for you, but that's about all we can do. Another community, they had land and they're like, yeah we have a procurement department it's great we have land we don't know how any of this stuff works with your program so we flew down there and we did training with them and all this other stuff another community they didn't understand a lot of it we had to go up there and it was like an episode of shark tank sitting there for a couple of hours while everyone from the community started asking questions about the resource because a lot of these people are sold a bill of goods from folks that fly in and offer probably well intentioned help saying oh Alaska we'll show you the way.

34:39Let us lead you out of the wilderness. And to jump in there. That is what Alaskans do not want to hear. Somebody from the lower 48 coming here telling us what we need or how to do something. We're from New York and we're here to help. Yeah, because that conversation does not go over well. I mean, we're flying into a community of maybe a thousand people and a bunch of the community elders are at the table. We're the guests in the community. So it's like, here's our resource. We want to help you. And that's pretty much just letting the conversation play out. So the approaches were very different based on what the community wanted from us.

35:09But the thing that underpinned all of it was we were coming to them with a resource and a promise of support that we would stand behind. And everything else beyond that was the community's decision as to what they wanted to do. Did they want to take a more active role? Did they not want to? Like some of them were dealing with city managers who are dealing with sewer lines, things like this, any number of issues. They don't know how to negotiate with the contractor. They have no idea if a contractor asking for this payment request is reasonable based on the facts and circumstances. So for some of them, we were just a lifeline saying, we have lots of developments and at any given point in time, we have hundreds of millions of dollars in developments that are going on across the state.

35:49So this is second nature for us. And we can provide that technical expertise from a place that they trust because they've worked with us for a number of years. This isn't the first conversation that we've had with a lot lot of the communities. They know that the agency that we represent doesn't have a history of burning them. So when they call and say, is this reasonable? And we say, well, have you thought about this? Have you thought about this? Have you thought about this? They're having a conversation that anyone else could have with them, but they trust us to provide them the truthful answer.

36:16And we were able to do a lot with that one. Since you mentioned the hundreds of millions in development, let's actually talk about the finance part of finance. And we're very interested in various financing models for housing and are there way, especially given where interest rates are, et cetera, and who bears the burden. Will you talk to us about how you finance yourself, whether you use the municipal bond market and our creative ways of financing the construction of housing in Alaska that maybe those of us in the lower 48 don't appreciate? So I'm not the CFO and our CFO hockey player that he is.

36:52I would probably come down here very aggressively if I try to explain what he did. We're a self-supporting corporation. So we have a mortgage department that provides mortgage financing. Our finance department is active in the bond market, making sure that our programs have capital. A lot of the programs that Jimmy and I operate are funded from AHFC's earnings. We're under the Executive Budget Act. So our budget goes to Juneau every year and it's allocated. And usually there's a recommendation of what to do with the earnings from the corporation for some of our programs. So like our department and the planning department, we manage roughly 20 programs and it's a combination of state, federal, and foundation grants and tax credits from treasury.

37:34And then Jimmy has other funding sources from a bunch of different places. So it's a self-supporting corporation. Sometimes there are foundations that come in and match other things like that. There are financial tools that we use in housing. some of them are more relevant than others when you're looking at development that costs say i don't know five hundred thousand dollars to develop a unit off the road system going from a six percent interest rate down to a five and three eighths doesn't really make that five hundred thousand dollar a door something less prohibitive so what we tend to see in terms of the things that are driving housing in the mission spaces that jimmy and i think work in a lot it's not usually these things like people throw out terms like mezzanine financing or these other weird types of debt products.

38:20Those don't usually move the market for the multifamily stuff in the space that I see at the corporation. But there's an entire world of home ownership and lending and the relationships with the banks that we don't really touch that I don't want to speak to because that's probably really out of our area of expertise. Yeah, I would say that's true. Okay. Well, sort of a related question, but I imagine no matter what's going on with your finances, you are limited in some way in what you can do. And you have housing needs in relatively large urban centers within Alaska. So whether it's Fairbanks or Anchorage or whatever.

38:57And then you have lots of housing needs in lots of different rural communities. How do you decide where you need to intervene and how you actually prioritize a project? As Daniel mentioned, Lask Housing Finance Corporation is a quasi-state governmental entity. So we take our direction from the legislature and the governor's office essentially, right? So there's a lot of the initiatives that we work on are coming with that direction and that intent. For example, one of the areas that I work on and we work on on our team is improving the housing stock in rural communities through weatherization and making sure that individuals in those communities, again, have housing that is appropriate for their climate because, you know, they, you know, the people that have lived in Alaska for long durations and over the generations, you know, they've always had this can-do attitude and I'm going to put some sweat equity into something that really shines through in their lifestyle and their community.

40:05But oftentimes, they don't necessarily have the resources to do that. And Daniel was talking about the last Frontier Housing Initiative program. And I think that's a wonderful way to help the community is providing those resources. So when we go into a community with our weatherization program, we're not just going in to do one house. We're going to come in and we're going to do the community because we need to take advantage of economies of scale. We need to make sure that if we're going to put materials, insulation, windows and doors, things of this nature on a barge to then ship them up to the Norton Sound and maybe up a river to get to the community so that we can do an overall weatherization project in that whole community and impact 70, 80 % of the housing units there.

40:54So I think having the ability to take advantage of economies to scale and then work with the community to make that housing more resilient is very appropriate. Yeah. So on the subject of prioritizing, we're a stay-weight agency. So it's kind of like asking a parent to choose their favorite child. We try and make sure that our resources are allocated in a way that responds to the entire state in a way that's relevant. So one of the things that we do, like I said, we operate a lot of programs, over 20 in our department alone. We get a lot of information from the operations of these programs of how much homeless housing interventions cost, how much developments cost, operating cost trends, things like this.

41:34And then we also commission primary data on the rental market. And then we do a quarterly survey of lenders to try and understand what is the market doing on its own that we don't need to do because it's already taken care of it. So we're trying to make sure that we're not being redundant to what's already happening and we're actually serving an unmet need in our state with the housing resources. So that's a big part of it. But then the other thing, and one of the things that makes the last volunteer housing initiative work and some of our COVID responses, we talk to our partners. We have 70 different partners all across the state and we engage with them on a fairly regular basis.

42:09And we just ask questions like, what's going on in your community? I mean, technology has been able to do a lot about expanding access to programs and things like that. But the old school way of actually connecting and engaging with partners face-to-face, going out to their communities, like what we've been doing over the summer, that is really where we learn a lot of what we need to do to reposition our programs. Because especially with our state programs, these are on Word documents that we can change upstairs if Brian gives us the go-ahead or tells us that we need to change direction. A lot of our homeless response initiatives from COVID were developed based on feedback that we'd heard from our homelessness supportive housing partners over the last decade.

42:45The last Frontier Housing Initiative, the same thing. When we're going through revisions to some of our writing programs, we actually call people and say, well, how do you make a decision on when it's time to renovate your project? Or when you're looking at a development, what do you actually walk us through the process? We try and understand things from them. So it's not so much us making a decision from our little forestry building here in Anchorage for the entire state, we really do try and inform that based on the data that we get from our programs and the conversations from our community partners.

43:16Let me ask a related question. How do you judge the success of one of your programs? Because again, I imagine in a rural area like in Anchorage, maybe you could measure it in sort of traditional ways. So we built a bunch of housing and then we saw a bunch of people move in and we saw economic growth increase by whatever basis point or percent or whatever. But if you're talking about a remote community where maybe a large chunk of the population is basically subsistence living, how do you actually measure the difference that your housing initiatives have made for that particular community? Quantitatively, it's very difficult to come up with a benchmark that doesn't basically redline communities.

43:55Because if you look at it on a quantitative standpoint and say it has to be this growth rate or this unit thing, you're going to disadvantage one community or not. I'd say over the 17 or so years that I've been here, what I've come to view success from in terms of our initiatives is we do a lot of benchmarking when we design these things and whether or not the outcome delivered more than I thought. That's usually what I see as success. Was there something that we didn't account for that we captured in the process that drove the outcome further than we thought it would? The last Frontier Housing Initiative, we thought we were going to get 53 units.

44:30We got over 60. So our leverage rates for the units were in excess of what I did or what we were modeling when we set that up. We were able to get broad based support that led to other new programs. So we got more than we thought we were going to, and people seemed happy with it. That tends to breed success that has support for our programs going forward in the future. So I know it's a kind of a fuzzy thing in a quantitative world, but it's really more of a qualitative thing that drives whether or not what we did works, at least from my perspective. And I'm going to take a little different approach in thinking some of the space that my team and I operate in, and that's focusing on the existing housing stock.

45:07And I talked a little bit about the weatherization aspect. So what we've done in Alaska Housing since the early 90s is developed an energy modeling software, which is unique to the state of Alaska. We call it ACWARM, AKWARM. And what this tool allows you to do is assess the building's energy efficiency level from a performance standpoint. So if we're going to go into a community and weatherize it, like I talked about earlier, you know, we do an energy modeling of that home to determine and benchmark its performance. So if we're going to then do insulation and air sealing and some other aspects to improve its resilience, we can then measure that on the back end.

45:51Thinking back to 2008 or 2009, the state of Alaska made a very large investment in weatherization. I mean, two big programs. One was targeted more toward the low-income residents, and it was weatherization services provided by many of our partners throughout the state at no cost to the participant. And the other one was a rebate of up to$10 ,000 for homeowners making improvements to the house. And what this allowed us to do was create a database of more than 100 ,000 housing units throughout the state, right? And there's, what is it, correct me if I'm wrong, Daniel, but in the neighborhood of like 260 ,000 occupied housing units somewhere in that neighborhood.

46:34I try to never do math in public, but that sounds right. Yeah. And at least owner are occupied. And so you think about having a database of over 100 ,000 of these buildings in one centralized location, and you have information on how much insulation's in there, the square footage, the location, the building performance. I mean, that's an incredible wealth of information that you then can use to make decisions. One of the things that we've heard is that Alaska has particularly high quality public data, in part due to the dividend that people get from the permanent income fund and the people are willing to hand over some data in order to get that check.

47:14So it sounds like you guys have it better than many in terms of having sort of some visibility into your own state. I want to ask about one of the things in New York City is that there's a fair amount of public housing, but there's a perception that it's not kept up well, that it's in disrepair, that elevators go unfixed, et cetera. Public housing is under your purview here at the Housing Finance Corporation. Talk about how that works. And also maybe we could use some lessons or what you've learned about how to keep the housing stock there good. Yeah. So the public housing is a different department than what Jimmy and I manage.

47:55What I can say is that the units that we operate that HFC owns do tend to be kept up better than a lot of the other folks. So the stories that you may have heard or read about in other cities, I think our units tend to be kept up very well. It's one of the benefits of being the type of agency that we are. If there's an issue with one of the units, it's very easy to get through to someone at HFC to connect with it. And I don't know the relationship that other housing authorities have in other states. I'm guessing they have a different reporting structure than what we have here at HFC, where Brian has a very close relationship with the folks in the elected government and all these other things.

48:35So they tend to look nice relative to the other ones. We read the same stories that you do about other places, like that wouldn't happen here. But maintenance is an issue in Alaska. Sorry, did you want to say something? Yeah. So in the room here, we also have Stacey Barnes, Director of Government Relations and public affairs here at the Housing Finance Corporation. Come in. Come into the conversation. Well, thank you. So you've had some really great dialogue. And a couple of things that I was thinking about as you were talking about it is, as it relates to public housing and the work that we do statewide, you know, we're one of 39 of the original moving to work agencies, which is a designation.

49:13So what's the moving to work? Moving to work. It was a designation that was authorized by Congress for us when Senator Stevens was still in the U.S. Senate. And that gave us great flexibility to accommodate many of the needs that we see across the state. So as a result of this designation, we've been able to provide a lot of flexibility and meet the needs of Alaskans where they're at. So we have public housing in 16 communities across the state. We own and manage more than 2 ,000 properties or so. And we also work really closely with landlords across the state. And on the question of funding, Of course, there's never enough HUD funding to meet all of the needs in New York or elsewhere.

49:53Our state augments the funding that comes in because of the success that our mortgage and our finance business have. And as a result, we pay a dividend to the state of Alaska. Jimmy mentioned being under the Executive Budget Act. That means that we get authority to spend some of the dividend toward our public housing maintenance. And that has been really successful in helping us to maintain the units. All right. So as we're wrapping up this conversation, I guess one thing I would be really interested in hearing from you is what do you think is like the big takeaway from the Alaska experience that could pertain to the lower 48?

50:29What should people know about the housing market here and your housing initiatives that could possibly have some insights for, you know, housing bottlenecks elsewhere in America? I thought a little bit about this question as we've been talking over the last hour or so. And I take a lot of what Daniel talked about with regard to how we are working with our partners in specific communities and meeting the needs of those community members where they're at. you cannot have one big magic policy to fit every situation throughout the state and i honestly think that other places throughout the country can take that to heart that you have to recognize that giving the power to the people to make the decisions and giving them the resources to determine the path forward for their situations is a best approach and a best practice that we've taken here in Alaska.

51:28And I think that's something that others can take away from this conversation. Yeah. I guess from the lessons I think I've learned from our implementation of some of the COVID initiatives and what we did with the last turn to your housing initiative, I'd say that there's a change in terms of how we do work as housing professionals that feels like it's happening at different speeds all across the country. Through the pandemic, we were able to develop systems that really connected us to our partners. And we used a shared space. And through the last Frontier Housing Initiative, we're connecting partners to our institutional infrastructure here at Alaska Housing.

52:06And people are able to, in other communities, do things that used to take self-contained agencies with the staff and a finance department and all these other things because they're able to connect with our resources. So they're able to do more in a sort cohesive community framework now than they could a couple of years ago. When you think about vacation rentals, we talked about that earlier. People have owned houses for a long time that they could have rented out, but now with platforms online, they can connect to some corporate infrastructure and someone traveling here from Japan can find their house in the Kenai Peninsula and rent it for the weekend that they're in Alaska.

52:42So the people on the Kenai Peninsula that are doing that are able to leverage some corporate infrastructure that exists somewhere else to have market opportunities for them and their community. These sorts of connections can apply to some of the housing programs. And we're starting to see that happen where we're connecting communities that are off the road system with communities that are on the road system within our state. So Alaskans in Juneau are helping Alaskans in Nome operate some of our programs. And these barriers that have historically been there through technology for any number of reasons are starting to come down.

53:15And technology is really helping us expand access to some of our programs to people in communities that may not have had all of the necessary tools to utilize them in the way. And that's a really exciting thing. It's bringing a lot of people together and doing more for our state than we could have a decade ago. And I just probably close by saying that our bonds are rated AA plus and higher on Wall Street. We had more than$600 million in single family mortgage activity last year. And the delinquency rate on our loans is less than one third of 1%. We are doing exceptionally well there. So you heard Daniel and Jimmy talk a lot about partnership, but we heard Mary Daly talk a lot about resilience as well.

53:52And the people of Alaska are very resilient and we're very optimistic as well as we work together in the smallest and most remote communities to attempt to tackle these many challenges. I think for me listening to you, it's like one of these things is by necessity, you have to have a lot of collaboration, which is a word everyone uses all the time, but you're literally, you know, so many different sort of entities and vehicles under one roof. And that seems like a sort of necessity, but it also seems like the type of structure that, you know, in other states or like New York City, where a lot of authority is extremely vulcanized or other fights about who has authority, like maybe merge some departments and actually put them under one roof could be a pretty useful takeaway.

54:34Anyway, Jimmy, Daniel, and Stacey, I'm glad you also joined us. Thank you so much for coming on AdLoss. That was really fascinating and really educating. Thanks for allowing me to pop in. Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks so much.

55:01Tracy, I love that conversation. I love the detail. I love, you know, in our conversation, we talked with Mary Daly and she talked about Alaska's economies and listening to housing is like very clear what that means, that this is just a very diverse state in terms of the challenges and the nature of living arrangements. You definitely get a sense of it from that conversation. The other thing I was thinking about was in terms of like the usefulness of this type of program, I can imagine having dealt with a bunch of contractors that just being able to call someone up, a government agency or quasi agency and ask, like, I just got a quote for the following activity.

55:36Does this sound reasonable to you as someone who has been involved in many, many of these projects? That would be a huge helping point just when you're getting started. I think another takeaway for me from this conversation and others is that like infrastructure bottlenecks or choke points in the lower 48, everyone started paying attention to them in the second half of 2020. And that they feel like endemic to the nature of living in Alaska. The idea that if the person who clears the runway can't find a house right then, that that is an open position. And then that threatens the lifeline of an entire community.

56:12That is not like a 2022 story. That's a story that's like endemic to how Alaska operates. And so it feels like all these things that we've just sort of like woken up to are like the core like challenges of, you know, operating the economy here. Alaska is truly an Odd Thoughts themed state. Yeah, it really is. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Check out the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation. Maybe some lessons to be learned in your state.

56:46Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at CarmenArmand, Dash O 'Bennett at DashBot, and Kale Brooks at KaleBrooks. For more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLots, where we have the daily newsletter and all of our episodes. You can chat about these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash OddLots. And if you enjoy OddLots, if you like it when we travel to Alaska to learn more about its various economies, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free.

57:19All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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