The Juneau Assembly evicted thirteen tenants for an empty lot. The lot does not yet exist. The developer is not yet chosen. The financing is not yet arranged. But the tenants are gone, and the homes — one of them the oldest still standing in the city, built in 1882 when Chester A. Arthur was president — are waiting for the bulldozers.

Alaska’s capital sits in a vise. Water on one side, glaciers and impenetrable forest on the other. The city of 31,600 can’t sprawl outward the way Anchorage or Fairbanks can, and thousands of seasonal workers arrive each summer to service cruise ships and fishing boats, turning a persistent housing shortage into an acute one. The gap sits at roughly 500 homes and is projected to grow. When the state of Alaska handed over a four-acre parcel atop Telephone Hill in 2023 — a ridge of bedrock crowned by seven homes dating to 1882 — the Juneau Assembly saw an answer that had literally been sitting on a hill overlooking downtown for 140 years.

As many as 155 apartments and condos. But every original structure would have to come down.

What followed is the part of the story that travels beyond Juneau. The Assembly finalized demolition in June 2025, evicted 13 tenants — including an 82-year-old flute maker and a 74-year-old retired lawyer — and then discovered it had no developer, no financing plan, and no construction timeline. It committed roughly $5.6 million to raze the homes and prep the site. In April, it paused the project to wait for contractors to produce something resembling a plan. The sequence — demolish first, figure out what to build later — is the part that should alarm anyone watching how small cities handle housing desperation.

I am not here to tell you the housing crisis does not matter. It matters. It is a wound in the body of a city, and the wound is real. But there is a difference between building housing and performing urgency, and what Juneau is doing on Telephone Hill looks less like building than like clearing ground for a promise it cannot yet keep and punishing people while it waits.

The seasonal dimension amplifies everything. Juneau’s economy runs on tourism and fishing — industries that flood the city with transient labor every summer and leave it half-empty by October. The housing shortage isn’t just a year-round resident problem; it’s an artifact of an economic model that demands peak-capacity shelter for workers who may only need it for four months. Building 155 permanent units to absorb a partly seasonal shortfall raises a question the Assembly hasn’t publicly answered: how much of the shortage would persist if the city treated seasonal housing as a distinct category rather than dumping every pressure into the permanent-housing pipeline?

The human cost is not an externality. John Ingalls rented one of the Telephone Hill homes for years. The city evicted him at 82. Mary Alice McKeen, 74, who lives in a 1913 home nearby, helped lead the petition to stop the demolition. She circulated a petition whose name told you everything it needed to tell you: “Stop the Bulldozers on Telephone Hill.” They gathered signatures. They packed the assembly hall with signs. They hired lawyers. The mayor said, “My heart’s out for you.” And then the Assembly finalized the demolition anyway.

“They provided dumpsters,” Ingalls said. That sentence will outlast whatever gets built on that hill.

In April, the Assembly paused the project. Not because they reconsidered the evictions. Not because they decided the historic homes might be worth saving. They paused because they needed contractors to weigh in on a more-definitive construction plan. The plan they did not have before they evicted the tenants. The financial plan they did not have before they decided to spend nearly six million dollars razing homes and prepping the hill for a developer they had not yet selected.

“You should really have a good plan before you, you know, you really ruin it,” McKeen said. She is a retired lawyer. She knows what she is watching.

The Catholic social tradition has a principle for this. It is called subsidiarity: higher bodies must not absorb functions that smaller, more immediate communities can perform well. The state of Alaska was a bad landlord on Telephone Hill. It did not maintain the homes. It let them decay. It handed them to the city. The city, faced with decay, reached for the bulldozer rather than the carpenter. The city decided that the highest and best use of a hundred-foot ridge of bedrock with seven historic homes on it was to spend public money making it into a hundred-foot ridge of bedrock with no homes on it, and then figure out what came next.

But subsidiarity is not only about who decides. It is about whether the deciding body is competent to the decision it has claimed. The Assembly was competent to evict the tenants. It was competent to budget for demolition. It was not competent to name the developer, secure the financing, or produce a construction plan. Those are the things it is now trying to do, after the evictions, after the demolition vote, after the tenants are gone and the front door of the yellow 1914 house swings open because no one is watching it.

This is not housing policy. This is demolition policy with a housing press release attached.

I am a carpenter before I am anything else. When you are repairing a chair, you do not break the legs off first and then check whether you have the wood to replace them. You assess what you have. You determine what can be saved. You build the repair plan before you swing the hammer. The city of Juneau swung the hammer first. Now it is looking for the wood.

The pattern isn’t unique to Juneau. Across Southeast Alaska, communities are caught between the economic logic of development and the identity logic of preservation — a tension that surfaces whenever land-use decisions arrive faster than the planning process can absorb them. The regional Tongass National Forest plan revision has drawn criticism from residents who say the timeline favors extraction over the kind of slow, deliberative resource stewardship that small Alaskan communities depend on for their sense of place. Telephone Hill is that same collision at building scale: the institutional reflex to clear first and plan second, to treat what exists as an obstacle to what might be built rather than as a resource whose destruction cannot be undone.

The temptation in a column like this is to make the historic homes the heroes and the housing crisis the villain, or the reverse. Both moves are too easy. The homes matter because they are the built record of a city’s life, and once you break the record, you cannot get it back. The housing crisis matters because people need places to live, and a city that cannot house its workers is a city that is failing its people. The failure on Telephone Hill is not that the Assembly chose housing over history. It is that the Assembly chose neither. It chose clearance, and called it action.

The corporal works of mercy include sheltering the homeless. They do not include displacing the housed to build shelter that does not yet exist. The two are not the same act. One is mercy. The other is something else.

The possibility space the Assembly hasn’t explored is wide. Adaptive reuse of at least some of the seven structures, mixed-density development that incorporates the historic homes, a seasonal-housing strategy that doesn’t require demolishing the city’s architectural memory — all of these were available as intermediate positions between “do nothing” and “bulldoze everything.” The Assembly went straight to the endpoint, then stalled.

I do not write this to condemn the Assembly members. Maureen Hall sat in her car in the rain next to one of the historic homes and told a reporter the city was getting beat up over this, and she was right. She is trying to solve a genuine problem. The mayor stood in front of a room full of people holding signs and said her heart was out for them, and I believe her. These are not cruel people. They are public servants who have mistaken the performance of urgency for the practice of competence, and the difference is eating their credibility from the inside.

If the city of Juneau wants to be trusted with the power to evict, to demolish, to clear ground, it must first demonstrate that it can build. It has not done that. It has demonstrated that it can clear. That is not the same thing. And the people of Juneau — the ones who packed the hall, the ones who circulated the petition, the eighty-two-year-old flute maker who lost his home for a plan that did not yet exist — are watching the gap between the two.

Dorothy Day wrote, “The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?” The revolution of the heart required here is smaller than Day’s. It is only this: before you knock a house down, know what you are going to put up.

The Assembly paused the project in April. That pause is a recognition, however reluctant, that the plan was insufficient. It is not too late to do what should have been done first: assess what can be saved, determine what must be built, and only then swing the hammer. The houses are still standing. The tenants are not coming back, and that harm cannot be undone. But the bulldozers are not yet on the hill.

That is a door, not a wall. The Assembly can walk through it.