The Juneau Assembly is demolishing working-class homes for a housing plan that doesn’t exist.
On a four-acre granite outcrop called Telephone Hill, seven houses that held thirteen tenants now sit empty. The oldest—wood frame, Victorian fish-scale shingles, built in 1882—stood before Alaska was a territory, when the neighborhood housed the Navy and, later, the first commercial telephone company in the state. The tenants are gone, evicted by a city that wants to build 155 apartments and condos but has no contractor, no definitive construction plan, no financial scheme, and no answer for the working people it just displaced. The Assembly voted to raze the structures, spend $5.6 million on demolition and site preparation, and only afterward, in April, paused so builders could tell them whether the numbers were even possible. The tenants were already out. Their belongings went into dumpsters the city provided.
The Wall Street Journal’s Jim Carlton documented the evictions Sunday, and the reporting, read at length, renders the Assembly’s position plain. Juneau (population 31,600) runs out of room against geology, wedged between the Gastineau Channel and the Coast Mountains, hemmed by water on one side and glacial wilderness on the other. Every year thousands of seasonal workers arrive for fishing and tourism, and the city’s own estimates peg the housing shortfall at 500 units. When the state of Alaska handed the city the Telephone Hill parcel in 2023, the Assembly saw one thing: a chance to spend $5.6 million making a construction site.
The state had owned the hill since 1984, acquired for a capitol expansion that never happened. For thirty-nine years it let the homes deteriorate, then offloaded the neglect onto the city. The inspection that found restoration costs prohibitive was conducted by a municipality that had already decided to demolish. One of the tenants, John Ingalls, an eighty-two-year-old flute maker, is now a plaintiff in the lawsuit arguing the city violated its own ordinances. It is not only the elderly and poor who notice when a government’s opening move to address a housing shortage is to create more homelessness.
The structural observation is not that Juneau is uniquely heartless. It is that the city is operating inside a policy architecture that invites exactly this sequence: a municipality starved of federal dollars and constrained by geographic boundaries—the same interplay of mountain, forest, and sea that shapes every Southeast Alaska land-use fight, including the ongoing Tongass plan revision—reaches for the quickest show of action, which is demolition, because demolition is visible, and a visible $5.6 million expenditure reads to voters as decisiveness. It is political capital spent in hardhat language that bypasses the harder work of preservation and finance. The crisis is real. The solution is not, and the disconnect matches a pattern the housing scholar Matthew Desmond named in Evicted (2016): “We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.” Evicting thirteen households to clear ground for units that may never be built is not an error of execution. It is a policy that creates poverty while purporting to alleviate it.
The city had options it hasn’t explored. Adaptive reuse—renovating existing structures for housing while adding density on surrounding land—is not a novel concept. Detroit and Portland have converted schools, warehouses, and historic homes into mixed-use housing. The four-acre Telephone Hill parcel could almost certainly accommodate some combination of restored historic structures and new construction. The city’s own consultants studied the site. The question is whether they were asked to price anything other than a blank slate. “Highest and best use,” Assemblywoman Maureen Hall called the demolition, the vocabulary of commercial real estate applied to the oldest standing house in the city.
The political costs are already accruing. Voter anger unseated an assembly incumbent in October 2025, replacing them with an anti-demolition challenger. Three evicted tenants have sued. The Assembly’s April pause looks less like prudent project management and more like an admission that the project lacks the basic scaffolding of a real development. Mary Alice McKeen, a retired lawyer who helped lead the opposition petition, captured the sequence: “You should really have a good plan before you, you know, you really ruin it.”
The telephone in Telephone Hill once connected a remote gold-rush town to the rest of the continent. The Assembly is cutting the line, then asking why it’s dark. If the city wants to address a housing shortage, the immediate course is to preserve the existing affordable stock, not erase it, and to press the state and federal governments for the capital and the land-policy changes that a city trapped between ocean and icefield cannot supply alone. The Assembly instead chose to spend $5.6 million making thirteen units of housing disappear. That is not a plan. It is the city’s confession that it has no plan, dressed in hardhat language and dumped on the curb with everything the elderly tenants once owned.