With the coming of spring, construction has resumed at the end of Jarvis Street where housing is being built for people who are experiencing homelessness.
Plans call for a dozen tiny apartments and related facilities to be built before the onset of cold weather this fall, Sitka Homeless Coalition executive director Andrew Hinton said.
There are about 26 chronically homeless people in town, and many others who have marginal access to housing, Hinton said.
“What we are seeing is homelessness in the form of chronic homelessness, but also just in the form of individuals losing their homes and relying on an unstructured safety net of family and friends," he said.
He cited a Tribal Housing Needs Assessment from March of 2024 which found that in the past year 30 percent of respondents had opened their homes to someone experiencing homelessness.
Construction crews broke ground in the Hitx’i Saani (Little Houses) project in the fall of 2023, with completion scheduled within a year. But a number of delays – caused in part by difficulty in meeting the housing code requirement for parking -- have pushed the anticipated completion date to October 7, Hinton said.
The project is the first of its kind in Sitka, though the Homeless Coalition has worked in recent years with the United Methodist Church, among other groups, to provide various forms of shelter, showers and laundry for unhoused individuals.
The permanent structures now being built are “designed not only to provide housing but to create a pathway to long-term stability and healing for individuals experiencing chronic homelessness,” Hinton said. “This project isn’t just about building homes, it’s about creating a foundation where folks can begin to rebuild their lives with dignity and support. It reflects a deep community commitment to ensuring that no one is left behind.”
The project site is on a tract of Alaska Mental Health Trust land that the trust donated for housing the homeless. At present it's a large gravel pad with utility hookups and little else, but crews with CBC Construction are at work setting foundations.
"Early this year, we released a request for proposals for getting us from where we were -- that's the completion of the pad, as well as the underground utilities, which is what we already had... to the completion of our residential units," Hinton said. "We received a number of competitive proposals, and ultimately began working with CBC construction ... In the last month, since we started working with them, they've just moved so quickly and have been so on top of things. Right now, we're on track.”
As currently planned, the site will have fewer than ten parking spots, while the project as originally planned would have needed 27.
“Virtually none of the folks that we're serving have cars, and that would be incredibly expensive -- I mean, it would be more expensive than the whole project to have to create a parking lot that big, just especially as you go further from Jarvis Street, as the cost of the site work becomes more expensive,” Hinton said. “And we were very fortunate that the Planning Commission was able to work with us.”
As originally envisioned, the project would have had 12 standalone housing units. Plans now have 12 tiny apartments in two structures, and separate outbuildings for a communal kitchen and laundry unit and housing for the onsite caretaker. The entire construction site covers less than one acre.
Excluding design and preparatory work, the project is slated to cost about $1.4 million, raised from a variety of sources, from local donations to federal money from Housing and Urban Development. Like many nonprofits, the coalition has concerns about the stability of federal funding.
“Some of the funding we receive is federal, and I think, like every organization that receives federal funding, that is quite a scare right now," Hinton said. "We've got no reason to believe that our funding should be in jeopardy... We take comfort in the fact that knowing that we do have funding from so many different sources, that at a local level, we've received so much support. I mean, this project has received some federal funding, but is also funded by the White Elephant, the Rotary Club, and Sitka Tribe of Alaska."
Working with STA, he added, the coalition also has applied for an Indian Community Development Block Grant through HUD.
The experience of homelessness in Alaska’s rainforest is a constant challenge, and despite the work to provide shelter when possible, stable housing is the long-term solution, Hinton said.
“While we've been fortunate enough to partner with the United Methodist Church to provide some warm, safe space in the form of a shelter these last two winters, there really is no replacement for housing. Having a bed of one's own, a place that they can return to, that's really what we've seen change folks' lives,” he said.
