Small Alaskan towns (Anchorage, Wasilla, Barrow: condo, houses, employment)

[ArcticPhoenix]

I'm not an Alaskan resident, and I don't plan on moving to Alaska (beautiful as it is, it's farking freezing). But I do have a question, and I apologize if it's been asked before, but.. what of the small frontier towns that rely upon goods to be flown in?

Will the rising costs of fuel cause some of these small settlements to disappear? Or do you think people will persevere? I'm really curious to hear all of your responses. Thanks!

[susitna-flower]

I believe you asked a very astute question. The numbers in those towns are dwindling....Many towns and villages however have access by water as well as air, so the cost also is for barging supplies in those cases, which is coordinated with summer schedules....

These are reasons many in rural Alaska support the development of our Natural Resources, especially vital to making a living in remote areas. It spreads the cost of bringing in supplies with the big companies associated with projects like the Red Dog Mine, and provides employment that makes the high cost of living possible.

Even areas like Anchorage would not fair well if ALL of rural Alaska had to move in just to afford fuel prices to heat their homes or generate electricity! The flood of people would drive prices for housing sky high!

[rotorhead]

Depends on where you're talking about. The smaller towns ON the road system will inevitably grow as people in the larger cities move further and further out in search of affordable land and housing. Many villages in the interior reachable only by air or by boat are already shrinking in population. It's not just the price of fuel, though that is a major factor. It's the price of EVERYTHING, and the fact that the wages of the already scarce jobs there haven't been keeping up with the rapidly increasing cost of living in the rural areas.

Increased heating fuel costs can be offset by going back to firewood as the primary heat source in many areas, but the effect on transportation cascades throughout the community. Shipping costs were already sky-high in the villages even when gas was relatively cheap, now they're ridiculous. We even see that here in the relatively easy-to-access areas of SE Alaska. Almost all of our essentials travel by sea on barges towed up from the pacific NW, pulled up by tugboats. Their fuel cost increases have been passed on along to us with price increases on virtually everything and exhorbitant shipping surcharges.


As far as evidence of the move to the cities, consider the following. I have a friend with connections at the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage. It's claimed that they're enrolling around a thousand new patients a month. Obviously not all of those folks are moving out of the villages to stay, but it would seem that enough are already moving into the Anchorage area to put a strain on the health care system.

[Floyd_Davidson]

Originally Posted by rotorhead

As far as evidence of the move to the cities, consider the following. I have a friend with connections at the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage. It's claimed that they're enrolling around a thousand new patients a month. Obviously not all of those folks are moving out of the villages to stay, but it would seem that enough are already moving into the Anchorage area to put a strain on the health care system.

That was a very good article. This one last paragraph though, probably isn't quite correct on perspective. The ANMC is not just a regional hospital in the same sense that, for example, the Samuel Simmons Memorial Hospital here in Barrow is. But just as some patients that are registered at the Barrow hospital actually live in Point Lay or Atqasuk, many patients that are registered at ANMC actually live in bush villages all around Alaska, not Anchorage or nearby road communities. ANMC is a facility that serves the entire state (in fact it is the only Level II Trauma Center in Alaska, and in that way serves all Alaskans, not just the Native or bush communities).

For example, there are no surgical facilities in Barrow. Any patient that needs surgery, whether it is scheduled in advance or an emergency, necessarily must be transfered (and thus registered) at another hospital, and in most cases that will be ANMC.

ANMC does function as the regional hospital for the South Central area. It is jointly owned by the Southcentral Foundation and the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium which represents all tribal health care organizations in Alaska.

Hence, while certainly there has been for several years a migration from the bush to urban areas, the registration numbers at ANMC would probably not be a valid measure of the numbers.

The State of Alaska's community database, which can be accessed via the States web page, might have better indicators though. For example (these aren't exact numbers, but the State's web page will provide them) Barrow's population peaked at almost 5000 people in about 2000, but the last census estimate (2006) that I've seen puts it at 4065 people. The numbers are approaching a 20% reduction over half a decade. That is an astounding figure!

[elgusano]

The Seldovia Tribal Medical Center is here in Homer, not in Seldovia, for example.

[susitna-flower]

I don't feel that people who are not independently wealthy or other wise financially secure without working at a steady job will move very many miles out of town even if they are on the road system...Fuel costs prevent folks from commuting long distances. Talkeetna for example is to far for people to live and work in Wasilla.

Homes and land may be cheaper, but then you have to work at the lower end jobs available, or the "government or health care" jobs which are fought over by locals, or professionals brought in for. Even a school janitor in this area is a job NEVER given up because it is one that will actually pay your bills.

Try sometime driving 80 miles RT for your weekly groceries, and see how far a $10 / hour job will go. THAT is why land and housing is lower out of town!

[rotorhead]

I suspect that a lot of new residents who move to the larger cities in AK deliberately choose a place well down the road because they're seeking "the Alaskan experience". Even if it's just to a bedroom community like Eagle River or Chugiak, some folks can't see living in Alaska and getting stuck in a zero-lot-line condo because housing in Anchorage is so pricey. I suspect that after a handfull of winters, a lot of folks find that living closer to the "big city" ain't so bad after all (especially on heavy snow days), but some folks just like a bunch of space around them rather than a bunch of neighbors.

Here in Haines, there's still plenty of space for houses right in town, but it seems like half the folks that work here live 20 or 30 miles out of town, out along the highway. A big part of it is housing costs, but some people just don't want to live in town even if they can afford it. I'm sure that >$5.00/gallon gas is gonna change the equation for a lot of folks, but I'd predict that people will change their vehicles rather than their locations. There's already a lot of Subarus on the road here, but I'll bet they're gonna get more and more common while the pickup trucks stay closer to home most days.

Thats one fundamental difference between living in the bush versus on the road system. The bush residents don't typically have the option of choosing radically more efficient vehicles. You can't really choose airplanes that are dramatically more fuel efficient than the ones in use today and still get any utility out of them. Virtually all the air taxi outfits serving the smaller bush communities are using the smaller piston singles, or Caravans at the most. Diesel engines for airplanes are in development, but so far there really aren't any practical or affordable retrofits available...yet. Snowmachines are a little better off, the newer four-stroke engined models are quite a bit less thirsty than the old two-strokes. They're not cheap though (either to buy or maintain), and even the newest snowmachines are far less efficient than modern cars when it comes to the amount of cargo/passengers they can carry on a given amount of fuel. Bush residents are already using small skiffs with low-horsepower motors since it's expensive to ship a boat anyway and gas has always been expensive there. Again, there's a switch underway from 2-stoke engines to the more fuel-efficient 4-strokes but the new engines are much heavier for the same horsepower and harder to keep maintained.

[warptman]

I made the switch to a four stroke Yamaha 50hp outboard from a 40hp mariner, night and day difference. This was about 4 years ago and two boats. The original boat it was on was a 18' Lowe bucket of rivets jonboat and now I use the Yamaha on my 18' welded Lund jonboat. I've never had any problems with the outboard since I bought it, change the oil and gearcase every year.

[ArcticPhoenix]

It really sounds like it's a raw deal for a lot of people trying to live in areas that actually have decent paying jobs available. So why is housing so cheap? Land is obviously abundant out there. What gives? I'll give you that Anchorage is very limited in the space it has with which to build, but beyond that, there's lots of wide open spaces. So why the hefty housing costs?

[Barkingowl]

I think part of the high costs are that all the building materials have to be brought up from the lower 48.