Elizabeth Place - Downtown Anchorage

Elizabeth Place includes ground-floor retail.

Unlike in 2010 when I made a list of the top ten projects to rise in Anchorage during the 2000s, I did not publish such a list for the closing of this last decade. But I've thought to myself that if I were to decide on what was the most significant project that would top the list for this last decade, it would probably have to be Elizabeth Place. Yes, there have been multistory housing projects built elsewhere in the city, not to mention more high-profile projects such as a dramatic museum expansion, but the significance of Elizabeth Place is its location in the heart of Downtown Anchorage. Numerous media sources reporting on the recently completed Elizabeth Place have given different timespans, with one source saying this is the first downtown residential development in ten years, another saying this is the first development in 30 years, and still another saying this is the first residential project since 2006. But the residential developments being referred to were not in the heart of downtown. There were of course a number of trendy multistory residential buildings built in the Bootleggers Cove neighborhood as well as in South Addition, but while the term downtown often tends to include those two neighborhoods (and even Government Hill), they do not makeup the downtown core. It is true that in 2006 a four story condominium was built on 7th Avenue and Cordova, but again, it is not in the downtown core. In terms of residential construction in the commercial center (between L Street and C Street), it has indeed been more than 30 years.

I can't say this for sure, but from what I know of, the last significant housing development in the core of downtown is the old Duke's 8th Avenue Hotel, which by the way has recently been restored into apartments by Cook Inlet Housing Authority (the same non-profit behind Elizabeth Place) and is now called Qanchi Place. Though it was formerly a hotel, there have in fact been Anchoragites who called that place home (I personally knew a family friend living there in the late 1990s). This property has been around long enough that you can see it in the 1963 postcard of Anchorage from my last post! Having been built in 1961, it has been over half a century since dense housing came to the heart of Downtown Anchorage.    

Hopefully Elizabeth Place will act as a wetting of the feet from which other developers would come into downtown to build market-rate housing on other sites, particularly those occupied by surface parking. The quest to fill empty lots in west downtown has played out over the course of several years as evidenced by my post back in 2014 when the city sold downtown property it owned in hopes that the land sale would spur redevelopment. For a long time I have looked to the surface parking spaces, including the one now occupied by Elizabeth Place, and imagined them being home to a wealth of five to six story mixed-use residential developments. Whether we see other developments follow remains to be seen. But with trendy developments around downtown's periphery continuing to be built, the area continues to further cement itself with a unique identity which should in turn attract more people and thus more demand for downtown living, including inside the core. With Downtown Anchorage already among the top desired neighborhoods in polling, I'm optimistic for downtown in the long run.