Government leaders say a multi-pronged approach is needed to tackle affordable housing in Sitka. The issue was high on the agenda when the Sitka Tribe of Alaska Tribal Council and the Sitka Assembly met for their semi-annual government to government dinner Thursday night (11-13-25).
Assembly member Katie Riley said phase one of the city’s land study — which looks at the potential for housing development on nine different parcels across Sitka — is almost complete.
“My goal is definitely to make sure that the kind of development we’re doing is solving some of the housing issues that we have here in Sitka, and really making these homes accessible to year-round Sitkans,” Riley said. “Obviously, we’re legally bound between what we can do and what kinds of things we can do with this land, but how can we explore those things as a city and really work with the tribe as well to meet the needs of your tribal citizens.”
Tribal council secretary Martha Moses said affordable housing should mean more than affordable spaces, but affordable power, water, sewer and solid waste.
“We’re losing families,” she said. “Our school system was at 1,800 students, and now we’re down to 1,000. We can build all the homes, but we’ll be like Adak or Attu with that corporation that built a whole hillside of houses, and they’re all brand new and they’re empty. We want affordable homes that are going to bring people to our community and bring them home. We hear that from our tribal citizens about, ‘How can you reach us out here?’ But we say, ‘No, you got to come home,’ but we’ve got to make it affordable for them.”
Both parties discussed adjusting the criteria for a city program that reduces utility costs for low-income Sitkans, which municipal administrator John Leach said is underutilized. For example, tribal council members asked the city to consider adjusting eligibility requirements to include Sitkans on Medicare, not just Medicaid.
Council chair Yeidikook’áa Dionne Brady-Howard said there’s a larger problem that the tribe has been grappling with. She said thresholds for things like the federal poverty line don’t accurately reflect the cost of living for Sitkans.
“We just realized that a lot of the programs we have, we’ve been grappling with how in the world are we going to get the assistance to the people who we know need it when we’re bound by this really stringent definition of who should be qualifying for it, when we know that the definition is far too narrow to be getting that help to people who really do need it,” she said.
Brady-Howard said both the city and tribe should make a venn diagram of where their interests intersect the most and collaborate on legislative priorities to better advocate for community members and tribal citizens moving forward.
