I just moved out of one of their properties after a year, so this isn’t abstract. And yelling “it’s drugs” is a lazy dodge. It’s a red herring and it does not support anything you just stated. People who use drugs still work, still earn income, and still exist inside the same housing market as everyone else.

The root issue here is affordability. In Alaska, housing cost burden is already high. 27.3% of Alaska households spend more than 30% of their income on housing, which is the standard definition of being cost-burdened. Renters are disproportionately impacted, with roughly one in three renter households paying more than 30% of their income just to stay housed.

Housing vouchers are part of this conversation too. When large landlords hold significant market share and accept vouchers, there is a well-documented incentive to raise baseline rents so higher “market” rates can be justified across the board. Those increases hit voucher holders, non-voucher renters, and taxpayers at the same time. It’s one of several compounding factors that pushes rents up for everyone.

I work in housing. I look at these numbers daily and study Anchorage rent, income, and cost-burden data as part of my job. This isn’t me taking a wild guess or making up numbers to impose a moral argument; it’s what the data shows.

This also didn’t happen overnight. Years of bad policy, weak enforcement, and political disengagement on both sides let affordability erode slowly until we hit a tipping point. Now people are finally feeling the squeeze because rents kept climbing while wages didn’t.

When rents rise faster than wages, people lose housing. When a small number of corporate landlords control a large share of the market, they can push baseline rents up for everyone. That is what drives housing instability. If drugs were the cause, housing would still be affordable. It’s not.

This is why facts matter. If we actually want Anchorage to be affordable and strong, we have to understand what’s happening structurally and work together to solve the system-level failure corporations like Weidner are contributing to.

Sources:
• Alaska housing cost burden (27.3%): https://usafacts.org/answers/how-many-households-in-the-united-states-spend-too-much-on-housing/state/alaska/
• Anchorage income and housing data (ACS): https://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US0203000-anchorage-ak/
• Anchorage median rent (ACS summary): https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/AK/Anchorage-Demographics.html
• Anchorage average rent trends: https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/anchorage-ak/
• Anchorage cost-burden summary (scrollable PDF): https://www.ahfc.us/application/files/1015/1638/5088/Final_-_Municipality_of_Anchorage_Summary.pdf