Rural housing crisis intensified by COVID-19 pandemic

With more COVID-19 cases being detected in regional villages rather than in Nome in recent weeks, communities across the region have to deal with how they’re going to protect their residents from the pandemic. With public mask mandates and travel restrictions tightening down in many villages, one longstanding systemic issue has again come to the fore: healthy, affordable housing. The rural Alaska’s housing crisis has been well documented, but in a time when isolation and distance from others can be a matter of life and death, the crisis has become even more urgent.
Delbert Pungowiyi has lived in Savoonga for most of his life and served on the village’s governing council for nine years. In Savoonga about 60 percent of households are overcrowded. Pungowiyi said the village has faced housing shortages for years, with many people forced to live in cramped conditions under crumbling roofs. “If we could get some housing inspectors to come out and inspect the homes, I believe many of them would be condemned as unfit for human habitation,” he said.
Sue Steinacher was a Nome-based activist advocating for the city’s homeless population when she started getting involved in village housing. She described her first visit to overcrowded homes in Savoonga as an eye-opening experience. “You go into multiple homes that have got floors rotting and buckling, in parts of the house the ceiling might have collapsed, there is plywood and Visqueen over the windows, and all of this is heated with only a little oil stove,” she said. “And there’ll be 14 people in the house, that’s got two little bedrooms.”
The threat of COVID-19 has only intensified the need for adequate housing in Savoonga. The village has imposed restrictions on nonessential travel, but Pungowiyi said stress about the pandemic is still high. “Our fear is that we have too many vulnerable people – elders and those with health issues – in our community. The fear is that it’ll have a devastating impact on our people,” he said. “It is really serious stuff.” While the village’s relatively new clinic offers some space for travelers to self-isolate, the high degree of overcrowding would make it virtually impossible to contain the virus if it made it into the community.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) defines “overcrowded” as having an average of more than one person per room, and “severely overcrowded” as having an average of more than one and a half people per room. The last major study of overcrowding in Alaska was released in 2018 by the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation and found that the Nome Census area was the third most overcrowded region in the state, with 14 percent of households overcrowded and another 13 percent severely overcrowded.
Those numbers can be misleading, though, because city of Nome tends to be much less overcrowded than the region’s villages. Non-hub communities in the region had an overcrowding rate of approximately 37 percent, and a severe overcrowding rate of 19 percent, meaning that more than half of regional households outside of Nome are overcrowded. For comparison, the severe overcrowding rate nationwide is around 1 percent.
All that overcrowding makes basic social distancing and pandemic prevention nearly impossible. Some villages have no available quarantine housing for COVID-19 patients, and some village residents who tested positive have been transported to Nome to prevent them from infecting the friends and family they’re forced to share a room with.
Another consequence of crowded housing is poor indoor air quality. The 2018 housing assessment found that 20 percent of homes in the region had no ventilation, which correlates with a high risk for respiratory illness. Alaska had the highest rates of tuberculosis in the country according to a 2019 report, and Alaska Natives died at rates four times the national average from the 2009 H1N1 flu.
Funding for housing in regional villages mainly comes from the Indian Housing Block Grant, a program set up by HUD in 1996. Through the program, each community receives a set amount of money every year to build affordable housing. But the cost of construction is so high that most villages– with Stebbins and Unalakleet as notable exceptions – pool their resources into the Bering Strait Regional Housing Authority, or BSRHA, which coordinates the construction of new housing across the region.
Every year, the BSRHA combines the annual grant money coming in from each of its constituent villages and funnels it into a handful of projects, with the goal of accomplishing more than any individual village could get done on its own. Each year, the BSRHA focuses on a different village and uses its combined funds to build housing there. Even combined, though, the funds are woefully inadequate. The Indian Housing Block Grant has never been adjusted for inflation or the cost of freight, so in 2017 it had 28 percent less purchasing power than it did when it was established more than 20 years prior, while other federal spending in Alaska actually increased 40 percent from 1998 to 2011.
One HUD estimate found that the region would need about 1,000 more homes to alleviate its current housing shortage, costing close to half a billion dollars. Meanwhile, the BSRHA’s budget in 2018 was $5.8 million, which included everything from staff salaries to office space, in addition to funds for building new homes. The annual budget of the Indian Housing Office, which runs housing programs for Indigenous people across the U.S., was just $600 million.
 “When you hear those numbers, you start to get what the problem is,” Steinacher said. “This goes all the way to Congress and severe, severe underfunding.”
Savoonga got four new houses and a duplex last time it was their turn for BSRHA funding in 2016 – a drop in the bucket for a community of more than 700 people – and can’t expect any more development for about 10 years. The 2018 HUD report concluded “if construction rates continue at their current pace, they will not be able to keep up with projected population demand.”
Another possible source of funding could be homelessness assistance, which is also distributed by HUD to help communities provide shelter for the homeless. Steinacher, who has been involved with Nome Emergency Shelter Team (NEST), has been arguing for a long time that village overcrowding is really homelessness in another form. “My point year after year was that Native families are not going to put another Native family out on the street to literally freeze to death,” she said. Instead, village residents whose houses have collapsed or who can’t afford their heating bills are forced to move in with their neighbors, even if their neighbors have no space for them. “And those people deserve to be counted,” Steinacher said.
Funding for homelessness assistance, however, is allocated based on an annual “point in time count,” a single January day each year when communities across the country count and report their homeless populations. While large cities like Anchorage have well-staffed and well-organized teams to get accurate counts each year, smaller rural communities often don’t even know the count is going on. Steinacher said that some years, people in the NEST were the only homeless people counted in all of rural Alaska, and so the vast majority of the state is unable to receive any homeless assistance funding.
Paul Winders, Vice President of Operations for the BSRHA, said that while funding is a major issue, there are administrative and organizational hurdles as well. “Before the Housing Authority can do anything, we need to be granted access to a lot that we can build a house on,” he said. “And some of the lots that were negotiated several years ago are now no longer available.”
One homeowner may have built on a neighbor’s empty lot, or an ATV trail may have appeared, and the entire project needs to be renegotiated before anything can be built. If communication between the tribe, BSRHA, and other regional and state entities becomes interrupted, it can set building projects back years. BSRHA has had three different presidents in the last six years, and Winders said that sometimes when personnel rolls over, records are lost and negotiations have to start from scratch.
This year, BSRHA was planning on building six to 12 homes, “but because of COVID-19 and other issues with our predecessors, we’re only going to be building two,” Winders said. However, he also said that since he started in January, he has witnessed strong communication between the BSRHA and the tribes, and he expressed confidence that next year – especially if COVID-19 gets under control – the BSRHA would be able to up its output.
Another source of hope may be technical innovation. Aaron Cooke, an architect at the Fairbanks nonprofit Cold Climate Housing Research Center, CCHRC for short, said that for years people tried to build the same low-income houses in Alaska that HUD built in the Lower 48, which had huge impacts on cost. “Because most of our housing models are adapted from the temperate zone where you can go to the hardware store if you forgot something, we never select materials based on how they get to the site,” he said. “And that needs to change.”
In the last five or six years, CCHRC has been receiving calls from villages across Alaska calling not just for more housing, but for different housing. They work on all kinds of unorthodox homes, from cheap “tiny homes” that fit a single family to ADA-compliant housing modules for elders. “If you go into any village in Alaska and every single house looks exactly the same, then you can tell there’s a problem,” he said. “Because the people aren’t the same.”
Last year, CCHRC started work on a project in Unalakleet to test out a partially prefabricated home that comes in two shipping containers. Cooke explained that while modular, pre-built homes cost less to construct, they often take up so much space on the barge that the high shipping costs make them more expensive than houses shipped as sticks and bricks. The Unalakleet project aims to develop a house with pre-made plumbing and electrical systems and a deconstructed exterior, so it’s compact enough to ship inexpensively but can also be assembled onsite relatively easily.
The project, like all of CCHRC’s work, will become open source once it’s completed, so that other villages and housing authorities across Alaska can use the plans in their own communities. Even the cost of development, though, can be prohibitively expensive. Unalakleet is one of the few villages in the region that is not part of the BSRHA, and it’s using a combination of savings and CARES funding to finance the project. Cooke said most villages don’t have the money to develop a similar project on their own.
Meanwhile in Savoonga, village residents have not been sitting idly by while crisis after crisis threatens their community. Pungowiyi and the rest of Savoonga’s leadership have played an active role in advocating for themselves in a range of issues – most recently pushing for a USDA-approved reindeer processing facility to promote food security and economic opportunity – and Pungowiyi has attended numerous national and international conferences to raise awareness of his village’s housing crisis.
Two years ago, Savoonga made a major breakthrough when Senator Lisa Murkowski chaired a field hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee there. It was the first meeting of its kind on the remote island, and Pungowiyi described it as “the first real hearing on the housing crisis.” The senator, along with top officials from HUD and the U.S. Interagency on Homelessness, saw people’s living conditions firsthand and heard accounts from village residents.
For Pungowiyi and the rest of Savoonga’s leadership, the senator’s visit was a massive accomplishment, and many hoped it was a sign that change was around the corner. But years went by, and the people of Savoonga are still waiting. “So far nothing has materialized from that,” Pungowiyi said. “Getting Washington’s attention on our crisis is one thing, and getting them to do something about it is another. It’s an uphill battle for our tribes, on all our issues.”