Telephone Hill residents will be required to vacate their homes by Oct. 1 so they can be demolished during the fall to prepare for a long-debated redevelopment of the 4.2-acre historic downtown area under a plan getting initial approval Monday night by Juneau Assembly members.
The Assembly, meeting as the Committee of the Whole, voted 8-1 to advance a proposal where the city will spend $5.5 million demolishing existing structures and creating four developable lots in time to allow construction of new housing to begin next summer if a developer is found. City Manager Katie Koester told Assembly members developers are expressing concerns about costs and other uncertainties of the project, which is why the city should do the preparatory work.
“You might need to invest in demolition and site preparation just to be able to attract developers,” she said.
The area currently contains 13 residences on 19 individual properties, plus the downtown transit center and a parking garage. The Assembly has previously approved moving forward with a plan to build mid-rise apartments with about 150 total residential units and add three stories of parking to the existing garage.
Demolishing the existing homes still needs official approval by the full Assembly, with a proposed timeline by Koester calling the introduction of an ordinance funding the project in early June and — if approved in July — issuing formal three-month eviction notices to tenants on Aug. 1.
Her original timeline recommended evicting residents by Sept. 15, but that was altered to Oct. 1 so displaced residents won’t be seeking new places to live while seasonal tourism workers are still occupying their housing.
The lone dissenting vote to proceed with the proposal was cast by Assembly member Paul Kelly, who said he wants further assessment to ensure residents who are displaced have housing to move into given the city’s ongoing chronic shortage.
“If we’re going to be removing 13 housing units I would at least like to see 13 housing units coming up somewhere else,” he said.
Assembly member Wade Bryson said residents in the neighborhood have been told for at least the past five years they were going to have to move eventually.
“We have worked tremendously on the amount of housing units and we just made a motion to move it to Oct. 1 so we’re asking these people to vacate during the easiest time of year to find housing,” he said. “We are not being haphazard or careless. This has been talked about and this has methodically gotten to this point.”
The proposal advanced by the Assembly calls for 20% of the residences to be officially categorized as affordable housing. Koester said the cost and timeline for completing the redevelopment are unknowns for reasons ranging from developer interest to the cost/availability of materials — especially if tariffs imposed by the Trump administration are in effect.
The neighborhood’s history dates back to the city’s founding during the 1880s and it became known as Telephone Hill when the owner of the Juneau and Douglas Telephone Company located his business on the summit there in 1915. In 1984 the state purchased land there with the intention of building a new Capitol, which failed to happen, resulting in residents continuing to live there the past four decades although none of the homes were owned by individuals.
The state transferred the land to the city in 2023, at which point redevelopment proposals began in earnest. Assembly members in February of 2024 voted to proceed with a redevelopment plan that includes the mid-rise apartments and construction of a road.
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
