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Alaska Natives are among the hardest hit by the state’s housing shortage.
As Rhonda McBride from our flagship station KNBA reports, rural areas struggle the most.
A new housing trust called Housing Alaskans: A Public and Private Partnership (HAPPP) hopes to change this.
Preston Simmons, who chairs the board, says it won’t be easy.
“It was expensive to build up here before, but it’s really expensive now.”
In the last 40 to 50 years. rural communities haven’t seen much new housing.
Simmons say that’s due in large part to building costs that can be several times higher than in urban areas.
A few years ago, she left Hooper Bay, a remote community on the Bering Sea coast, for more schooling. But when she finished her studies, she decided against moving her family back home.
“There’d be no way we could get our own place out there.”
Tuluk says the only option was to move in with her mother and the rest of her extended family — a household of ten people packed into a small home — not unusual for Hooper Bay.
So Tuluk signed up for a RurAL CAP self-help building project in south central Alaska — in which her family and eight others, worked together to build nine homes with a lot of the costs covered, in exchange for their labor.
Tuluk says she wishes Hooper Bay could have a similar program.
With HAPPP in the mix, that might be possible someday. It funded nine more self-help homes this year.
“Alaskans have a lot of great ideas and work really hard.”
Simmons says HAPPP hopes to partner with tribes and other organizations to put those ideas to work and support projects like the one it funded in Sitka this year — the Hítx’i Sáani project, which means “Little Houses” in the Lingít language.
When conditions deteriorated at their school, the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes mounted a vigorous lobbying campaign at the Nevada legislature. KUNR’s Maria Palma reports.
When the legislative session opened this year, the tribes called for funding to replace Owyhee Combined School, which serves more than 300 students living on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation.
They highlighted problems like a bat infestation and an old heating system.
For four months, Tribal Chairman Brian Mason encouraged his community to raise their voices and speak out about the bad condition of the school.
It worked.
On June 13, Nevada’s governor signed a bill that earmarks $65 million for a new school.
Sean Davis, a sophomore at the school, traveled six hours to attend the ceremonial signing in Carson City.
“I imagine the new school bigger, better and more up to code. Just a whole better place than what we’ve got now.”
Diana Cournoyer heads the National Indian Education Association. She says this is an example of tribal empowerment.
“Owyhee’s tribal leader advocated with the state. So I think state investment, even though a Tribal School is on a reservation, it is still a school with students that live within that specified state.”
Federal and state funding – as well as philanthropy – are options that tribes can use to improve their schools, she says.
“And I think there needs to be a different way of approaching tribal state partnership, tribal state collaboration, it shouldn’t be competing.”
Chairman Mason says it’s a big win for the tribe, students and future generations.
“With so many things challenging them on the reservation, everything is stacked against them, this is gonna help, this is gonna help, they’ll have a reason to get up and go to school and succeed.
Mason says the tribes already have set aside 80 acres for a new school.
He expects it will take about two years to build.
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