Saving Sinking Homes - The Margin

Stephanie Alexie awoke one morning to find her home surrounded by water too deep to wade through.

“It looked like the ocean,” she recalled. Neighboring houses appeared barely suspended on top of rippling blue pools—mirrors reflecting the clear sky. In the distance, the wooden boardwalk built over marshy tundra dropped off into a vast sea. Alexie and her children were stranded until neighbors came by with a boat to her corner of Nunapitchuk, a Yup’ik village of roughly 550 people.

The land Alexie’s home sits on never used to flood. But, in the last few years, seasonal transitions in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta—an area of western Alaska where the state’s two longest rivers empty into the Bering Sea—have become more disruptive. Now, every spring, when the region undergoes a great thaw and chunks of ice break free from frozen rivers, Alexie finds herself sitting on an island.

Alexie’s home survived the May 2020 floods, which were the worst the village had experienced in years. But, floodwaters rose dangerously close to the building’s foundation, rotting the insulation underneath its floors. Black mold—likely a result of moisture trapped in the home—bloomed across the kitchen ceiling.

Alexie worried about where she and her family would go if the home became uninhabitable. It already felt like it was bursting at the seams: 26 people shared its four bedrooms. Mattresses with dozing children lined the living room floor. And toys and clothes spilled out of closet doors into the hallway. “There were too many things and no room,” she described.

Alaska is home to 40 percent of the country’s federally recognized Tribes, nearly half of whose members are based within roughly 200 villages in rural Alaska. These Alaska Native communities are diverse in culture and geography, but share a common risk: Alaska is warming two to three times faster than the global average. A 2024 assessment by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium found that 144 of these Tribes were facing some form of erosion, flooding, permafrost degradation, or a combination of all three.

Those environmental changes have contributed to a severe housing shortage in western Alaska. In Nunapitchuk, for example, water damage during the 2020 floods rendered several homes uninhabitable, forcing some displaced residents to move in with friends and family, increasing already-high rates of overcrowding in the village. Alexie thought about moving back to Bethel, a city of more than 6,000 and the largest in western Alaska, which also serves as the hub for the 56 villages in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region. Although there is more available housing there, in Bethel, it would be more difficult to access the same traditional subsistence lifeways they practice in Nunapitchuk.

In the absence of meaningful government assistance, residents have taken extreme acts of adaptation to stay on their ancestral lands, from dragging houses across the tundra to safer locations to moving into already crowded homes. As governmental neglect persists and climatic shocks worsen, Alaska Native communities worry it will be increasingly difficult to maintain safe shelter and keep their Tribes together.

The Legacy of ‘Sick Homes’

Prior to prolonged contact with settlers and missionaries in the late 19th century, Indigenous peoples in western Alaska lived semi-nomadic lifestyles. Based on subsistence needs, Tribes might have moved from the coast in the spring, to riverside fish camps in the summer, to the tundra for black and whitefish trapping in the fall, and ice fishing in the winter. This mobility offered protection: people moved frequently to adapt to changes from flooding and erosion.

Starting in the late 19th century, roaring waves of economic development brought an influx of settlers and boom-town investment. During the gold rushes in northwest Alaska, the federal government invested in schools as a tool of colonial control, in hopes that Native children “might find viable economic and social roles to play in western society,” as described in a 1996 book recounting the history of education of Indigenous peoples in circumpolar regions. Settlers and the U.S. government positioned schools as crucial hubs for medical care and sanitation, with some also offering religious services, food, and clothing. These offerings, coupled with mandates for compulsory school attendance, pushed Alaska Native peoples to settle permanently around newly-constructed schools.

As a result, land that Tribes may not have found suitable for long-term habitation became the locations of many modern-day villages. In western Alaska, people settled along wetlands, marshy tundra, and rivers—where they frequently camped for ease of hunting and fishing. Decades later, these fragile waterside ecosystems have become bellwethers for the climate crisis.

When temperatures warm in the spring, melting snowpack restores flowing river channels, plentiful lakes reemerge and trails become soggy. This “breakup season” ushers in a short subarctic summer, when the tundra transforms into muddy wetlands, reviving salmonberry shrubs and opening new opportunities for subsistence hunting and fishing.

These days, snow melts earlier than ever before, and erratic temperature swings in the spring can unleash sudden deluges. Rapid breakup of ice hastens erosion along riverbanks. Although breakup season typically brings some flooding along riverbanks, more extreme floods, such as the ones affecting Nunapitchuk, are now more common.

The warming climate warps life in western Alaska year-round, too. Freeze-up comes later in the fall, restricting traditional winter travel routes along frozen rivers and across sea ice, and consequently limiting access to fish, seals, whales, walrus, and other important subsistence resources. Fall storms are increasing in frequency and strength. In September 2022, Typhoon Merbok, born out of warmer-than-usual waters in the Pacific, pummeled western Alaska. Forty communities in the region were damaged, with losses to homes and fish camps, according to a government tally in the month of the storm. From 1953 to 2017, the number of federally-declared disasters in the state increased dramatically, with the majority of these events caused by flooding or severe storms in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region.

And, as western Alaska has become wetter and warmer, once-frozen ground is sinking. Permafrost—the ice-rich soil that rests below the surface of roughly 85 percent of Alaskan land—is rapidly thawing. That phenomenon is projected to cost billions in infrastructure damage and is already increasing upkeep costs for homes that are losing their structural integrity as the ground below lurches.

Worse, the effects of climate change—erosion, flooding, and permafrost thaw—don’t always appear in isolation. They often amplify one another, leading to major land collapses, known by the Yup’ik term usteq.

Natalia “Edna” Chase, a 60-year-old Yup’ik woman, moved into her Nunapitchuk home with her family when she was two years old. When it was built in the late 1960s, the house sat high off the ground on wood stilts—a structural feature intended to prevent the home’s heat from thawing the permafrost below. As long as permafrost remains frozen, it can support homes and infrastructure. With rising temperatures, however, this frozen soil is degrading rapidly, transforming solid ground into muddy sinkholes and swallowing Chase’s home.

Each year, the home sinks six inches. When the marshy land engulfed the original flooring from her childhood home, Chase laid another floor on top. Soon, both were entirely underground.

Chase’s house, crookedly descending into the earth, is now supported by layers of plywood she built haphazardly on top of the sunken floors.

Like Alexie, Chase was also affected by the 2020 Nunapitchuk floods. Water inundated her house, and she bailed out over 100 gallons. The flooding accelerated permafrost degradation underneath the building, according to Chase. Since then, conditions in her home have gotten exponentially worse. Her floors warp at steep angles. Whenever it rains or snow melts, the home floods. Last year, Chase tried digging a culvert under the building to drain floodwaters. A foot and a half underground, she hit permafrost, signifying what she already knew to be true—that the building was rotting from the ground up. “So if I want to build a house, it’s not gonna be here,” she said.

As the ground shifts, the joints between her walls and floors split open. Every week, despite her chronic back pain, Chase moves all her appliances and furniture away from the walls to seal the cracks with a fresh layer of duct tape. But these are only stopgaps.

Homes like Chase’s were never equipped to survive in Alaska’s extreme climates. Instead, developers constructed them hastily, and with little consultation with local residents, while riding the oil revenue booms of the 1970s.

The discovery of oil in Alaska’s North Slope in the 1960s set off fierce lobbying for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline project, which was the largest private-capital project in world history at the time. The resulting pipeline boom drastically altered life across the state, especially for Alaska Native communities. Oil companies sought control over vast swathes of land in order to begin oil drilling. They pushed for the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971, which extinguished all Indigenous land claims across the state; in exchange, Alaska Natives received roughly one billion dollars and forty-four million acres of land. In a departure from the reservation system in the contiguous United States, the federal government conveyed these lands to newly established Alaska Native corporations.

The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act secured the future of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, effectively creating a “pipeline right-of-way through the center of Alaska,” according to Philip Wight, an Assistant Professor of History and Arctic and Northern Studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It also inextricably linked Indigenous land sovereignty to oil development, and further consolidated Tribes in permanent villages by forcing them to lay claim to specific portions of land via Native corporations.

The state of Alaska reinforced these permanent villages through investments in infrastructure. Massive amounts of oil revenue enabled the state to construct housing at an unprecedented rate; over half of Alaska’s current housing stock was constructed during the 1970s and 1980s. Many homes in Indigenous villages—including Chase’s home—originated in this industry-fueled housing boom.

The speed and scale at which these homes were constructed had consequences. Much of this housing development ignored centuries of Indigenous wisdom on which structures are most resilient in climates of extreme cold. Developers modeled many homes after those typical in the temperate continental United States, erecting California ranch-style houses across the tundra.

Decades later, these houses are deteriorating rapidly.

“That has a lot to do with the current housing crisis, frankly, and it has a lot to do with the health issues we've seen with housing,” said Ryan Tinsley, a Fairbanks-based construction expert. Tinsley has been advocating for more adaptable housing models in Alaska with his wife, Stacey Fritz, an anthropologist who formerly worked with the Cold Climate Housing Research Center.

Older homes built in the 1970s and 1980s had thin, uninsulated walls that offered poor protection from subarctic cold temperatures. Weatherproofing processes attempted to fix these issues by adding insulation and sealing leaks, but failed to install proper ventilation. As a result, a 2018 statewide housing assessment estimated that more than half of Alaska’s households lacked the ability to properly remove moisture and indoor pollutants from their homes. In such indoor environments, the health of the occupants suffer.

Alaska Native communities suffer from respiratory diseases at high rates; in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region, children are hospitalized for RSV, or Respiratory Syncytial Virus, at rates up to seven times that of the national average, according to a 2023 study. And climate change is making indoor air conditions worse, as ambient temperatures and moisture levels increase, and wildfire events become more common.

Chase’s household has been living with long-term health consequences since their home sustained damage in the 2020 floods. Her 15-year-old son started using an inhaler, and her former partner, who was living with her at the time of the flooding, developed Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, or COPD, a lung condition that causes breathing difficulties.

No matter what she does, she can’t seem to prevent moisture from seeping in, sending mold—green, then black—up the walls of the house. “That stench on my clothes can never come out, that mildew smell,” she said.

‘We're Not Getting the Help that We Need’

On an overcast March afternoon, Simon Lawrence drives on the Kuskokwim Ice Road. Parking just east of Kwethluk, a Yup’ik village about thirty miles inland from Nunapitchuk, Lawrence gestures out the window at an opening of the Kuskokuak Slough, a tributary of the Kuskokwim River. Just three decades ago, village children could safely hop over the narrow gap and play in its shallow waters during the summer, Lawrence recalls. Over time, erosion has deepened the channel, widening the gap between its banks and redirecting powerful currents towards the village.

At age 55, Lawrence has spent almost half his life working in maintenance in Kwethluk’s local education system. When he built his two-bedroom house in the early 2000s, he thought siting it on the higher ground uptown would shield it from flooding.

But now, the eroding river channel is inching westward towards a small stream connected to the heart of the village. When the two bodies of water inevitably meet, the resulting oxbow will likely unleash an outpouring of river water on Kwethluk’s uptown. The floods could engulf several homes, including Lawrence’s.

This isn’t the first time that changing river conditions have threatened housing. A few years prior, the advancing riverbank forced Kwethluk to apply for federal funding to tow four of its homes inland. The village needs to move four more buildings that are within 15 feet of the water, but are struggling to find funding. The equipment and personnel required for the relocations are costly. Even gathering the data to demonstrate climate-related threats, which is a requirement for many government funding requests, is an expensive task. The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium estimated in its 2024 report that this would cost $20 to $30 million for the 144 threatened villages across the state.

When scarce federal resources are being spent on moving and repairing homes, local housing authorities are redirecting funds that normally go to new development.

Maintaining safe homes in increasingly extreme and unpredictable environmental conditions is costly, but also increasingly necessary. “The reality of their climate is changing faster and more harsh[ly] than anybody expected 20 years ago,” said Brian Wilson, the Executive Director of the Alaska Coalition on Housing and Homelessness. “The upkeep budget gets more and more expensive, which then also makes it so you can't build as many homes.”

And, even when housing authorities build new homes, volatile weather swings can interfere with construction that is already confined to a short season. Rural villages like Kwethluk are off of Alaska’s road system. In warmer weather, people arrive by boat on the Kuskokwim River. And, when subzero temperatures hit, local crews plow a seasonal road averaging 200 miles over the thick river ice. Building materials are delivered to Kwethluk via river barges in the limited summer months. To get to the village, lumber and steel must travel through Seattle, Anchorage, and Bethel first. By the time they arrive, it’s late summer’s rainy season. And crews scramble to put the homes together before freezing temperatures set in.

Global warming brings a wetter environment—and an increased incidence of precipitation events, such as freezing rain—that can disrupt these already-tight schedules.

To alleviate these pressures, one of the former directors of Kwethluk’s housing program wanted to build a facility in which homes could be fabricated. This manufactured housing system would enable prefabricated homes to be assembled year-round, regardless of weather conditions. “He had a good vision. If we had funding for that building, I would say go for it,” said Chariton Epchook, Kwethluk’s Tribal Administrator. “Funding is what holds us back from the things we want to do.”

Epchook said the region’s housing authority is already stretched thin. Access to funding is a particular challenge for Native communities living in rural Alaska, who are disproportionately low-income. Indigenous people in Alaska experience poverty rates nearly triple that of white Alaskans, census data shows. And poverty is the highest in rural, predominantly-Native areas of the state: in one western Alaskan village of Alakanuk, nearly 40 percent of residents live below the poverty line. In many rural areas, people depend on subsistence harvesting—not just for survival, but to maintain culturally and spiritually important practices, too.

Public funding is therefore crucial for maintaining infrastructure and services in villages. Many residents rely upon affordable housing units to remain in their village. Even for higher-income families that can afford market-rate rent or homeownership, the high cost of construction in remote villages disincentivizes private developers from investing in new homes. The majority of construction for affordable housing for Alaska Natives in villages today is funded through HUD’s Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act programs, which were passed in 1996 to address housing gaps in Indigenous communities.

Since the law went into effect, the program’s funding has been used to build or acquire almost 41,500 affordable homes and restore an additional 105,000 affordable homes on Tribal lands and in Alaska Native communities. Funding levels, however, are subject to political whims and have remained largely stagnant. Until the 2024 fiscal year, inflation-adjusted dollars for the Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act’s housing grant program remained below levels from fiscal year 2000. That means fewer houses have been built in the last two decades. That decline in available resources can be seen clearly in a coastal Inupiaq village north of Nunapitchuk. In Brevig Mission, a village outside of the hub community of Nome, the Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act funded 20 houses in the late 1990s, but in recent decades, it has barely covered the construction of five homes.

The Bering Straits Regional Housing Authority, headquartered in Nome, serves Brevig Mission along with 17 other communities. The housing authority estimated in 2022 that Nome and its surrounding villages need about 400 new homes over the next 25 years. However, the housing authority only delivers about three new homes each year. Building one costs about $780,000, said Jolene D. Lyon, President and CEO of the housing authority in the Bering Strait region. Lyon and her staff also have to balance the logistical puzzle of constructing new homes with the upkeep of already existing ones. In Brevig Mission, for example, the severity of permafrost thaw has come as a surprise. Homes are sinking several feet. Water and sewer lines are pulling away from their hookups and creating mini glaciers. Windows are warping.

“The 20-plus homes that we leveled last year need to be re-leveled again,” Lyon said. “I cannot afford to do that every year…I don't have that kind of funding allocation.”

In other words, the climate crisis is exacerbating the funding squeeze for housing agencies. “Those changing terrestrial processes, whether it's permafrost degradation and thaw, whether it's erosion and flooding, that's all coinciding with a time where we have fewer resources than ever, at least at the state level, to put toward these kinds of projects,” summarized Griffin Hagle-Forster, the Executive Director of the Association of Alaska Housing Authorities.

And now, with frenetic federal funding freezes, even more projects—including several intended to proactively protect villages at risk for major climate hazards—are in jeopardy.

Genevieve Rock coordinates mitigation efforts against climate impacts for the Tribal government in Shaktoolik, an Inupiaq village of around 200 on a narrow spit of land along Norton Sound, an inlet of the Bering Sea. The community was already considered one of the state’s most threatened by climate change; that existential threat became even more urgent after Shaktoolik lost its protective berm in the 2022 typhoon. The community also has a prospective relocation site further inland with a potential water source and enough land to sustain a village. But in the near-term, the village badly needs a safety access road and emergency shelter so that residents are not stranded when the next storm comes, Rock said. Much of Rock’s time is spent applying for competitive federal grants from entities like the Environmental Protection Agency to attempt to meet those needs.

“We're all competing against each other for federal funding, and that is just not our way,” Rock said. “In our Native culture, we’re a kind, caring, supportive, loving group of people that support each other. I have relatives over in Shishmaref, and that's miles and miles away.

There is no federal agency solely devoted to addressing the climate threats these communities are facing. As a result, solutions are emerging in a patchwork, and Rock said she often finds herself in a Catch-22. Shaktoolik needs critical infrastructure, but federal agencies don’t want to fund new construction in areas that may soon be underwater. Meanwhile, Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster funds are restricted to help with individual disasters, rather than the slow-moving disaster of climate change.

“We're not getting the help that we need,” Rock said.

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