Anchorage offers free pre-approved tiny home designs to speed building

Anchorage homeowners now have a city-made shortcut to a backyard cottage or garage apartment: free, pre-approved ADU plans that already cleared municipal plan review. The first two options are the Williwaw, an 811-square-foot one-bedroom apartment over a 563-square-foot two-car garage with a 176-square-foot entryway, and the Near Point, a 460-square-foot one-bedroom unit with a vaulted kitchen, dining and living space plus a flex room that can work as a walk-in closet or home office. The city says a complete submittal can bring comments or approval in one to two weeks, and Daniel King of the Development Services Department said the plans can save several thousand dollars in design fees and cut review time and related costs.

The pre-approved catalog launched in spring 2026 through the Municipality of Anchorage’s Development Services Department and the Anchorage Assembly, with the simple pitch that residents can apply and receive a plan for free from a set of designs that have already gone through the city’s plan review process. More designs are due in summer 2026, including 1 to 2 additional plans being developed with the University of Alaska Anchorage’s civil engineering program. Not every plan will work everywhere, though, and the city says some designs may still need standard review in Girdwood because of extra building requirements.

This is the practical side of Anchorage’s larger housing push. The Assembly loosened ADU rules with AO 2022-107 on January 10, 2023, after earlier parking mandates had already been removed, and the 2040 Anchorage Land Use Plan calls for 1,000 new ADUs in the Bowl by 2040. The ordinance also told the Planning Department to build permit-review assistance, applicant guidance materials and better tracking of ADU development within a year.

The numbers show why the city is trying to standardize the process. Anchorage says 42 ADUs were permitted in 2025, up from a prior decade average of about 18 per year, while a 2024 tracking report had shown only six permits since February 2023 at that stage. The Anchorage Home Builders Association has said an earlier 2018 revision was supposed to push ADUs to 20% of annual residential building permits, but actual ADU permits were only 7% of residential permits. That gap is what the free blueprint approach is meant to close, and Anchorage is not alone: Kansas City has identified seven pre-approved home plans at no cost to residents, including an ADU over a garage and a tiny house.