Garden City RV Park in Skagway. Photo by Mike Swasey.
With cruise ship traffic comes an influx of seasonal employees to provide food and entertainment to tourists visiting Skagway. As the pandemic caused many businesses to close at least temporarily, the seasonal housing crisis was put on the back burner by municipal officials. But with cruise ships now returning, there are calls to revisit the situation before it’s too late. Some see a solution in an RV park that’s been empty since the pandemic started.
It’s called the Skagway Shuffle. During busy cruise ship summers, seasonal employees show up to work with no place to live. They crash on somebody’s couch or split a room until they eventually take a job that offers reasonable housing. Sometimes they end up sleeping in their cars parked on side streets or sleeping in tents in the woods.
Some employers cram a dozen people into bunk rooms, others have seasonal housing that has no heat. And still, other have people found their best option was to live in an RV in one of the local campgrounds.
“Especially when you’re married and you have a dog, you don’t want to live with a bunch of other people, you just want to have like your own little space. You know,” said Eatough.
That’s Raymie Eatough a local tour operator who used to live seasonally in Garden City RV park. She and her husband Joe both own small businesses and travel to the Lower 48 in the winter to find work.
“It’s not like there’s a lot of jobs in the winter. So we choose to leave so that we can still bring in an income into our lives,” said Eatough.
So that leaves them with the unenviable position of trying to find a place to live each summer. In May, municipal officials closed Garden City RV park to seasonal housing. They’re in a rental now — but they say it won’t be available to them next summer
“We’re having a hard time finding seasonal housing, we’ve been here for 25 years. Think about how it’s going to be for people that haven’t been here this long and don’t know as many people as we know,” wondered Eatough.
The proposed goal of the RV park as described by the borough manager is to host RV traffic from the Klondike Highway. That traffic is expected to rebound faster than cruise ship traffic once the pandemic-related Canadian border restrictions are lifted and more independent travelers arrive.
But the estimated costs of repairing electrical issues plus water and sewer upgrades at Garden City RV park are as high as $500,000.
The municipality purchased the RV park in 2013 from a church group for $1.2 million-plus interest. It plans to keep it open for nightly visitors next summer but also wants to develop a long-term plan.
Assemblyperson Sam Bass says now is the time to take action.
“What we’ve done is we kind of used a band-aid fix, which is an RV park where people have started to use that as their seasonal housing, which I don’t think that ever was the intent,” said Bass
In 2020 the Assembly drafted plans to subdivide the property into up to two dozen (WEB: 50-by-100 foot) lots. But then the pandemic put that on hold. Bass says there are opportunities to tackle both the seasonal housing problem and the lack of affordable homes for sale in Skagway.
“We’re looking at duplexes, triplexes, maybe even a condo setup, depending on how it’s developed. But somehow some way to develop and make available more housing for both seasonal folks and for year-round people. Because we need both of those,” said Bass.
Plans have been discussed by the assembly to put a new RV park near the Solid Waste Dropoff and Composting facility on land already owned by the municipality on the north end of town. But that site doesn’t currently have water and sewer access.
Bass says the site doesn’t need those. And he wants to get started on redeveloping both projects while admitting not much will likely be completed before workers arrive for the 2022 cruise season.
“If we’re not willing to make the sacrifice now, we’re just going to keep kicking that housing issue down the road. And eventually, it’s going to get very, very bad where there’s no year-round housing, and there’s no more seasonal housing because it’s all full, then what do we do? We’re stuck,” said Bass.
The assembly had granted a waiver from the regulation forbidding RV rentals on privately owned residential property. But that resolution expired on May 1, leaving people who want to live seasonally in their RV with no legal options other than to move from campground to campground every two weeks. And with elections coming up on October 5, the issue will likely need to be addressed by those running for office.
