In a town like Skagway, what, and who, is considered essential? In any town, residents will need police officers, a fire department, a school, medical professionals, city and elected officials. It’s easy to make the case that the Skagway Library, Recreation Center, and Traditional Council also provide essential services to residents. Because of its proximity to the border, federal officials make their home in Skagway, as do National Park Service staff. Then there are the employees of the airport, the port, the ferry, AML, the tourism board, the editor of the local newspaper, and more. And they all need a place to live.

Here’s Mayor Sam Bass:

“The city itself really operates almost as a renter itself, where we’re in that mix of we need to find housing, so we have to either help provide or help find housing for those essential workers. Skagway needs those essential workers even more than some other towns that aren’t as isolated because there’s nowhere else for us to go,” Bass said. “We need those extra police officers. We need those fire department folks. We’ve got to have the clinic people here. We need that to make sure that we have the safety of the citizens are covered. The city’s also in competition inside that rental market.”

It’s a common story in Skagway; folks who arrive in the off-season for permanent, year-round jobs are often made to move a few months later to make room when the seasonal employees come to town.

Dahl Memorial Clinic director Albert Wall also arrived in the off-season to accept his new position, which like many full-time essential roles in Skagway, provided housing to help him land.

“Well, for a short period of time, the city included housing in my contract,” Wall said. “It actually was included through May, in the next month, but I found a place that somebody needed in over the summer, and so I’m in that place.”

When the clinic’s mental health counselor Kira Lathrop accepted an offer to move to Skagway with her family of three from Juneau, she thought of housing first.

“Housing is so basic, I immediately started looking for housing and literally all I could find was, hey, you can have this trailer if you fix it up,” Lathrop said. “Like, I don’t need a mansion on the hillside. The clinic did come through and said, okay, because of the timing of when you’re coming, we’re going to secure housing for you. But they were only able and open to doing that from March until December of last year, so that’s why we moved. But I am very thankful for the housing I did get. It just was not a long-term sustainable housing situation for us.”

Housing for permanent and visiting clinic staff is one of the more pressing problems clinic director Albert Wall faces.

“The locum tenens, which include doctors and dentists and a wide variety of contractors, occupational therapists, all kinds of, you know, specialty health care, they are kept in one of four apartments that we lease here in town,” Wall said. “We do need more, by the way, if anybody has any. But yes, we just lease on the economy for now. We do have plans to change that and build some places, but right now we’re leasing on the economy.”

Wall hopes to expand the range of services the clinic offers to Skagway residents. But to do that, he needs housing to support the providers that will offer them.

“We carry three full-time providers in the winter every day and about four or five depending on the tourist traffic in the summer a day and that is because we run 24-7 emergency care and some provider has to be on call all the time,” Wall said. “Then we need two providers at all times in the clinic just to carry daily appointments. So it’s three to five providers that we need housed for. I mean, I understand because housing is a big, huge problem here.  But the clinic’s kind of in a catch-22, right?  So the community wants a doctor who will live in Skagway and be a full-time doc here. We can’t do that without a house. So if a doctor is going to bring their family here and live here happily ever after, they’re going to need a place to live.”

Police Chief JJ Reddick did exactly that. When he brought his family to Skagway five years ago, they lived in a cozy loft apartment with a sunroom that can double as a spare bedroom in the summer months. It’s an apartment the police rent year-round to help staff find a place to land when they first arrive. Full-disclosure: it’s the other side of a duplex that I also rent when I’m in Skagway, and we share a landlord. For a short time, I also shared a wall with one of JJ’s officers, James.

“So the housing started as we, actually my wife went to work for the police department first, and she was in the same apartment that James was in, which would be adjoined to the one that you’re in. She was there with five kids and my mother-in-law,” Reddick said. “From there, before I got here, they moved to 16th, a double-wide trailer.”

It was a tight fit. When Reddick’s wife left the police department to take a position with the Customs and Border Patrol, they moved into CBP housing. And then they heard someone was leaving Customs.

“That’s what really saved us from having to leave, because when we thought we were gonna lose the housing here at 16th and the double-wide, we couldn’t find anywhere that would house seven of us, let alone eight with the mother-in-law,” Reddick said. “It was kind of a dire situation. We didn’t know if we were gonna be able to stay in Skagway.”

Dahl clinic director Albert Wall hasn’t given up hope but he’s also realistic.

“I’m still looking for a place to buy. I’d like a little piece of land. They’re really hard to find here,” Wall said. “You know, we’re sandwiched between the National Park and the Tongass National Forest and we’ve got this little wedge of land here and there’s some Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority land built around and there’s some big pieces of land that are owned by companies, but there’s really very little land to go around here.”

And as city council changed where seasonals are allowed to sleep, and encouraged seasonal employers to build, buy or rent housing units for their seasonals, there’s even less.

This is the third episode of Molly McCluskey’s series “The Skagway Shuffle.” In the next episode, McCluskey will report more about where seasonals sleep, and some of the challenges that arise in an upcoming segment. So stayed tuned. Click here to listen to episodes one and two. McCluskey has contributed to the U.S. News & World Report, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic and The Washington Post. She is also a former reporter for the Skagway News and she returns to report on Skagway’s housing challenges and some possible solutions.