R-11 in the attic leaves the wood making up the bottom chord of the roof truss exposed to ambient air temperatures which means that 15% of the ceiling is “insulated” at only the R-4 of the 2×4 and worse, since the interior sheet rock is tightly fastened to the ceiling heat is rapidly conducted out of the home.

In many even moderately old homes just repairing air infiltration problems could make a 15% improvement. For example if the weatherstrip at the bottom of an exterior door is worn out or torn away leaving 1/8 to 1/4 inch gap, across the typical 36″ door that adds to a hole in the door the size of a baseball……. or equivalent to leaving the door open 20 minutes a day. Repairing worn weatherstripping and caulking around all window and door trim, both inside and out can be done for very little cost and make a big difference.

Many of our commercial buildings have even more wasteful problems. Weatherization programs have not targeted them for the most part, and often there is the problem of the tenant paying the energy bills while the building owner would have to extend the capital to make the improvements.

It would be an interesting experiment to cross Enstar’s gas usage data with the borough’s square footage data to get a benchmark of average fuel usage/ft and perhaps notify those with buildings in the high consumption range.

At a later time, as we’ll all have to pay more if we require more energy and the infrastructure to deliver it, along with global warming concerns, building efficiency might become a part of our property tax formula.

In short, if we’re worried about the boat sinking let’s plug the holes!

However, in looking over your Compass piece a few things piqued my curiosity. The first is that of using 1980 as the base year for comparison. The early 80′s were good times for commercial R/E with low vacancies, strong rents and the resulting high tax valuations. But came 1984 with high vacancies, extremely low rents and a halving of building prices that were, frustratingly not reflected in tax valuations.

It’s taken all of the two decades since for rents and valuations to rebound and I doubt that Anchorage rents returned to inflation adjusted levels of 1980. Then what gains have been made are now in a period of electricity and gas having tripled with other utilities having increased rapidly as well. These factors all reduce the income approach of building, and thus taxation, valuations.

Next I reflected on the housing stock of 1980 with virtually none of the expensive homes of the hillside, south Anchorage and the Eagle River hills existing at the time. My guess is that the ration of home prices and quantity of homes have changed the ratio between commercial and residential over the decades, though the number of new hotel rooms may prove me wrong.

Something else has happened here. Anchorage too has participated in the home price bubble of the L-48. Fortunately not to the same degree and even more fortunately the deflation is taking place at a slower and more tolerable rate. But a deflation is taking place as a tour of the homes for sale will confirm with most listings being offered BELOW tax appraisal.

http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeqrguz/housingbubble/

Lastly, I’ve a theory (ha! unproven) that while Anchorites are living in larger and more costly homes, due to technology changes they are doing more biz in less commercial space. These might range from the few “box” stores to the dozens of smaller less efficient stores of “the 80′s” to computers, faxes, cell phones allowing smaller offices to accomplish more to perhaps higher productivity in auto and other types of repair and maintenance facilities.

If my theory of doing more with less is true and the property taxes on buildings are not paying business’ way, (subjective, I suppose?) that buildings be categorized on what they do and the typical gross revenue, ie high grossing, high traffic “box” stores paying a higher rate than if the same building were used for a marginal biz like miniature golf etc.

Addressing the symptoms of a problem does not cure the problem. Alaska suffers greatly under a lack of private land. While we cannot get our land back from the Federal government, we could get the state to turn over what it has claimed. Increasing the amount of land available will decrease the price of land and housing. That will do more to aide us all than any number of welfare programs.