Safe streets and thriving neighborhoods should be available to everyone in Anchorage. If you’ve seen the sidewalks in winter or heard about recent collisions and pedestrian deaths, you know that all to often Fairview gets left behind. It’s time to change that. The Gambell-Ingra corridor serves as the connection between the Seward and Glenn Highways, but it is a dangerous, high-speed corridor. It does not have to be this way.

On February 28th, 2023, the Fairview community was awarded a Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program Grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation. This is the first-ever Federal program to reconnect communities previously cut off from economic opportunities by transportation infrastructure. There will be many community projects in throughout 2023+ for this effort. See our press release here.

• Learn more about what the neighborhood wants to see in the future of the Fairview from our community workshop: Solving Scenarios for the Future of Fairview Summary Report (April 2023)

Purpose of Reconnecting Fairview

The Fairview community seeks heal the Gambell-Ingra Corridor by revitalizing and improving safety within it through economic analysis, active transportation traffic modeling, responsive greenway design and robust public engagement that includes civic dialogue and visualization processes.

Anchorage, AK, is a sub-arctic community located on the eastern side of Anchorage’s urban core. The Fairview neighborhood is divided by a high-speed highway couplet, including four north-bound lanes on Ingra Street and four south-bound lanes on Gambell Street. In 1965, the city explicitly acknowledged the highway connection in Fairview would “cut the neighborhood and create an island two blocks wide by ten blocks long.” The couplet has led to decades of disinvestment, safety, and health impacts in Fairview.

The project is led by NeighborWorks Alaska (NWAK) in partnership with the Fairview Community Council (FVCC), focused on community-led solutions.

You can watch a short clip on this here: