Anchorage is the least densely populated city in the entire country. Out of room for new homes? Try building second stories. My city has 18,000 people per square mile--Anchorage has like 250. Cry me a river as you rob me blind.
If your work is oil related, you're already diverting plenty of money from more productive sectors of the economy.
My work is designing new drill sites to produce more oil. Do you honestly claim this is not important to our economy to raise our domestic production of oil?
Trying using private, available land for your comparison. Nobody has built a single story home up here for a long time. They crowd townhomes on top of each other all over the place. New single family dwellings are often built on lots that are not much home. I bought a 40 year old house so I could get 1/4 acre.
The comparison is invalid. The Municipality of Anchorage is equivalent to a county, that would be a fair comparison. The old city of Anchorage is very constrained geographically and geologically. Most of the population has to live outside the Anchorage bowl. Anchorage cannot invest in high rises due to the extreme earthquake danger combined with the nature of the soil of the Anchorage bowl. Traffic access to the Anchorage bowl is very limited, and the distance to get from inhabitable land to downtown is large.