Anna Brawley: Anchorage Community Planner

City planners have to be experts on a wide variety of issues; yet, because they are not elected officials, their well-informed advice is not always followed. Victor Fischer, a previous podcast guest, was Anchorage's first city planner in the 1950s. So much of the city was a blank slate then that it's easier to imagine the utility of the planner: this goes here, this can't go here, etc. But what about when much of the city is already built? Today we talk with Anna Brawley from the consulting firm Agnew Beck. She discusses her family, what led her to become a planner, how she ended up in Alaska, and her major projects over the past decade: alcohol policy, housing, and homelessness.