# Whittier , AK Almost everyone lives in one building **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [February 1, 2020, 12:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whittier-ak-almost-everyone-lives-in-one-building/847330 "2020-02-01T12:46:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![davidm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/davidm/32/225_2.png) [@davidm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/davidm)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2020, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whittier-ak-almost-everyone-lives-in-one-building/847330/21 "2020-02-02T22:00:09Z")
Begich Towers has a website. [http://begichtowers.com/index.html](http://begichtowers.com/index.html) ---
**Author:** ![Kovitlac](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/2bfe46/32.png) [@Kovitlac](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kovitlac)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2020, 3:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whittier-ak-almost-everyone-lives-in-one-building/847330/22 "2020-02-03T15:21:16Z")
I’m pretty sure I watched a Real Life Lore episode on that. For anyone curious, Real Life Lore does short animated episodes on absolutely every weird event of location on the planet. I’m not affiliated with them at all - I really do just love their content, lol. ---
**Author:** ![kayaker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kayaker/32/441_2.png) [@kayaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayaker)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2020, 3:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whittier-ak-almost-everyone-lives-in-one-building/847330/23 "2020-02-03T15:33:56Z")
I’ve been to Ketchikan, Alaska the town where it is always (pretty much) raining. ---
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2020, 4:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whittier-ak-almost-everyone-lives-in-one-building/847330/24 "2020-02-03T16:24:07Z")
> [@davidm](#): > > Begich Towers has a website. > [http://begichtowers.com/index.html](http://begichtowers.com/index.html) Named after Rep. Nick Begich (D), who served from 1968 until his disappearance in a plane crash in 1972, along with House Majority Leader Hale Boggs and two others. It’s always been assumed that the plane went down due to icing and probably crashed into a glacier. The remains were never found. The pilot, Don Jonz, was known for his views that icing was something made up, and that real pilots didn’t worry about it. Begich was not declared dead until December of 1972, which means he was still on the ballot that year and won the election posthumously. His losing opponent, Don Young, was subsequently appointed to the seat and has been there ever since, much to the detriment of the state. ---
**Author:** ![Bijou\_Drains](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bijou_drains/32/2814_2.png) [@Bijou\_Drains](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bijou_Drains)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2020, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whittier-ak-almost-everyone-lives-in-one-building/847330/25 "2020-02-03T18:31:05Z")
Alaska is pretty far right now so it’s rare when a Dem wins there. After all they elected Palin governor. ---
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2020, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whittier-ak-almost-everyone-lives-in-one-building/847330/26 "2020-02-03T20:51:03Z")
> [@Bijou\_Drains](#): > > Alaska is pretty far right now so it’s rare when a Dem wins there. After all they elected Palin governor. Nick’s son Mark took Sen. Ted Stevens’ seat when Stevens came under investigation. He only lasted one term. Mark was also mayor of Anchorage for awhile. Tony Knowles (D) was governor of Alaska from 1994-2002. He also served two terms as mayor of Anchorage in the 80s. He did a lot of good in the state, as did the way-early governors of the territory and early statehood. Alaska is a political oddball. It’s hard right nationally, but state politics are all over the board. The legislature goes back and forth between D and R majorities and sometimes agrees to bipartisan rule. Why the place isn’t as discriminating on the national level has always puzzled me. ---
**Author:** ![wguy123](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wguy123/32/3161_2.png) [@wguy123](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wguy123)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2020, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whittier-ak-almost-everyone-lives-in-one-building/847330/27 "2020-02-04T15:06:18Z")
> [@MEBuckner](#): > > Definitely an odd little place. Before the current Building Where Nearly Everyone In Town Lives there was a previous such building during the early Cold War named the [Buckner Building](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckner_Building) (no relation\*) which is now in ruins and looks like the setting to a horror movie or a video game where you have to fight off zombies. > > . You can Google Street View around almost the entire building. And you are right…it is creepy AF! Don’t do it at night with the lights down!! ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2020, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whittier-ak-almost-everyone-lives-in-one-building/847330/28 "2020-02-04T18:59:21Z")
I found out about Whittier about 10 or 12 years ago, in some article i read. I always thought it was fascinating, and actually a decent idea. I had been involved with a friend developing a future/alt universe game and had remembered back when I had to take a couple semeters of architecture being absolutely fascinated by Buckminster Fuller’s [Old Man River City project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project) - and made it the center of a techno-oasis in [oddly] what is currently Detroit. Detroit had lost all the car companies, and was a wasteland that a billionaire had bought property by property in a tax assessor’s auction or by private purchase. He demolished major areas, dug up the aging infrastructure and replaced the decaying Detroit area with a single ‘neighborhood’ complex that housed all 250 families that worked for his company. I think that the whole planned community thing is a neat idea, I lived in [Craddock](http://web.arch.virginia.edu/learningbarge/Community%20History%20Website/Website%20Edit/Cradock/Cradock_Index.html) for a couple years in what had been officers housing. I know one of the issues that many planned communities have is everybody flashes on HOA horror stories, some of hte strange and scary historic planned communities like those in Florida and Arizona, and the horrors of a ‘company town’ but think that planned communities of people linked by shared interests may be a coming thing - I have seen several articles about planned communities of tiny houses, some veteran/homeless communities based upon tiny houses and small housing built by various charities. My ‘family’ [with the exception of some cousins that I haven’t seen in 40 years] are all deceased and my core family is my husband, myself, and 2 friends that have known each other for the past 20 years, joke about starting our own mobile home park based on a shared community of fenn, authors and artists clubbing together to make every penny of our poor tiny incomes work out. Shared gardens to make the food budget work better, shared library both book and DVD/CD, shared maker space. Almost all of us have known each other variously for 10-50 years. If I had the money, we would do it right now … _sigh_ ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2020, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whittier-ak-almost-everyone-lives-in-one-building/847330/29 "2020-02-04T19:15:20Z")
One of the SimCity games introduced me to the idea of an [arcology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology), which is a really large building containing residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural spaces and also has self-contained utility infrastructure. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whittier-ak-almost-everyone-lives-in-one-building/847330.md?page=1)