Jerry Koerner stood at the podium during a North Pole City Council meeting and paged back through old meeting minutes, one after another, tracing a story he had lived inside for more than two decades. He called it the end of an era. What he was describing was the last chapter of Brookside Park, the 200-acre subdivision his family's trust had spent years releasing onto the market one careful phase at a time. By the time he spoke, the lots were gone.
Here is the detail that should stop any buyer scrolling North Pole listings: the grocery store came after the neighborhood sold out, not before.
The order everyone assumes, reversed
Most buyers read a market the same way. A big-box anchor shows up, and that signals growth. Rooftops follow retail. If you're weighing North Pole against other parts of Interior Alaska and you see Three Bears Alaska's new complex on Buzby Road, the instinct is to treat it as an arrow pointing at where the neighborhood is headed next.
In Brookside Park, the arrow points the other direction. Homes filled in first. The store showed up once there was nothing left to sell.
That reversal isn't a coincidence of timing. It's the direct result of one landowner's decision about how fast to release property, and it changes how a buyer should read "growth" anywhere else in the 99705 zip code.
A developer who refused to rush it
David Ainley spent decades assembling land on North Pole's south side, eventually developing more than 600 acres that became the Beaver, Beaver East, Baker, Mission Homestead, and North Star I subdivisions. Around 2004 he brought Jerry Koerner onto a new 200-acre project south of those earlier ones, land that would become Brookside Park.
Ainley's instructions to Koerner were specific and, for a developer, unusual. Go slow. Don't dump too much inventory on the market at once. Koerner has repeated the advice publicly: build it carefully, and don't over-flood the market and drop prices. Ainley died in 2006, but the trust kept following that plan for another nineteen years.
The subdivision wasn't formally platted until 2019. The city and North Star Developers had signed an infrastructure agreement the year before, one that technically gave the project until 2034 to finish roads and utilities. Land sale proceeds ended up accelerating that timeline instead of stretching it out. Individual single-family lots moved steadily. Larger parcels, some as large as 45 acres, were zoned for multi-family development, apartments, or senior housing rather than single homes. The trust also donated land to the Fairbanks North Star Borough for a park near what would become the Three Bears site, and set up a homeowners association with real teeth: the authority to stop actions that don't comply with covenants, the same kind of junkyard-prevention language the borough deals with in other subdivisions that never had an HOA at all.
By September 2025, Koerner was telling the News-Miner the subdivision had sold out ahead of schedule. Buyers had come partly for the recreation nearby, non-motorized boating and fishing on a small lake and in the Thirtymile Slough, and partly because a patient release strategy kept the supply tight enough that values held.
The grocery store the city spent years chasing
While the trust was selling lots, North Pole officials were separately trying to land a grocery anchor. Mayor Mike Welch has said the city began reaching out to chains more than two years before anything was announced, first approaching Fred Meyer without success. In January 2023, Three Bears Alaska confirmed it would build on a 25-acre site off Buzby Road, about a half mile from Brookside Park.
The original plan was to clear the land that spring and open by fall 2023. A public meeting that July laid out a bigger footprint than first discussed: a roughly 56,000-square-foot warehouse-style grocery store, a Shell gas station, and a hardware store, with executives targeting a March 2024 opening while openly acknowledging that Alaska winters and supply chains don't always cooperate. By November 2024, construction was still underway, with Three Bears confirming the combined grocery and Ace Hardware building would be the company's largest in the state, surpassing its existing store at the Four Corners complex in Palmer. The company's own site now lists the North Pole location as open, placing the actual opening in the early months of 2026, roughly three years after the announcement and well over a year past the original target.
Line up the two timelines and the sequence is plain. Land assembled starting in 2004. Subdivision platted in 2019. Homes sold steadily through the early 2020s. Grocery announcement in 2023. Grand opening in 2026. The rooftops didn't wait for the store. The store waited for enough rooftops to justify the investment.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2004 | Koerner joins the Ainley trust to develop 200 acres south of North Pole |
| 2006 | David Ainley dies; trust continues his slow-release plan |
| 2018 | City and North Star Developers sign infrastructure agreement |
| 2019 | Brookside Park formally subdivided |
| ~2021 | City begins courting grocery chains for a south-side anchor |
| Jan 2023 | Three Bears Alaska announces North Pole store |
| Jul 2023 | Public meeting details 56,000 sq ft grocery, hardware store, gas station |
| 2024 | Construction continues past original opening target |
| Sep 2025 | Koerner confirms Brookside Park sold out ahead of schedule |
| Early 2026 | Three Bears North Pole store opens, its largest in Alaska |
Why the rooftops came first
The reason North Pole could sell out a subdivision without a grocery store next door isn't a mystery. Eielson Air Force Base sits about eight miles south of Brookside Park, and when the Air Force stationed two new F-35 squadrons there, the Department of Defense invested roughly $600 million completing a beddown program that built new hangars and a flight simulator facility for the jets. That program has since wrapped, but the housing pressure it created didn't disappear with it. Base growth planners studying the effect on the surrounding community once found that the large majority of Eielson personnel living off base were already choosing North Pole over other parts of the borough, well before any grocery chain committed to the area.
Military households need a place to live regardless of whether a Shell station or an Ace Hardware has broken ground nearby. That demand carried Brookside Park through its slow-release years, and it's also the demand the city was counting on to eventually make a grocery investment pencil out. Three Bears wasn't betting on a neighborhood that might grow. It was building for one that already had.
What this means if you're looking at North Pole right now
If you're comparing North Pole streets today, waiting to see which one gets its own anchor store next is exactly the wrong tell. By the time a retailer commits, the land in that pocket has usually already changed hands, and the pricing that built up during the quiet years is the pricing you'll be buying into.
A more useful question is who controls the land and how it gets released. Brookside Park's HOA covenant enforcement is a real, documented protection against the kind of unmanaged lots that can drag down a street's value elsewhere in the borough. That's worth asking about directly if you're looking at a resale inside the subdivision. It's also worth asking what sits on those larger, multi-family-zoned parcels nearby. Forty-five-acre lots zoned for apartments or senior housing don't disappear just because the single-family lots sold out, and what eventually gets built there will shape the corridor for the next buyer the same way Ainley's pacing shaped it for this one.
A few questions worth asking before you write an offer
Are there still lots available in Brookside Park? The subdivision's platted single-family lots sold out by the fall of 2025, according to the trust's own account. Anything available now would be a resale rather than a new lot from the original release.
Does the new Three Bears store affect property taxes in North Pole? The store adds sales tax revenue, which the city has said funds a large share of its budget, but that's a city revenue question, not a property tax mechanism, and it's not something to treat as financial guidance for your own situation.
Should I wait for retail to show up before buying in a similar North Pole subdivision? Based on how Brookside Park actually played out, no. The subdivision filled in through the early 2020s while the city was still trying to recruit a grocery chain, and the store didn't open until 2026, years after most of the lots were gone. Waiting for a store to break ground would have meant missing the window when lots were still available at the pacing the trust intended.
If you're weighing North Pole against other parts of Interior Alaska, or trying to figure out which corridor still has room to move before the next anchor lands, Daniel Larranaga can walk through what's actually available on the ground right now, not just what a portal search turns up. Schedule a free consultation and get a straight read on where North Pole stands today.
