Luck is not a housing strategy
My op-ed submission for the Albuquerque Journal arguing for more housing freedom. Send your support as the Albuquerque City Council contemplates upzoning measures to relieve the housing crisis.
They say the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The same goes for affordable housing.
My partner and I got lucky when we purchased our first house in 2023. While searching for a suitable home within our budget, we quickly realized that our options were slim. For a while, all we could find were small, run-down, single-family-homes that needed a lot of work (to say the least). We visited many properties only to be disappointed with the options Albuquerque offered. That all changed when our current home hit the market - a decades-old townhouse in Barelas. It was within our price range, big enough for a potential family, in a neighborhood showing promise, and even had a modest backyard for our dog. We jumped on the opportunity, and after a stressful bidding war, we got on the housing ladder. Many others aren’t so lucky.
Townhomes, duplexes, and condos are, by nature, the most affordable options for those trying to get on the housing ladder. They require less land, less building materials, and less infrastructure like wires, utilities, and roads. And if it’s a couple decades old, it’s likely even more affordable. A detached home can’t compete with attached units on price even with tax credits and other subsidies. We continue to see these demand-side housing tactics fail because nothing will save us from the fact that the most affordable types of homes aren’t legal to build in most of the city.
On Wednesday, February 18th, the Albuquerque City Council will decide on a pro-housing amendment to the zoning code which would legalize townhomes and other affordable housing structures, as well as corner stores (tienditas), in more areas of Albuquerque. Council needs to approve these measures to expand opportunity in our city.
Opponents of the zoning change often say allowing duplexes and townhomes will “ruin” the character of a neighborhood - a take that is not only wrong, but backwards.
The character of many of our neighborhoods have already changed drastically because of the constraints we have put on housing development. Neighborhoods like mine are aging, and historic Mainstreets are crumbling. We’ve encased our city, especially the historic neighborhoods, in amber - unable to breathe and evolve with the changing times. We’ve locked out investment and priced out our youth. Barelas used to be a walkable, family-oriented neighborhood with a pharmacy, grocery store, and a pub. Today, despite the neighborhood’s potential, you rarely see kids playing outside, and the Barelas Mainstreet is now just a ghost-town throughway for commuters.
As homelessness persists, and home prices continue to climb, the proposed upzoning before council on Wednesday is a pressure-release valve that can help absorb some of the demand for housing. It’s not a fix-all solution, but a necessary step that would create more opportunity for New Mexicans and break off some of the amber that’s suffocating younger generations.
We can create a city where Mainstreet has foot traffic, young families are encouraged to grow roots, and people aren’t displaced or forced to the streets. I hope city council realizes that more housing is the key to reversing a declining statewide population, boosting economic development, and reducing the cost of living for New Mexicans. Not everybody is going to be as lucky as my partner and I were, so lets create our own luck and give people a shot at growing some roots in Albuquerque.
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but the second best time is today.
If you’re an Albuquerque resident, consider contacting your councilor or signing up for public comment on February 18th to show support for the pro-housing measures in bill O-26-2.
We live in a fairly extreme version of this in Los Alamos, particularly in White Rock. There are simply no starter homes to buy. Most of the housing stock is fairly modest, but of the 3BR, 2BA variety, and priced well over half a million. That means coming in you need $50-100k to be able to afford a down payment. Who has that kind of money right out of school? And in the meantime, there's very few rental units available.
They recently built a new subdivision and filled with the relatively large, suburban-style homes like you see developing along the I-25 corridor south of Albuquerque. Space is limited for development here, but that location, near to the White Rock town center and a road to LANL that can only be used by employees, would have been well-sited for apartments or other high-density dwellings. The county, with heavy influence from the lab, decided a long time ago that what people here want is a suburb, with no "urb." This is pushing people outside of the town into long commutes. The pay is good enough to justify that for some, but the quality of life is massively harmed. It's not uncommon for people to commute all the way from Albuquerque now, which should be embarrassing for our leadership.
Meanwhile, despite the residential population increasing, storefronts are more empty than ever because small businesses can't afford the rent. The lack of retail is sometimes blamed on big box stores and Amazon, but those businesses can't be blamed for a lack of restaurants. We don't even have food delivery here in White Rock. The Dominos in Los Alamos doesn't deliver. There is no Uber Eats. We have had a few food trucks pop up in recent years, after those previously being regulatorily prevented from operating, and while it is a nice addition, a food truck being in the parking lot of an empty commercial building is incredible irony to me.
And we seem to have a system that allows commercial property owners to just sit on fallow land for years. I have trouble fathoming that because whenever I consider business ownership, I can't help but worry about losing money on the venture, but this seems to be of little concern to the current owners.
It all just feels... broken.
Grout is my councilor and I'm in no shape to go anywhere tonight :(