Mixed-income housing on Midtown Campus a good idea
Now that the Santa Fe City Council has chosen a major Dallas company as “master developer” for the city-owned Midtown Campus, one of the unresolved issues concerns the hundreds of units of housing expected to built there.
City leaders have essentially promised that the campus site will be used to help meet Santa Fe’s critical need for “affordable housing,” a vague term that seems to cover a wide variety of shelter options, from governmentsubsidized units for the poor to houses that middle-class families can buy.
There’s talk of putting as many as 1,700 housing units on the old college campus, which would create a whole new neighborhood between St. Michael’s Drive and Siringo Road.
Many advocates, including Councilor JoAnne Vigil Coppler and the social justice organization Chainbreaker Collective, argue that all the new housing should be in the affordable category.
But Mike Loftin, CEO of the Homewise organization that has successfully created affordable houses around town for years and helped people with financing to get them into the homes, and Mayor Alan Webber support a mix of units.
Loftin, whose nonprofit is part of the development team, is talking about as much as 40% of the new units being affordable housing; the mayor suggests a 50% goal, with 20% or 30% for low-income households and 20% for “lower middle income.”
If 50% of the new midtown residential development comes to 800-900 housing units — be they rental apartments, owner-occupied houses or condos — the addition of that many affordable homes would be quite an accomplishment for Santa Fe.
And mixing affordable homes with market-rate housing and even upscale residences would be a breakthrough.
For more than a decade, Santa Fe has tried to encourage a mix of affordable and market-rate homes by requiring builders to include a percentage of affordable units in new single-family home or apartment developments. This scheme has seldom worked, though, with developers typically choosing other options, like paying fees to the city in lieu of building affordable units, or just eschewing new housing construction altogether.
The Midtown Campus offers a chance to encourage residents of different income groups to desegregate and come together in a single Santa Fe neighborhood, which just seems like inherently good public policy.
Before the suburbs and gated communities, people from different income levels shared neighborhoods in many American cities.
Still, affordable housing in the midtown development has to be the first priority. The 50% mentioned by Mayor Webber should be the bare minimum portion of the campus residential units intended for lowor middle-class people.
While profits from market-rate or upscale housing might help with the financing of lower-income units, there likely will be economic pressure to reduce the affordable housing numbers as this project proceeds. This isn’t free land — the city is carrying more than $2 million a year in debt service on the campus.
It’s worth repeating here that Journal North is among those who opposed the secret way the city used to choose a developer. And, please, can City Hall leaders stop citing the state procurement code as the reason the developer selection process was kept secret? Under Webber, the city has chosen to follow the New Mexico state code as if it were some kind of widely proclaimed gold standard for procuring contractors. The state procurement code isn’t a statute the city must follow. Santa Fe can have its own, more open procurement standards.
But mixing affordable and market-rate housing on the Midtown Campus is a good idea, however it was arrived at.