Webber: ‘Wheels in motion’ to fix housing shortage
S.F. mayor says midtown campus, other sites, enforcing rental rules all factor into City Hall’s plans
Discussing Santa Fe’s housing crisis before a roomful of homebuilders, Mayor Alan Webber on Wednesday offered an optimistic view of City Hall efforts to help alleviate the shortage of affordable places for people to live in New Mexico’s capital city.
“The wheels are now turning,” he told members of the Santa Fe Area Home Builders Association during a luncheon at which he was billed as special guest speaker. “We’ve gone beyond thinking through the process to implementing the actual work of getting housing built.”
The mayor spent more than an hour answering questions and laying out details of a housing agenda that includes highly anticipated plans for incorporating residential uses into redevelopment of the former Santa Fe University of Art and Design campus.
Webber called the 66.5-acre cityowned midtown property “a once-in-alifetime opportunity.”
“We’re about to issue the part that everybody is really waiting for, which is the … request for expressions of interest,” he said. “The RFEI, which is almost done, will go out in the next week or so to invite people to come bring us their proposals. … The doors will be opening after the RFEI goes out.”
The city also is working on plans for the third phase of the Tierra Contenta housing subdivision on Santa Fe’s southwest side, he said, as well as looking at six to seven other pieces of city-owned land for possible residential development.
Webber didn’t provide exact locations but said the properties range in size and
are located in each of the four City Council districts. If they are all developed, they could provide an estimated 330 housing units, he said.
“I think we’ve got a very good strategy,” Webber said in an interview after his talk. “Like anything else, you want to develop a plan before you start executing anything. I feel like we’ve got the right components. I think the team inside city government is really working together really well, and I think that if we execute all of the pieces together, we’re going to be able to address our housing needs going forward.” It won’t be easy. Estimates of Santa Fe’s housing shortage, which forces many workers to live outside the city, range from 4,000 to 5,000 units, and pressure to generate more long-term rentals is only growing as some established neighborhoods fight development projects and the market for short-term rentals to tourists continues to boom.
Webber said neighborhood engagement is a key priority while the city seeks to be more aggressive in enforcing rules on short-term rentals, such as collecting taxes. The city is hiring a contractor to search the web for violators and switching the enforcement system from a criminal to a civil proceeding, which Webber said will make it more direct and punitive.
“We have a limit of 1,000 permits,” he told the audience regarding registered short-term rentals in Santa Fe neighborhoods. “We’re currently at 700 to 800. According [to a recent study], there are probably 1,400 short-term rentals operating in the city, so we clearly have a bunch of people who are violating the law. And we may have other people who have a permit and are also violating the law by not adhering to the rules.”
Webber said the city also took a “small step” to address the long-term housing problem when the City Council approved a proposal last month that makes it easier for property owners to build and rent out guesthouses.
“There is no one solution or one remedy to a long-delayed housing strategy,” he told the homebuilders, “so it’s not something that can be solved with a single stroke of a pen. We have to approach it with a package, and that is what we’re doing. In some cases, there’s progress. In some cases, there isn’t. In every case, we know what we need to work on.”