Affordable housing must be a priority for Santa Fe

When the stated concern is safety, the clumsy conflation of economic class and criminal behavior becomes nakedly apparent.

The Santa Fe City Council and the mayor recently voted to amend a 1998 ordinance restricting the entrance to a property on Calle La Resolana to emergency vehicles. The amendment was the last hurdle for the Santa Fe Civic Housing Authority to build a two-story, 45-unit, income-restricted affordable apartment community at 1115 Calle La Resolana that had already been approved by the Planning Commission.

However, as has long come to be Santa Fe tradition from neighbors of future affordable housing developments, a concerted and vocal effort worked to put a stop to the Calle La Resolana project. Opponents loudly decried the latest housing project and cited traffic and safety as major concerns that should prohibit the development.

Santa Fe has long suffered from a widely acknowledged affordable housing problem, which in recent years has become a full-blown crisis. The most recent census data (2018) tells us that more than 6,000 families in Santa Fe were paying unaffordable rent, a staggering 86 percent of families earning $50,000 a year or less. And that was before the pandemic. Over the next six months, we’re likely to see the most alarming housing crisis in our lifetimes with as many as 29 million households at risk for eviction.

These facts are hard to ignore. Every elected leader in Santa Fe has claimed to support affordable housing on the path to being elected. However, as is so often the case, the known fact that we have thousands of struggling families becomes less of a priority when a few loud neighborhood voices speak out.

Tired issues of concern predictably surface (neighborhood character, crime, traffic and general neighborhood density are the usual suspects). They become a rallying point for those who acknowledge and express “concern” about the housing crisis during development discussions.

At the end of the day, opponents of housing developments in their neighborhoods typically worry more about property values and geographic demarcations of class than addressing a crisis that doesn’t impact them. These “concerns” become dangerous and reinforce systemic inequity when elected leaders give them credence.

City elected officials, nonprofits, community leaders and housing advocates are accustomed to the loud, specious reasoning and ill-informed arguments that dominate housing development conversations. More often than not, opposition to affordable housing development in existing neighborhoods tends to elide the underlying misinformation and motives that serve as the foundation of its arguments. When opponents voice fear for the destruction of neighborhood character, the underlying concern is typically that class lines will be blurred. When the stated concern is safety, the clumsy conflation of economic class and criminal behavior becomes nakedly apparent.

And all too often, the concerns of the housing-secure supersede the concerns, perspectives and lived experiences of those families and individuals who might benefit from such developments — the very same who suffer and are displaced as a result of an unbalanced and inadequate housing market.

The residents in the Calle La Resolana neighborhood might have felt as though their concerns weren’t heard because they weren’t acted upon. But we would ask a different question. What has become of the concerns of the more than 1,000 lower-income families that have left Santa Fe in the last two years? Their voices will never be heard by the council.

Affordable housing is important and necessary for a sustainable and inclusive economy, but most of all, it is an issue of fundamental rights, even if it pops up in your own backyard.