OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW
Albuquerque Housing Authority builds first new residential units in 30 years
The Albuquerque Housing Authority built its first new construction of residential units in over 30 years in the Santa Barbara-Martineztown neighborhood.
The $18 million project located on McKnight NE included demolishing 30 affordable housing units that were built in the 1970s and replacing them with 54 new townhouse-style units.
The neighborhood has become more of a senior area, said Loretta Naranjo Lopez, president of the Santa Barbara-Martineztown Neighborhood Association, and the affordable housing project will help bring more families with children into the neighborhood.
“Our institutions like Longfellow (Elementary School), Albuquerque High (School), need the children to attend the schools and the youth to attend the schools, and so we need more families in the neighborhood,” Naranjo Lopez said. “The community has put millions of dollars into our institutions, and so we’re saying, they’re our investment and they’re the ones that keep those institutions going.”
The Broadway/McKnight Affordable Housing Development project is unusual because it offers three-, fourand five-bedroom units that can accommodate larger families — something the housing authority tried to maintain from the original project. It is difficult to find housing with rental assistance that can accommodate a larger family, said Linda Bridge, executive director of the Albuquerque Housing Authority.
The property includes 26 residential buildings, a new community building with a leasing office, a playground and a community garden plot. A quarter of the units will be reserved for households with children. Resident selection criteria also prioritizes active duty or retired U.S. military veterans. The project includes project-based assistance.
Some residents had to be relocated while the project was under construction. Approximately 24 of the residents who previously lived in the old units have moved back in to the new construction.
While it’s the first new construction the AHA has built in 30 years, this is its fifth recent affordable housing project. The other properties have been redeveloped and updated instead of being entirely rebuilt.
All of the Albuquerque public housing was built in the 1970s and early ‘80s through HUD’s federal public housing program, Bridge said.
“What’s happened nationwide is the decline in federal funding has caused an underinvestment in public housing,” she said.
Ten years ago, Albuquerque began seeing the effect of that underfunding on housing that was 30 or 40 years old, Bridge said. A new Rental Assistance Demonstration program from HUD made it possible for the AHA to take a different approach to projects. Instead of being solely reliant on capital funding, AHA can find debt investment partnerships and take out loans to help build and rehabilitate public housing.
“We have pathways on almost everything. Housing is the tough one, because the cost of building new housing is going up so rapidly,” said state Sen. Jerry Ortiz y Pino, who spoke at the new construction’s ribbon cutting Tuesday. The Albuquerque Democrat helped secure $1.6 million in state capital outlay funding for the project.
A recent city report estimated that Albuquerque is short 15,500 housing units.
“I grew up in housing instability,” said speaker Terry Gentry, executive vice president of the Richman Group Affordable Housing Corp., the project’s tax-credit equity investor. “I can tell you, it’s not easy to do your calculus homework in a car or in a bus station, and so having housing stability at a place where you can thrive is vitally important and doing the right thing by providing this housing, you also have significant impact to the community.”
Gentry said the project will have an estimated $16 million local economic impact and is projected to generate $500,000 in taxes and 40 full time jobs.
The AHA is working on closing on funding for its next two rehab projects on La Plata NW and Veranda NE. Each is approximately 30 units. The housing authority has 25 sites in Albuquerque and more than 900 units.