‘They can’t afford to live here’

City, business community consider ways to ease affordable housing shortage

Stacy Fischer is on the front lines in the effort to recruit health care professionals for Santa Fe.

Currently, some 127 jobs for certified nurse assistants are open in the county, mostly in Santa Fe, and those who are qualified can come here and earn more per hour than jobs in other communities. Still, said Fisher, marketing director for Right at Home, a home-care and assistance provider, potential hires are deterred by the cost of housing.

“They can’t afford to live here,” said Fischer, who participated in a breakfast discussion sponsored by the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce to consider ways to develop more housing for Santa Fe’s workforce, especially teachers, lawenforcement officers and health care workers.

Affordable housing has long been an issue in Santa Fe, and Thursday’s discussion represents the latest effort to address the problem. It kicked off a focused initiative by the chamber, which plans to establish committees to look at various aspects of the housing issue and develop specific recommendations for the City Council and County Commission.

In addition, the Santa Fe Association of Realtors will sponsor a one-day conference, Bring Workers Home, Sept. 28 at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center.

For members of the local business community, the topic is a central part of

the city’s economic development challenges: If businesses can’t hire and retain workers, they are unable to grow and expand, and they might even have to close. It’s also a matter of lost opportunity because employees who leave Santa Fe after completing their work shifts spend much of their paychecks elsewhere.

One state survey shows that Santa Fe is missing out on $300 million in spending a year from such workers, said Simon Brackley, president and chief executive of the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce.

The panel that met Thursday morning emphasized that Santa Fe can consider many things tried by other cities, from refining zoning classifications to providing public infrastructure bonds. Those can help because most banks won’t make loans for sewer, water and road extensions, all of which must be completed before a building permit is issued.

Cities like Albuquerque have had success with voter-approved bonds for multifamily or affordable housing, which are repaid by the owners when homes are completed.

Another issue is exclusionary zoning in Santa Fe, which makes it difficult for private developers to build at a density of more than seven units per acre, a level many say they

need to book a profit. Just 17 percent of city land allows for that density — and most of that is concentrated in a few areas.

Alexandra Ladd, the city’s housing director, estimated there is a need for 3,000 new rental units to meet current demand and, “We don’t have enough zoned land to support the units we need,” she said.

Some possible solutions include making it easier to develop taller, mixed-use buildings along existing commercial corridors, such as Cerrillos Road and St. Michael’s Drive, and permitting housing along the peripheries of shopping malls or on school parcels, which could be rented to teachers.

Other ideas have been tried in Santa Fe but changed with new political regimes. The city of Santa Fe, for instance, imposed a ban on police officers driving patrol cars to and from work if they lived more than 10 miles outside the city. The policy was meant to encourage more city employees to live in Santa Fe and to offer a police presence in Santa Fe neighborhoods.

That mandate was lifted a few years ago. Mike Loftin, director of Homewise, a nonprofit that builds homes aimed at working families, said the change means officers living outside the city are getting what amounts to a $5,000-a-year subsidy, which is what it costs taxpayers to absorb the extra take-home miles.

“Our policy is to help them live in Albuquerque and Rio Rancho because we pay for them to drive cars there,” Loftin said.

City Councilor Signe Lindell said the car take-home policy is an example of competing interests, weighing police recruitment against having officers live here.

“We incentivize police to live someplace else. It’s maddening; it doesn’t make sense,” she said, but that has to be weighed against the reality of officer shortages in Santa Fe and a competitive job market.

“These are super-complex problems,” Lindell said.

For Fischer, they also are urgent problems. The city has two large assisted living projects set to open in the coming year and a population that is aging faster than the rest of the country.

“For us, this is never-ending,” she said. “We’re hiring all the time, and we’re all fighting for the same people.”