Survey finds Santa Fe is a city of commuters
Groups hope data will spur more efforts to boost affordable housing in community
It’s well known tons of people work in Santa Fe but live in Rio Rancho or Albuquerque.
Now a new report by the Santa Fe Association of Realtors gives an idea of how many: 37.8 percent of Santa Fe workers are commuting into town.
What’s not as well known is nearly the same percentage of Santa Fe-area residents — 34.8 percent — leave town each day for jobs in Los Alamos or Albuquerque.
Those are just two of the nuggets revealed in the 2020 Santa Fe Housing Report, an initial effort by the Santa Fe Association of Realtors to paint a comprehensive data picture of the city’s complex housing factors.
“We could get all the information before, but you would have to grab this piece here, this piece there, this piece somewhere else,” said Susan Orth, the association’s president in 2020. “This is going to be really, really important for us all to be able to easily compare data.”
The report, which incorporates data from both local and national sources, analyzes the entire housing sector but especially focuses on affordable housing. The association assembled a housing stakeholder team to research and assemble the report and included people from the city’s Office of Affordable Housing, the Santa Fe Public Housing Authority, the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness and New Mexico Inter-Faith Housing.
“The big issue we have in Santa Fe are the multiple truths that exist about affordable housing,” said Daniel Werwath, chief operating officer of New Mexico Inter-Faith Housing. “The idea here is to give us a starting point for discussing housing. If we are not looking at data, we are just relying on anecdotal material.”
Others on the stakeholder team include the Association of Realtors, the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce, Gateway Mortgage Group and the Santa Fe Area Home Builders Association.
“There is a big appetite from the City Council to do something about affordable housing,” said Miles D. Conway, executive officer at the homebuilders association. “With all of this material, we are leading the horse to water and showing them the full spectrum. Now it’s going to be up to our elected officials to look at all these options and take us in a direction.”
In addition to housing supply, the report touches on rental housing, housing sales, mortgage finance and affordability.
“We would like to have more datadriven strategies and policies,” said Donna Reynolds, the association of Realtors’ government affairs director. “Our [real estate agent] members being able to look at a bigger picture is good for their clients.”
The report provides data going back 10 years but stops in 2019, sidestepping the instabilities of the pandemic year of 2020. The association plans to release a second report this summer that will include 2020 data. The intention is to release a housing report annually in the summer, Orth said.
In the report’s opening message, Orth writes: “Growing smart will be key as we face the extreme housing and rental shortages in our community with limited resources to address the issue. Unless the shortages are fully addressed, the lack of housing will continue to contribute to the adverse impact on the economy and quality of life.”
The report says homebuilding has shifted from single-family homes to apartments. From 2006-08, the city issued 1,391 building permits for single-family homes, while just 843 permits were issued from 2017-19.
Only 326 apartment permits were issued from 2006-08. But from 2017-19, that number grew to 1,015. And in 2020, 17 multifamily projects with more than 1,500 apartments were under construction or recently completed.
The report acknowledges an estimated rental shortage of 7,343 units in the Santa Fe metro area, with about 5,328 renter households eligible for down payment assistance. It cites a 2019 apartment vacancy rate of 2.3 percent, which is considered exceptionally low.
The vacancy rate now is estimated at 5 percent — only because some 1,500plus new units are on the market or under construction. Once the market settles, the vacancy rate could once again drop to 2 percent or 3 percent even with all the new units, said Billy Eagle, senior vice president at the Albuquerque office of commercial real estate firm CBRE, which most closely monitors the multifamily market in Santa Fe and Albuquerque.
Werwath brought the idea of doing a housing report to the Santa Fe Association of Realtors after learning about a similar report the Missoula Organization of Realtors has produced in Montana for 15 years. Werwath had consulted with the Missoula organization about affordable housing, and the association worked with officials there to create the Santa Fe report.
Lenders use the Missoula Housing Report in deciding on home or construction loans, said Dwight Easton, public affairs director at the Missoula Organization of Realtors.
“This gives them the resources to say, ‘This is a good idea,’ ” Easton said. “[The housing report] has allowed a lot of people to get a good sense of what’s going on in the Missoula housing sector.”