Who’s ready to champion taxes to boost affordable housing?
The first three organizations recruited in the fall of 2017 to form the Santa Fe Housing Action Coalition were the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce, the Santa Fe Association of Realtors and the Santa Fe Area Home Builders Association.
In 2009, those same organizations worked to defeat a proposal put in front of city voters that would have imposed a small transfer tax on the sales of homes over $750,000. Tax revenue would have gone to the Affordable Housing Trust Fund the city created in 2005.
It was a stinging defeat for affordable housing advocates and created long-lasting wariness of voter-determined new taxes. Not surprisingly, it also created wariness of organizations that seemed opposed to affordable housing.
Fast-forward through a decade of rising housing demand unmet by shrinking housing supply, and virtually nobody is opposed to fixing the resulting housing crisis. The action coalition quickly grew to more than 20 Santa Fe organizations. Invited to join were those representing large constituencies of individuals affected by our housing shortage, ranging from homeless kids at YouthWorks to well-paid heroes at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center.
For a full list on steering committee members, visit santafehousingaction.org. While you’re there, click on the news tab and read the white paper released Jan. 10 by the coalition. It’s about funding the city’s affordable housing trust fund.
After waiting nearly three years for the city to come up with a plan to do what a mayoral task force said in 2018 needed to be done, namely finding $3 million every year for the trust fund, the coalition created pathways for finding the money.
The report is thorough, practical and stakeholder-vetted.
It explores a wide variety of funding sources. It categorizes them by ease of approval into short range (triage), midrange and long range.
None of the proposals will happen without elected champions. If the white paper has any failing, it is that political leaders will face analysis paralysis with that many options.
They might struggle with the same dilemmas faced in the report’s drafting: Which idea is best? Should they be priori tized? Can more than one, or all of them, be pursued simultaneously? If one councilor champions one path and another a different path, is that good or bad?
These are not idle speculations. With a municipal election scheduled for November, and with at least one councilor possibly challenging Mayor Alan Webber if he decides to seek reelection, funding choices and housing policies must be front and center in the race.
A column on building doesn’t have to be shy about prioritizing — we need to have a small mill levy increase on our property taxes. The question to do so should be on the November ballot. Let candidates run on their support or opposition.
Back in 2009, the three stalwart business organizations were not necessarily opposed to affordable housing. They opposed robbing the rich to help the poor, which is what a real estate transfer tax would have done. The homebuilders’ position at the time was that the proposed tax collection was chump change compared to the problem, and if affordable housing was a communitywide problem, the entire community should participate in solving it.
Albuquerque voters go to the polls every two years to tax their homes to fund their affordable housing trust fund, and they’ve done so for over a decade. It passes by wider margins every cycle. The last got support of nearly 75 percent.
The suggested need of $3 million per year was pre-pandemic. The need now is much greater and will get worse. A $10 million bond every two years is needed now. Who’s ready to champion that?