County’s report on homelessness will have ripple effects
After a year of work, Santa Fe County is inching closer to dropping a bombshell report on affordable housing. Its conclusions could be worse than expected, which says a lot since most already know there is a crisis.
County staff members, led by affordable housing expert Joseph Montoya, contracted New Mexico-based planning group Sites Southwest to draft the plan. The firm hired Carlos Gemora as a senior planner shortly after he resigned from the city as its long-range planner in 2021.
Gemora, assigned to facilitate the plan with county staff, was beneficial for being well-versed on crucial housing issues in the city, which has the bulk of the county’s population and housing. Gemora, with Montoya’s oversight, assembled a housing plan advisory group comprised of a couple dozen individuals with experience and interest in affordable housing issues.
The advisory group has met online every month since December, vetting the plan’s progress and offering perspective and guidance.
I’ve participated in the process, and a fascinating aspect is contemplating how county land-use policies must change if narrowing the housing gap has any prayer of success.
The county created a Sustainable Growth Management Plan in 2010, which led to adoption of the Sustainable Land Development Code in 2015. The plan recognized the “urban form” was leaking over the city/county boundary lines and so formalized higher-density development prospects in areas labeled Sustainable Development Area-1.
Most of SDA-1 is south of Interstate 25 between the N.M. 599 interchange and U.S. 285 near Eldorado. Within it lies the community college subdistrict, serviced by state N.M. 14 and Richards Avenue. That area has seen the highest growth rate in both large single-family developments and multifamily apartments either started or in the approval pipeline.
Another SDA-1 area has seen no growth but could and should. That chunk of land lies west of N.M. 599 and is bisected by Caja del Rio, the road leading to the back end of Las Campanas and which passes city recreation fields and the city’s Marty Sanchez
Links de Santa Fe golf course.
It may be hard to visualize high-density development in the rural rolling terrain, but there is much to recommend it, in some ways even more than the community college area. Current underlying zoning for the area is R-1, meaning no more than one dwelling unit per acre.
That’s not different than much of SDA-1 zoning south of I-25, but there the county allows some sections can go as high as 20 dwelling units per acre, meaning apartments. For SDA-1 west of N.M. 599, anything more dense than one per acre must undergo the onerous entitlement process of county upzoning approval. Three votes by a newly seated County Commission in January could easily fix that.
From a purely logistical perspective, which defines how developers view vacant land, a huge advantage of the northern tract is upstream proximity to the wastewater treatment plant along the Santa Fe River. While many think density is a function of water availability, the true determination is treating wastewater.
The Community College District’s logistical challenge is the topographical bowl it sits in, which means, in the absence of a new county-built treatment plant, wastewater is pumped out of the basin to flow to the city/county treatment plant.
In addition to gravity flow sewer lines, the northern SDA-1 is closer to the Buckman potable water treatment plant, where the county gets its share of water for all its customers.
The county is determined to appropriately and aggressively address regional affordable housing shortages. Opening higher density development west of N.M. 599 must be part of that plan.