Use empty buildings to house the homeless

Iam a Santa Fe resident and retired state employee. I believe Santa Fe and the state of New Mexico have a wonderful opportunity to show the world a way to fix the homeless situation. Homeless individuals need more than just a shelter at night. They need shelter day and night, and they need a job that pays a decent wage. Let’s utilize existing empty properties and make them into temporary housing units. In the morning, rather than put a person back out on the street, we put them to work. Everybody who enters these housing units has to be on a work detail. There are hundreds of jobs around Santa Fe that need workers.

Pulling weeds, picking up trash, cleaning sidewalks, cleaning streets, and the list goes on. When you drive around Santa Fe, you see numerous empty buildings. One great possibility for a shelter would be the old Kmart store — or what about the $18 million worth of state-leased, unoccupied, unused office buildings throughout the city? Give people a place to call home, give them a job and give them their dignity back.

Terry Warnell Santa Fe

Public values

I attended the recent Railyard Celebration, an event honoring the passion and creativity of our community in establishing the many-acred Railyard site. It was a great moment of pride, to realize — over many years and through many public meetings — Santa Fe’s public stood up for its values, its ideas and came together with a solution. I wonder if a similar process might promote solutions for our homeless population in Santa Fe?

Margeaux Klein Santa Fe

Check the guns

In light of 600 mass shootings each of the last three years in the U.S., a Supreme Court that thinks every adult New Yorker (5 million!) should be allowed to carry a gun and the widely held view that more guns make us safer, we need to learn from how Wyatt Earp ran Tombstone. He had everyone check guns on coming into town. Nobody was to carry a gun in town except a few trained police officers. These were the only “good guys with guns” he allowed. It did not matter whether the guns were concealed or openly carried. The Earps knew everyone would be safer if essentially no one was carrying a gun. Of course, one can own guns, and there is a proper time and place to carry and use them. But there are also times and places where the presence of guns creates unpredictable dangers.

Robert Ross Santa Fe

Enabling theft?

The local office of a well-known delivery service, rather than using the apartment’s secure delivery procedure, dumps packages at the door to save time. Instead of ringing the doorbell, they send you a picture of the package on your doorstep by email. Why don’t they take a picture of the porch pirate who follows their truck?

Richard Hawkins Santa Fe

Bipartisan action possible

New Mexicans should take bipartisan action on climate change with carbon dividends. Carbon dividends is a bipartisan policy combating climate change centered on a carbon tax that places a price on each ton of carbon produced by industry. The tax could reduce carbon emissions more than every Obama climate policy combined. Crucially, the revenue from the tax would be returned to Americans with a monthly check.

Studies have projected this would increase 59 percent of Americans’ incomes. For Americans living below the poverty line, that number increases to 80 percent. The policy is fiscally and environmentally attractive, making it appealing to conservative and liberal New Mexicans alike. Experts agree and, in a statement in 2019, over 3,600 economists ruled in its favor, the most economists ever to agree on one issue. If you are in favor of the policy and want to help make a difference, please contact your representative.

Joshua Kerner Las Cruces

Quake danger

In the article (“Watchdog agency grills LANL, nuclear officials on lab safety,” Nov. 17), questions were asked how the plutonium facility, now being modernized for plutonium pit production, would withstand an earthquake. Seismic activity data in the area is limited; Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Seismic Network System has been underfunded since 1999. One can go to earthquake.usgs.gov to find updated seismic data for areas near LANL and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. In July 2021, a 4.2 earthquake struck Los Alamos County, with reports of shaking within the LANL complex. More recently, a 5.4 earthquake hit near the Texas/ New Mexico border, causing damage hundreds of miles away. Seismic activity has increased where horizontal oil and gas drilling takes place. I believe New Mexicans need to be aware of the growing dangers posed by seismic activity to nuclear facilities in our state and demand more accountability at these sites.

Betty Kuhn Santa Fe