5,000 additional housing units by 2025. Is it in reach?

Mar. 25—Survival is sapping Dulce Saldivar's down payment for a house.

She was saving money while she attended the University of New Mexico and hoped to buy a place when she graduated. But rising health care costs and a new car payment after her vehicle died have delayed that dream.

"That down payment money was hard to keep in a savings account," Saldivar said. "Just because there's so much survival to do nowadays."

But even with a down payment taken care of, the bills don't stop. Mortgage rates have increased, even in the four years since Saldivar's parents bought their home in the International District, she said. In 2019, the rate on that house was 2.75% — to buy her own place, Saldivar is seeing rates more than double that.

Saldivar is just 23. But she'd like to buy a house by the end of the year and move out of her parent's house. With four dogs, she wants to find a place of her own with a backyard and nearby trails to walk. Her golden retriever is high energy and could use a place to play, she said.

"Sometimes I think I push myself too hard, because I'm so young," Saldivar said. "But at the same time, I've always been very driven to do better and make my family proud. My family's from Mexico City, and all I wish is to make them proud and make it worth it that my family is here."

In 2022, Mayor Tim Keller announced the Housing Forward plan, an initiative intended to increase available housing and decrease prices. By 2025, the city hopes to add 5,000 new units citywide.

"Do we have the capacity to do it? Absolutely," Deputy Director of Housing Joseph Montoya said. "Clearly, there's the political will to do it. It's just that we have to be able to find the money to be able to do it."

Zoning changes

Mia Sosa-Provencio and her husband, Gerardo Martinez Luna, were starting to lose hope on getting a conditional use permit to build a casita in their backyard. The couple had already spent close to $5,000 on blueprints and contracting someone to help with the application process.

"It's like you climb one mountain, and then there's still a few more mountains," Sosa-Provencio said. "We were committed to it ... but it's like this kind of takes a full-time job — on top of your full-time job."

But now, they have blueprints in hand and are ready to break ground any day.

Last summer, Mayor Tim Keller signed a series of zoning code changes to increase housing stock in the city. One allowed casitas to be zoned permissively in most parts of the city.

Besides zoning changes, the city is trying to boost housing production by converting hotels, motels and office buildings into apartments.

One of those projects is almost finished. In late February, the city announced it would start preleasing for the Los Altos Lofts, a 1970s Surestay hotel on Lomas and Eubank — complete with an indoor pool — turned into 90 affordable apartment units. The city acquired the property for $5.7 million and will rent units for between $700 and $900, although additional subsidies may be available.

The city also contributed to the recently completed Imperial Inn renovation through a partnership between the Metropolitan Redevelopment Agency and a private developer. Although most of the rooms are hotel rooms, there are a handful of longer-term rentals at the property near Huning Highlands.

Some Housing Forward projects, such as the soon-to-be completed Los Altos motel conversion, will be fully developed and owned by the city. Others will be the result of partnerships between public entities and private developers.

The market

Anita Córdova, board president of the Affordable Housing Coalition, said people often argue about how many housing units Albuquerque needs to combat its housing crisis. But she said, although each study claims a slightly different number, there's a growing gap between the amount of affordable housing and the people who need it.

"It's clear," Córdova said. "We have a dire housing crisis. And it's most affecting people with limited income or the need for deeply affordable housing."

Montoya said a report last year estimated the city is short thousands of housing units — primarily affordable units. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development generally defines affordable housing as a place to live that costs less than 30% of a family's income.

Felipe Rael, executive director of affordable housing developer Sol Housing, said long planning periods — lasting 24 to 36 months — could make 5,000 units by next year hard to reach. But he said he hasn't seen this much "energy" from both grassroots and the city to tackle housing in the past two decades.

"It's kind of like turning a battleship," Rael said. "The energy and the focus is there. I think if the resources follow, you've got folks' attention in the development community."

Rael highlighted two major impediments to housing construction: lack of resources and difficulty securing land.

For several decades, Rael said, the organization built and sold single-family homes at a 5% profit. But he said about 10 years ago, following the Great Recession, the market shifted and it became unfeasible to construct houses that were still priced within reach for first-time homebuyers. Now the group focuses primarily on multifamily housing.

But multifamily comes with opportunities. Rather than building just a handful of homes at a time, Sol Housing can build dozens at once — making city subsidies go further. The organization is planning to build 70 new units this year.

"It's a lot easier to chunk it away 100 units at a time, than 10 to 15," Rael said.

Córdova said tackling housing can be "daunting," but she believes if the entire community maximizes available funding and focuses on reaching the 5,000 unit goal, it could be achievable.

But that's just the first step. Keeping people housed is the next challenge.

"Historically, we fall between third- and fifth-highest in the country for eviction rates," Córdova said. "That's not a sustainable housing formula. You can get people in the housing, but if they get evicted and cycle in and out of housing, what we see is that people get sicker and sicker and harder and harder to house."

Progress

There are challenges tracking the progress on the Housing Forward initiative. Although the completion of the Los Altos Lofts will bring the number of hotel/motel conversion units to close to 100 — the Housing Forward website lists the goal for conversions as 1,000 units — other pieces of the initiative are harder to quantify.

A spokesperson for the Planning Department said the current software doesn't allow tracking the number of casita permits issued since the zoning change, although the department is working on switching to a new program with that capability. The Journal previously reported that after Santa Fe made a similar zoning change in 2019, just a few dozen permits were issued and the overall number of permits remained largely stagnant in the following years.

Other Housing Forward projects are just in their infancy.

Last year, the City Council approved a tax abatement incentive for a three-story multifamily apartment building at Adams and Central and an affordable housing project, SOMOS, at Central and Alcazar. On Friday, city administration announced it was releasing a request for proposal for private developers to convert hotels, motels and underutilized commercial buildings in certain areas into housing. Up to $4 million is on the table, but at least a fifth of the units built need to be set aside for households at or below 80% of area median income for the next 30 years. City Council will soon vote on a proposal to fast-track permits for housing construction on certain parts of the city.

And Montoya said the city has its eye on another hotel.

This year's changes

Montoya said a zoning change adopted last year was "essential" to the Los Altos project and other converted projects. One of the challenges of turning hotel rooms into apartments, Montoya said, is they aren't typically set up with kitchens. Now, motel and hotel conversions aren't required to have full kitchens. Los Altos apartments will have induction cooktops.

But some of the zoning changes pushed by the initiative have failed when it comes to a vote. During last year's update of the Integrated Development Ordinance — the city's zoning code, which is updated every year — proposed changes to parking requirements for multifamily apartment complexes were struck from the final amendment package.

One of the most contentious items, an amendment that would allow for duplexes in most of the city's residential areas, was also struck after community backlash about the potential effects on property value, parking and crime.

That proposal has resurfaced this year. A Planning Department spokesperson said this year's amendment addressed a concern that last year's amendment would have allowed for three residences — a duplex and casita — in single-family neighborhoods. The amendment clarifies a homeowner can build one or the other, but not both.

But public comments attached to the amendment, which has passed the Environmental Planning Commission, showed several of the same worries about the impact on neighborhoods.

The amendments will head to the City Council's Land Use, Planning and Zoning Committee before the full council will have the opportunity to amend and vote on the proposals.

The zoning change for casitas was also controversial — and had failed before.

Sosa-Provencio and her husband had been considering building an addition for several years in anticipation of Martinez Luna's parents, now in their 80s, moving in with them. Until then, they plan to rent out the 360-square-foot unit.

Sosa-Provencio said the zoning change could make it easier in the future. She added that workshops could be helpful for homeowners — as well as the free, pre-approved casita plans released by the city in December, given the high cost of design. A Planning Department spokesperson said the plans have been downloaded about 1,800 times.

"Myself coming from the South Valley, (for) a lot of families, including my family, it's possible to build these casitas or ADUs (accessory dwelling units) with less money," Martinez Luna said. "But the very hard part for working families is the process."