Home Building: Housing, land-use and aesthetics

Jan. 1—Daniel House Werwath is a nontraditional affordable housing practitioner who serves as the executive director of New Mexico Interfaith Housing, chair of The Santa Fe Housing Action Coalition and Acting Director of The Housing Trust, all based in Santa Fe. For nearly 20 years, Daniel has worked at the intersection of affordable housing and community development planning and practice. He began as a Housing Counselor at the Santa Fe Community Housing Trust, assisting families through the process of buying their first homes. He has since spearheaded novel community input processes, directed strategic affordable housing planning processes, created new housing and land use policy, spearheaded community housing advocacy and directed housing development. Here we talk to him about housing, building aesthetics and land-use projects in Santa Fe.

Why are so many Santa Feans complaining about the new apartment complexes that are going up?

There are a lot of reasons, but the core of it is scale, the rapidity with which a lot of housing has been built and that it is often not the best-looking new development. Over the last 20 years, we didn't build any new rental housing that wasn't income-restricted affordable housing. The housing we see coming online now is the market making up for that scarcity. And quick!

Also, many people believe that multifamily housing isn't a "historic" development type. However, if you look at any Pueblo or prehistoric village, multi-family housing is the most historic development pattern in New Mexico. A lot of folks don't realize that Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon was the largest "building" in the United States until the 1880s.

We've all probably heard complaints about the aesthetics [of the new multi-family housing being built]. But the blame for this really lies with the city's pain-fully bad approach to commercial design standards. It's the same rules that require Target stores to put fake viga ends on the facade. Most of all, it feels like development without intention, a sort of "planning by unintended consequence." This is very much the case since the city's macro land use policy is almost 25 years old.

As for the massive scale of these projects, I think it's mainly because we don't allow smaller-scale rentals (like duplexes and small multiplexes) to be built, even though you find them all over historic neighborhoods. We also don't have residential zoning for apartments. That means developers have to compete for commercial land, which is very expensive and subject to commercial rather than residential design guidelines. Additional development restrictions called Highway Protection Corridor Overlay Districts (designed to protect views from cars) further limit the height of buildings to two stories in all of our most intensely used commercial corridors, which is where you'd normally find denser rental housing. So once a developer finds a commercially zoned piece of land outside of those overlay districts, it takes quite a big project to spread out the extremely high land costs. We've created this problem by eliminating other more scale-appropriate and aesthetically pleasing ways of adding rental housing.

Also, driving down Agua Fria heading west from Guadalupe Street yesterday, I remarked on how many multi-family units are in that neighborhood. And people like to live there!

Why doesn't that happen anymore in Santa Fe? The four- to six-unit projects? Did those units fly under the radar when they were built? (I'm thinking about Closson Street and that area.)

The main reason for the lack of smaller-scale rental housing is that it is functionally illegal under most of Santa Fe's current zoning guidelines. The majority of Santa Fe's zoning is for luxury housing, allowing only one unit per acre. The second-most-prevalent zoning is five units per acre, which covers most of the single-family neighborhoods in Santa Fe. At that density, it would take three-fourths of an acre to be allowed to build a three-unit building. That's simply financially infeasible compared to building three detached homes. A good way to understand zoning is that low-density zoning incentivizes developers to build the most expensive housing possible to maximize profit, while higher-density zoning incentivizes building the most units possible, which promotes more natural affordability.

Name some of the worst/ugliest/most insulting projects or buildings that have gone up over the past 5 — 10 years.

First, aesthetics are highly subjective. I don't think it's possible to make everyone happy. That said, my top-three least-favorite designs are the Santa Fe County Courthouse, Rudy's BBQ on Cerrillos Road, and Presbyterian Hospital. Funny how we hold housing to different standards, right? Lots of people got worked up about the Capital Flats building on Cordova. I'm like, Is it bringing down the aesthetics of the 1980s brutalist masterpiece, the state buildings across the street? Or the health-food store next door?

Name some of the best/most attractive/most sensible projects or buildings that have gone up over the past 5 — 10 years.

The new housing we've built in the last few years, while not necessarily in keeping with "Santa Fe Style" or perhaps not pushing the envelope around contemporary design, looks very good to the people looking out from the windows of safe, warm housing that didn't exist here a few years ago. We had over 11,000 people leave Santa Fe County in 2019 alone, and commuting tops 30,000 people a day. Anything that keeps workers in our city looks good to me at this point.

What city or other cities have used their land in ways that Santa Fe might learn from?

Minneapolis is one that fascinates me. A few years back, embracing the "gentle density" concept, they legalized four-unit buildings on all residential lots and also backed it up with major new public investments in affordable housing. As a result, they are the only major US metro with dropping rents right now.

Are there any attractive or future-beneficial land-use projects?

There is a lot of potential with the Midtown redevelopment, but if we want to see that redevelopment be successful, we badly need to invest in reimagining St. Michael's Drive. One of the main mistakes we made with the Railyard was to ignore (and even downzone) the adjacent neighborhoods, which makes it hard for the private sector to positively reinforce redevelopment. There are oceans of parking lots along St. Mike's. I'd love to see a right-sized road, with on-street parking, pedestrian and bike access, and lots of affordable housing infill and mixed-use development in those end-less parking lots.

Housing, land-use and aesthetics