It's not hard to look at the big picture-at least in theory. The City of Santa ***image2***Fe, like the shin bone, is connected to the knee bone and, as it turns out, a bunch of other gooey and sensitive matter as well. When one thing doesn't work so well, other elements have a tendency to bite the dust in succession. But Santa Fe's city government is still like a medieval surgeon, applying ointments and incantations to one problem area while leeching the life out of the city's ability to heal itself.
Take the recent examples of civic schizophrenia: In the course of a few days, the city announced its partnership and support of the Homewise Business Campaign for Homeownership, downzoned the residential neighborhood surrounding the Railyard and denied a forward-thinking, environmentally responsible, restoration of the skanky southeast corner of Cerrillos Road and Manhattan Avenue on the grounds that one component will be 20 feet too tall and another may, architecturally, appear to be floating.
What truly appears to be floating, even drifting toward an unattainable altitude, is the magical ether that might provide something approximating reason to the City Council's thought process.
When Homewise, a nonprofit that helps modest-income New Mexicans work toward home ownership, unveiled its new initiative, Councilors Rebecca Wurzberger, Patti Bushee and Carmichael Dominguez, as well as Mayor David Coss, were on hand to hobnob with Lt. Gov. Diane Denish and a slew of business leaders. The program is smart because instead of relying on a straight plea for affordable housing, it addresses the economic impact on the city when people can't afford to own homes.
That impact is assessed in a study, conducted by Homewise and supported by the McCune Charitable Foundation, which determines that $301.6 million in annual spending is lost due to Santa Fe workers who live elsewhere and commute. While the study is a bit thin on the justification for its calculations, it is convincing in its basic logic: When people can't afford to own homes here, we don't just lose diversity, we lose money.
The program based on the study is attempting to enlist local businesses in generating employer-specific programs to provide time, encouragement and, ideally, money toward homeownership. At least 20 local businesses, ranging from single offices to St. Vincent Regional Medical Center and Los Alamos National Bank, have agreed to participate.
But where are all these houses that will be purchased by the happy, newly embraced workers? Most of the houses need to be built. Homewise is itself a developer and real estate agent (say, that's handy), but many of the homebuilders who might be expected to do such work are currently involved in a lawsuit against the City of Santa Fe's affordable housing ordinance; they claim building the affordable units is crushing the bottom line. The builders, however, probably can meet the requirements and still turn a profit-provided the density allowance is high enough.
But last week, when the Council voted to decrease density in the Alarid/Railyard neighborhood, Councilor Miguel Chavez said he hoped the move could serve as a model for the rest of the city. Yet again, affordable housing is important, so long as it goes in some other neighborhood.
That other neighborhood would be Centex developments or the equivalent. Centex, the national homebuilder with a name that sounds like a deadly nerve gas, has four large-scale developments currently in the works in Santa Fe. Sure, the houses look less like Santa Fe and more like San Phoenix Diego Vegas, but who cares? Centex can build to a price point that satisfies the affordable ordinance, and it's only the workers who will be living out there anyway. Low density means sprawl, which means disconnected neighborhoods, more cars, more chain stores, more infrastructure and, most importantly, more personal space for phobic, uptight, NIMBY naysayers who already own property in central and east-side locations.
Cementing the fact that the Council is prioritizing the concerns of the whiny and fearful over the health of the city as a whole, it also voted to deny permission to a WivCo development at the site of the former Healy-Matthews and Club Luna. WivCo is the company that successfully sued the city to develop live/work infill units on Marquez Place and that is currently building the ArtYard residential units on the Railyard property (it is run by Democratic third-congressional candidate Don Wiviott). The ArtYard project supplies enough affordable units to meet the city's affordable housing ordinance, but the market rate units, intended for artists, start at $450,000. Why? Because the allowed density was cut in half when the city caved to pressure from a few squeaky wheels. Now it will be a nice community of second homes for "artists."
A ring of affordable houses in contained sub-communities surrounding a wealthy, too-sacred-to-profane center is a sure path to a dead and soulless city. Density is not the enemy and there are plenty of strategies for managing it so that houses are not congested and neighborhoods enjoy copious open space. We now know that we need the workers, or at least that we want their money. But simultaneous signals indicate that we don't want their diversity. If I were a developer, I wouldn't waste my time building affordable houses-I'd be looking into supplying the walls that will eventually be needed to block out the view of the real world from Santa Fe's useless, make-believe downtown.