More than three years after the City of Santa Fe approved Phase 3 of the Tierra Contenta housing project on the city’s Southside, the long-awaited development may finally have a chance to break ground this July—if affordable housing nonprofit Homewise can secure the $28 million it needs.
A significant part of the funding was recently secured when the nonprofit Anchorum Health Foundation announced last month that it would provide Homewise with a $10 million loan to support Tierra Contenta’s Phase 3 construction.
“Our vision for solving the affordable housing crisis depends on collaboration,” Anchorum President and CEO Jerry Jones said in a Feb. 5 press release. “It will take strong partnerships and bold, long-term investments to increase access to affordable homeownership, improve overall quality of life and transform our communities.”
This phase of development for Tierra Contenta—an ongoing housing project that has been in the works since the early 1990s—is set to provide the city with up to 1,500 new units of housing, with 40% of the units (about 600) designated to meet the city’s affordable housing guidelines.
“That's double [of] what the city guidelines call for. It's pretty ambitious to get that kind of affordability,” Homewise CEO Mike Loftin tells SFR.
Loftin adds Homewise is also working with Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and state legislators to secure capital outlay funds to help cover the cost of the foundational infrastructure. This legislative session, the city has requested $14 million for the project.
“If we don't get capital from the state, the project will get delayed, because the numbers just don't work,” Loftin says. “The infrastructure is very expensive.”
The $28 million, Loftin says, will primarily be used to fund trunk infrastructure for the planned housing site, which would entail extending the Paseo del Sol road and “connecting it all the way to Cerrillos Road,” as well as building water lines and other utility services for the units.
“Housing has become such an important issue statewide, but I think it's also, what people like about this is that it's very concrete, and it's shovel ready,” Loftin says. “All the engineering for the main infrastructure has been completed, so we can start construction on the infrastructure this year. We're trying to move as quickly as possible, because we have a huge shortage of housing in Santa Fe.”
Santa Fe’s request for capital outlay to the state says the project’s start date is planned for July 1 and should take approximately one year to complete.
The planning and design portion of the project is complete, and has been so since the city approved Tierra Contenta’s amended master plan for Phase 3 in 2021, encouraging the project to use a mix of residential housing types such as row houses, duplexes and courtyard apartments, rather than designating parcels of land with homogenous zoning categories.
The full Tierra Contenta project began when the city bought 860 acres on the Southside of Santa Fe out of foreclosure in 1993 to create more affordable housing. The city also created the Tierra Contenta Corporation nonprofit to manage the property and develop a master plan. By 2021, the first two phases of development produced more than 2,300 homes.
According to previous reporting from SFR, 90% of the city’s population growth from 2002 to 2012 was “concentrated in Tierra Contenta and the surrounding subdivisions,” and developers then had a goal of achieving 4,000 housing units for more than 10,000 residents.
“One of the goals here is not just to have Phase 3 of Tierra Contenta be successful, but to use it as a way to help build capacity in the system,” Loftin says. “Santa Fe needed about 7,500 [units]. This is about 20% of that need. It doesn't solve the whole problem by any means—more is gonna have to be done. We're hoping Tierra Contenta helps catalyze that.”
Once the trunk infrastructure project is complete, Homewise will open some of the tracts of land it owns to sell to other builders and developers. Homewise has spoken with several organizations, and several have shown interest—the Santa Fe Area Home Builders Association, the Santa Fe Habitat for Humanity, the Santa Fe Community Housing Trust and even some affordable rental developers.
Santa Fe Habitat for Humanity’s interim executive director, Rob Lochner, tells SFR he is “totally open” to being involved with Phase 3 of the Tierra Contenta project, depending on what proposals Homewise offers.
“We are actively pursuing all options, because we need more land. We need more projects,” Lochner says, adding that Santa Fe Habitat for Humanity has slowed its operations for approximately a year now due to a lack of shovel-ready building lots and land. “We're hoping to get back to [building] six, seven homes a year, and even increasing that. Our board was looking at trying to double our production over the next few years.”
Santa Fe Habitat for Humanity has collaborated with the Tierra Contenta Corporation in the past. Lochner notes—before his time there—the organization built an eight-plex unit on Avenida El Nido for Tierra Contenta’s second phase of development, in addition to a few other subdivisions.
House Bill 450, which focuses on this year’s capital outlay funding requests across the state, has not yet been heard yet in the legislature and currently resides in the House Taxation & Revenue Committee. It is also assigned to be heard in the House Appropriation & Finance Committee.
Loftin says Lujan Grisham and individual legislators they have met with are “very supportive” of the project, and says Homewise is optimistic about their prospects of receiving the capital outlay funds.
“The total capital requirements for the project are really big,” Loftin says. “We're just trying to get it started, so that's going to be a huge help for that.”
