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Morning Word
National affordable housing developer enters Santa Fe market
National affordable housing developer Community Preservation Partners announced yesterday it has “entered the Santa Fe market” by purchasing Sangre De Cristo Apartments (1801 Espinacitas St.) and nearby Santa Fe Apartments (255 Camino Alire) for close to $42 million. According to a news release, CPP, which is headquartered in Virginia and California, intends to renovate both complexes for a total investment of close to $94 million, counting the purchase price. Once renovated, the two developments, built in 1970 and 1968, respectively, will be restricted to households earning 60% or less of the Area Median Gross Income. Sangre de Cristo Apartments has 164 units of one, two, three and four-bedroom apartments; Santa Fe Apartments has 64 units ranging from one-to-three bedrooms. “Santa Fe is an important new market for CPP,” Vice President Karen Buckland says in a statement. “With 38 communities in New Mexico, including our newest one in Albuquerque, this purchase is another example of our continued investment in affordable housing in the state.” The “extensive renovations” planned for the complexes include: ADA modifications and improvements, including the creation of several hearing-impaired units; energy efficiency upgrades; stucco repairs; new playground equipment; and the addition of air-conditioning at both complexes. CPP says both properties’ federal Housing and Urban Development subsidies had been set to expire, but will now be in place until 2054. “We are looking forward to working with CPP on these new developments in New Mexico,” Bobby C. Griffith, CFO and director of acquisitions at JL Gray, the development’s management company and owner says in a statement. “They are partners who share our commitment to helping provide affordable housing to families and individuals in our communities.”
City of Santa Fe receives $2 million for hotel housing conversion
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham yesterday announced $8 million in the second round of Casa Connection Grant Program awards—which the state created using federal pandemic aid—to address housing shortages and homelessness. The awards include $2 million to the City of Santa Fe to purchase and transform a hotel into transitional living with onsite supportive services.The city is part of a coalition transforming the former Lamplighter Inn into affordable housing units (slowly), and helped fund a similar conversion for Santa Fe Suites, which the Legislative Finance Council highlighted in its report last May on homelessness and affordable housing. In a statement, the governor congratulated the recipients, whom she described as “already doing crucial on-the-ground work to tackle homelessness and housing insecurity in our state.” Other awards included $1 million to the City of Las Cruces for an affordable-housing development; $800,000 to Española Pathways Shelter to renovate a hotel as additional transitional housing for people experiencing homelessness and recovering from substance abuse; and $700,000 to Northern New Mexico College to renovate buildings on the El Rito campus to provide affordable housing for students and faculty. The state awarded the first $10 million round of funding last December, and an additional $10 million last November through the New Mexico Home Fund.
ISO salmon vandals
The state Department of Game & Fish yesterday reported vandals on Friday had “derailed” its annual kokanee salmon spawning efforts. Each fall, staff gather salmon into holding pens in order to “manually spawn them prior to taking the fertilized eggs” to the Los Ojos Hatchery. According to a news release, staff found the holding pen at Navajo Lake “dragged from the lake,” with the hundreds of salmon inside missing. With kokanee salmon populations already low due to drought and warm temperatures, the vandalism compounds the situation, officials say. “The loss of this spawn has dramatic impacts on future kokanee fishing opportunities, as they do not sustain their populations via natural spawning,” Kirk Patten, the department’s chief of fisheries, says in a statement. The department uses the once-a-year spawned salmon to stock coldwater lakes in Northern New Mexico for angling opportunities. “Every fish we can collect eggs from is critical to maintaining the fishery,” Patten says. “To have someone remove these fish from our trap is a massive hit to the state’s fisheries, especially this year when populations are already low.” As such, Fish & Game is offering a $2,500 reward for information leading to those involved with this incident. Call the Operation Game Thief hotline at 1-800-432-4263 or report online.
PNM: Watch out for possible scam
Public Service Company of New Mexico yesterday warned residents to be on the lookout for scammers posing as PNM employees. According to a news release from the company, “there have been reports across New Mexico of individuals who claim they are PNM employees requesting access to customers’ homes. They tell the customer they need to get into their backyards via the front door to measure equipment or other false claims.” The company says it will never request access to enter a home unless a customer has requested a specific service, such as its energy check-up. “It’s unnerving to hear of these incidents,” PNM Director of Safety Chad Krukowski says in a statement. “When we are notified of suspect activity, it is our duty to inform the customers in our service territory, so they don’t fall victim to these types of potential scams.” According to the company, PNM meter readers will access property yards without permission. Otherwise, if someone claims to be a PNM employee and requests indoor access, the company says, “DO NOT allow them in.” Customers can verify PNM employee identities and report incidents to 1-888-DIAL-PNM (1-888-342-5766).
Listen up
Entertainment website Music Grotto presents its roundup of the 20 best songs about New Mexico, a list including some big names (Hank Williams Jr., Neil Young and Johnny Cash, for instance), as well as some local musicians’ melodic musings such as “O Fair New Mexico” by Busy McCarroll and “New Mexico Rain” by Bill and Bonnie Hearne. The list had a few tunes that seemed more New Mexico-adjacent “Worst Comes to Worse” by Billy Joel (“Too many people got a hold on me/ But I know something that they don’t know/I know a woman in New Mexico”), and one we had categorically blocked from our memory (“Albuquerque” by Weird Al Yankovic). Still, in our opinion, any list of ditties about New Mexico should include “Santa Fe” by Beirut (founded, of course, by a New Mexico native Zach Condon) and “Santa Fe” by OG New Mexico band La Junta. In fact, throw in “Pecos” by La Junta as well.
Land of Enchantment and Heebie-jeebies
Forget the blue skies, the ancient culture and the chile-based cuisine. Visit New Mexico for the spine-tingling horror of it all. So says online magazine InsideHook, a publication with a stated mission “to help you develop and maintain a meaningful, ongoing connection to the worlds of culture, wellness and leisure.” In the case of Halloween, that includes the ultimate Halloween road trip through New Mexico, described as “America’s Spookiest State.” While some states have haunted houses, bat caves or the like, Matt Kirouac writes, New Mexico has that and then some, along with “plenty of morbid lore to keep you up at night, fretting about apparitions and alien abductions.” The road trip includes a stop in Taos, where Kirouac connects “the start of Taos’s paranormal activity” with the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 (note: If there’s a method to fact-check these claims, we did not pursue it). Downtown Taos, the story continues is a “hotbed of hauntings, from mystical sightings at the Taos Inn (where a man was inexplicably found beheaded a century ago), to the Alley Cantina, where you can eat carne adovada in the oldest building in town as items inexplicably move around you.” Other suggestions include downtown Santa Fe “where a headless horseman…reportedly trots along Alto Street en route to the Santa Fe River”; visits with the undead at Albuquerque’s Hotel Parq Central; and a night at the Hotel Eklund in Clayton, a town where New Mexico outlaw Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum died by noose.
G is for Georgia
Vogue magazine’s A-Z look at the cultural inspirations for the spring 2024 collections includes artist Georgia O’Keeffe (under “G”), who made the list for her influence on Co’s spring collection. Stephanie Danan, co-founder of the Los Angeles-based womanswear brand, was inspired by O’Keeffe, Vogue writes, “evident in the headscarves and short-sleeve button-downs in the collection, and wanted to bring in femininity via sculptural silhouettes, dimensional ruffles, and zippy colors.” (Hard not to wonder what O’Keeffe would make of look #9 in the collection). O’Keeffe also receives a name-drop in Vogue’s profile of Mexican designer Lorena Saravia’s spring line. “In a backstage interview, she explained that she wanted to make clothes to live in—and this she did with a certain Georgia O’Keeffe flair, especially when it came to her unique use of color,” María José Gonzálvez writes. “She played with different shades of blue and contrasted them against red. ‘It means blood—it means you are alive,’ she explained.” And both Bustle and the New York Times spotted a certain “O’Keeffe-ian” quality to the flowers in a few of Alexander McQueen’s dresses during designer Sarah Burton’s final show for the brand during Paris Fashion Week.
Chill out
The National Weather Service forecasts a 20% chance of showers and thunderstorms between noon and 3 pm today. Otherwise, it should be partly sunny, with a high temperature near 66 degrees and east wind 5 to 10 mph becoming west in the afternoon.
Thanks for reading! After learning in the November Harper’s Index that 18% of surveyed pet owners would save one dog versus 100 people, The Word tracked down the rest of the originating odd survey on pets and mortality.
