artdirector@sfreporter.com
Morning Word
SAR: Santa Fe home prices starting to level off
City of Santa Fe median home prices rose by 7% from $479,500 in the first quarter of 2022 to $513,561 this quarter, the Santa Fe Association of Realtors reported yesterday, while city home sales decreased by 29% during the same time period. In Santa Fe County, median home prices decreased by 3% from $780,000 to $753,000 and sales dropped by 13%. In combination, city and county home prices decreased 2.6% to $599,000. “Homes prices are beginning to decelerate and level off in response to higher interest rates this quarter,” SFAR 2023 President Drew Lamprich said in a statement. “Historically low levels of inventory are keeping prices stable with deals taking a bit longer to close as days on market increased slightly,” he added. SFAR’s quarterly indicators report describes the first quarter of the new year beginning with “hope and optimism,” as “mortgage rates dipped to the low 6% range,” but mortgage rates’ ongoing fluctuation ultimately caused “market activity to remain down compared to the same time last year, when rates were significantly lower. With fewer buyers competing for homes, price growth has continued to soften nationwide, although inventory remains limited, which has kept prices from falling too much so far. Still, demand for housing remains, and active buyers are taking advantage of any rate declines, as evidenced by the recent uptick in contract signings, new construction and existing-home sales.” Median home prices dropped the most for some of the city’s most expensive Northside real estate—up around St. John’s College, including Wilderness Gate—where a more than 38% decrease between quarters took prices from $1.4 million to $878,750. Homes on the Southside had a 17.5% increase in median prices between quarters, from $400,000 to $470,000.
Gov signs bill banning burns on red flag days
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has until Friday to sign another 130 or so bills passed during the most recent legislative session. She enacted close to 50 yesterday, including one that bans prescribed burns when critical fire weather exists. Sponsor Sen. Ron Griggs, R- Alamogordo, has said the bill responds to events such as last year’s Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, which grew out of controlled and prescribed burns into the state’s most devastating wildfire on record. While the US Forest Service says the state lacks the authority to limit prescribed burns, Griggs said the bill may at least inspire extra caution. “Maybe it’ll save us from this ever happening again,” he told the Albuquerque Journal yesterday. The governor yesterday also signed SB 19, which creates a public database (forthcoming in July 2024), that tracks the outcomes for police misconduct cases; and a bill raising salaries for elected officials (except for her). Other bills awaiting the governor’s signature, the Journal notes, include: the state’s $9.6 billion budget; a $1.2 billion public works package; and the tax reform package (including $500 taxpayer rebates). Today, the governor is expected to sign SB 13, which codifies protections for health-care workers providing reproductive and/or gender-affirming health care services.
DOT Sec. Buttigieg unveils federal wildlife safety program
During his visit to New Mexico yesterday, US Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced details for a new federal program to help prevent wildlife-vehicle collisions, created through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The program, administered by the Federal Highway Administration, will make grant funding available to states and communities to build wildlife crossings; add warning signs; acquire mapping tools and other safety measures. According to the federal DOT, approximately 200 people are killed annually in the US—and many more are injured—in more than 1 million collisions involving wildlife and vehicles (this 2021 interactive New York Times story documents some of the challenges wildlife face intersecting with civilization). “By launching the Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program, we are taking an important step to prevent deadly crashes in communities across the country and make America’s roadways safer for everyone who uses them,” Buttigieg said in a statement. The Wildlife Crossing Pilot Program will make a total of $350 million in grant money available over five years, including more than $111 million this year. Last month, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed Senate Bill 72, creating the Wildlife Corridors Action Plan, which, along with a $5 million appropriation in the budget, is aimed at 11 high-priority safe passage projects around the state designed to reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions and restore habitat connectivity
NMSU Black students decry new equity office
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on New Mexico State University Black students’ ongoing problems with an office created to help represent their interests. NMSU’s Black Student Association in 2019, the story reports, asked the school to: hire a coordinator and refurbish the Black Programs office; hire a chief diversity officer; create a minor in Black studies and commit to hire more Black tenure-track faculty members, among other requests. The school eventually, in April 2021, hired its first vice president for equity, inclusion and diversity and, in November, opened a larger center for Black Programs, along with programs for Chicano, Native American and LGBTQ students. But students say the new equity and diversity office has “churned through a succession of interim Black Programs directors”—five since 2019—and want their program moved out of the Office for Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity. Bobbie Green, a former NMSU business faculty member, and the third Black Programs director, confirmed to the Chronicle she was fired by VP for Equity, Inclusion and Diversity Teresa Maria Linda Scholz during Black History Month (February). “It was created because students were so frustrated and felt they needed a champion,” Green tells the Chronicle. “Unfortunately, it’s a case of ‘Be careful what you ask for.’”
COVID-19 by the numbers
Reported April 4: New cases: 213; 675,728 total cases. Deaths: 2; Santa Fe County has had 402 total deaths; 9,128 total fatalities statewide. Statewide hospitalizations: 96; patients on ventilators: nine
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent March 30 “community levels” map shows improvement for New Mexico, with just two counties—Cibola and McKinley—yellow with medium levels, down from four last week, none red and the rest of the state with green—aka low—levels. Corresponding recommendations for each level can be found here.
Resources: Receive four free at-home COVID-19 tests per household via COVIDTests.gov; Check availability for additional free COVID-19 tests through Project ACT; CDC interactive booster eligibility tool; NM DOH vaccine & booster registration; CDC isolation and exposure interactive tool; COVID-19 treatment info; NMDOH immunocompromised tool kit. People seeking treatment who do not have a medical provider can call NMDOH’s COVID-19 hotline at 1-855-600-3453. DOH encourages residents to download the NM Notify app and to report positive COVID-19 home tests on the app.
You can read all of SFR’s COVID-19 coverage here.
Listen up
“Every mile run in The Land of Enchantment frees you from the pressures of life and recharges your batteries.” So says the NewMexico.Run website, the brainchild of runner Roman Gurule, which he created, he says on the site, after “a near brush with death during the early part of the COVID pandemic.” Gurule joins Running New Mexico podcast host Coach Seb Romero to talk about his early days of running as a high school student at Pojoaque High School, where the team captain—now US Sen. Ben Ray Luján—mentored him and how running has continued to play an important role in his life.
Poet okpik awarded Windham-Campbell Prize
Iñupiaq-Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik, who lives in Santa Fe and is a Lannan Foundation Fellow at the Institute of American Indian Arts, yesterday received the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize administered by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. The prize, established in 2013, recognizes eight writers in the fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama genres; this year, each recipient receives $175,000, a $10,000 increase from prior years. Individuals do not apply; awards are made by nomination only. okpik is the author of the American Book Award-winning debut Corpse Whale (2012) and the recent collection Blood Snow (2022). With her latest collection, the prize announcement notes,”okpik established herself as a poet of both great achievement and great promise, a cartographer of wildernesses without and within.” Overall, the Windham-Campbell Prize 2023 selection committee says: “dg nanouk okpik’s lapidary poems sound the depths of language and landscape, shuttling between the ancient past and imperiled present of Inuit Alaska in a searching meditation on ecology and time.” okpik—the first Iñupiaq-Inuit writer to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize—said upon her win: “I’m as excited as a thousand marmots running in the tundra!”
The land we belong to also is grand
What does Santa Fe have to do with the history of the musical Oklahoma? This and that, it turns out. The Smithsonian magazine takes a deep dive into the history of Oklahoma playwright Lynn Riggs (Cherokee), from whose play Green Grow the Lilacs Rodgers and Hammerstein adapted the musical Oklahoma. Several years before he wrote the play, Riggs was suffering from the aftermath of tuberculosis. His friend, poet Harold Witter Bynner (known round these parts as Witter Bynner), urged him to come visit Santa Fe, where Bynner had moved. Santa Fe, the magazine notes, “…was a revelation. Riggs met free-thinking writers and painters and visited nearby pueblos, or Native communities. Unlike the displaced Cherokee of Oklahoma, Native American groups near Santa Fe had been living on or near the same land for hundreds of years.” Moreover, Riggs, himself gay, saw other gay men in a more open environment than existed in Oklahoma. “At the time, lots of American artists were being drawn to New Mexico,” American Indian Quarterly Editor in Chief Lindsey Claire Smith, a literary scholar at Oklahoma State University, tells the Smithsonian. “There was this Indigenous aesthetic, but it was really from a settler viewpoint. So it’s fascinating to me how Lynn Riggs entered that world, but he was a Native person.” At any rate, while Riggs didn’t stay here, he wrote his first full-length play the following year and over the next decade traveled “between the coasts, with frequent stays in Santa Fe.”
The calm after
The National Weather Service forecasts a sunny day with a high temperature near 47 degrees and west wind around 15 mph. Tonight’s low temperature will be around 19 degrees. Here’s a look at yesterday’s peak winds. The rest of the week looks fairly calm and progressively warmer, with temps currently forecast to hit the mid 70s by the start of next week. While the wind may be less windy the rest of the week, let’s face it: Spring brings allergies. To that end, Dr. Osman Dokmeci, an associate professor in the University of New Mexico’s Department of Internal Medicine and fellow of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, offers a survival guide for all sorts of allergens, from which we learned the following horrifying factoid: “A common allergen in Albuquerque comes from cockroaches.”
Thanks for reading! The Word appreciated this uplifting story about 96-year-old composer John Kander, even if she does now have “New York, New York” stuck in her head.
