While virtually all U.S. states struggle with housing affordability and homelessness, the situation in New Mexico is worse than most. A few examples: The median price for a new home is $440,000 — a price that’s unaffordable for 82% of New Mexicans. Median rent is up 60% (versus 27% nationally) and homelessness is up 87% (versus 40% nationally).
There’s more: Construction costs have increased more than 50% and new housing permits in the state (for both single family homes and multifamily developments) haven’t kept up with demand for 15 of the past 30 years.
“It’s driving a lot of our underlying issues,” Daniel Werwath, who cited data from a new Pew Charitable Trusts report, said. “Almost every community in New Mexico is paying for homelessness, just in the wrong ways — through emergency rooms and first responders. Our argument is to pay upfront, get ahead of this stuff and free up a bunch of resources.”
Werwath is Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s senior housing policy advisor. He spoke to members of the Albuquerque Affordable Housing Coalition and Strong Towns ABQ in an online presentation Feb. 7. Werwath is leading the drive — a return pitch by the governor through Senate Bill 205 — to convince lawmakers to establish an “emergency” Office of Housing Planning & Production at a cost of $2 million. The idea narrowly failed in committee on a 5-4 vote during last year’s 30-day session. Some of the opposition last year cited a duplication of the efforts by the quasi-governmental Housing New Mexico | MFA.
Werwath said the measure’s goal is to get new housing built across the state as quickly as possible. He said the office would coordinate the modernization of land use and zoning codes, analyze restrictive building codes, jumpstart the construction and trades workforce and help drive an increase in capital investments. Werwath said all manner of innovative approaches to housing would be on the table by using better data, coordination and technical assistance.
“My joke is that we have a regulatory environment in New Mexico that traces its roots to Medieval Spain,” he said. “The regulatory uncertainties are huge and it’s a reason investors are not investing in new housing in New Mexico.”
‘We need to ramp this stuff up’
Werwath and three others in the governor’s office have been operating the housing office on an informal basis for about a year. Passage of the legislation would make it a formal endeavor and expand the staff to six, including the state’s new director of homelessness initiatives, Taylor Cook.
“We spent the last year visiting about 40 different counties, cities, tribes and pueblos, and every one of them has housing issues,” Werwath said. “You can go to a place like Raton, which has hundreds of vacant homes, or Albuquerque, which needs 30,000 new homes.”
Albuquerque’s latest housing needs assessment projected that 55,000 new housing units would be needed by 2045 to fill the backlog and meet future growth projections.
The immense need for housing comes with an immense lineup of funding requests. Werwath estimates there are about $750 million in requests related to housing before the Legislature this year, including $500 billion for the Housing Trust Fund overseen by Housing New Mexico | MFA; a $100 million request by the city of Albuquerque to create 2,100 new affordable housing units through the Middle Rio Grande Housing Collaborative; and $50 million requested by the governor to help New Mexicans who are priced out of homeownership, but are paying exorbitant rents.
Werwath said the city of Albuquerque has also asked for tens of millions more to fund homelessness initiatives. Lujan Grisham has requested $50 million to address homelessness statewide.
“The governor only has two years left in her term and a lot of this stuff we’re looking at is going to take a long time to reverse,” Werwath said. “The same with the scale of the unhoused populations across the state.”
He said creation of the housing office would help to accomplish short-and-long term objectives that would carry over to future administrations.
“We’re continuing to build in a way that just maintains our housing gaps and is probably going to start losing ground in terms of economic growth,” Werwath said. “We need to ramp this stuff up and we need to do it pretty quickly.”
Werwath expects SB 205 will be considered by lawmakers for the first time this week in the Senate Health and Public Affairs Committee.