Mayor Tim Keller told Albuquerque business leaders that the city is finally making real progress on crime, homelessness and downtown revitalization after years of effort.
Speaking at the Embassy Suites by Hilton during the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce’s annual mayoral address June 17, Keller said long-term investments and partnerships are starting to pay off.
He pitched his plan to keep the momentum going, highlighting new crime-fighting technology, expanded homeless services through the Gateway System and zoning changes to boost housing. Calling it a generational turning point, Keller said the city is moving from talk to action and urged the business community to stay involved.
“We’re not going to study anymore,” Keller said. “We’re not going to do a pilot project [or] spend several work group sessions and charrettes on vision statements. This was already done.”
He said that work was already done by the community, including everyone the Chamber works with — county and state government, legislators and City Council.
The Chamber’s challenges to Keller
Keller said the Chamber challenged him in 2017, when he was first elected, to tackle some of Albuquerque’s toughest, most entrenched problems — crime, homelessness and a lack of affordable housing. Those issues, he said, were already weighing down the city before the pandemic and only grew worse with national spikes in crime and housing insecurity.
“These are tough times,” Keller said. “They were tough times in the first place for our city, and then you throw in all these national problems, and they just got harder. That is where we’re at today.”
The Chamber told him the city needed to stop avoiding long-standing structural challenges and start doing the real work. That meant fixing APD, addressing downtown’s struggles with lasting solutions, overhauling the city’s restrictive anti-housing zoning code and taking direct responsibility for homelessness instead of leaving it to nonprofits and churches.
“Believe it or not, I actually listened,” he said. “We’re gonna try and do real work that we desperately needed.”
The challenge now, Keller said, is that only in the past year has Albuquerque started making real progress on its biggest problems.
“It’s taken a long time. It’s taken real investment,” he said. “We’re all impatient. We’re all frustrated with what we see outside—on our streets, when we go shopping, heading to work, or just looking out at our front lawns in the morning.”
But he said the city is finally moving in a new direction—one that will shape how Albuquerque looks, feels and works for the next generation.
Rebuilding APD
Keller said Albuquerque’s police department was in disarray a decade ago.
“Ten years ago, our department was falling apart, and that is not an exaggeration,” Keller said. “We were under a consent decree for the right reasons — because we were doing terrible things to the population we were supposed to protect.”
Officers were demoralized, leadership was lacking and basic tools were broken or missing. Keller said there were no radar cameras in police cars, the department’s helicopter couldn’t fly in the summer heat and there was little functioning technology to fight crime.
APD had to rebuild its core operations, complying with 276 federal mandates under the Court-Approved Settlement Agreement (CASA) and civilianizing oversight of officer discipline.
Keller said the city has now exited the CASA process, thanks in part to pressure and support from the business community.
“I remember three years ago, we were going backward,” he said. “That’s when we started doing things differently—running four academies at once, growing our force by 20% and boosting morale.”
Today, Keller said, APD is drawing recruits from across the country and serving as a model for reform.
According to Keller, technology has become a cornerstone of modern policing in Albuquerque. ShotSpotter gunshot detection, license plate readers and surveillance cameras are now helping officers solve crimes faster and more accurately.
“Before, when there was a shooting in our city, there was only about a 50% chance that we would catch it,” he said. “Now, there’s a shooting we know where it happens, within 40 feet, because of ShotSpotter and about shot detection technology.”
Officers can now match shell casings to gun purchases, track stolen weapons and link them to other crimes. Keller said the arrest rate for shootings is now 99 percent.
To keep officers focused on violent crime, the city has expanded civilian roles. Public service aides handle traffic calls, gather evidence at crime scenes and help with crowd safety at events and protests.
“And just yesterday,” Keller added, “we used marked GPS money to catch a Walgreens robbery suspect. That’s modern crime fighting.”
Keller said the city’s crime tech platform covers only about 20% of the city and wants to expand it citywide.
Keller also touted the Albuquerque Community Safety (ACS) department, a 24/7 civilian team responding to behavioral health, substance use and homelessness-related calls.
“That department has taken 100,000 calls that APD did not have to take, freeing up officers to fight violence,” he said. “That’s civilianization.”
Albuquerque remains the only U.S. city with a full-time emergency alternative to 911 that runs around the clock.
Keller said for the first time in more than a decade, crime is down across all major categories.
“Now, I know we’ve got a long way to go, because it’s coming down from an all-time high,” he said.
He noted the city was once ranked the worst in the nation for auto theft. Now it ranks eighth worst.
Albuquerque’s Shift on Homelessness
Keller said one of his first trips after taking office was with the Chamber of Commerce to San Antonio to study how that city handles homelessness. The trip left a lasting impression.
They saw a coordinated system with a medical respite, detox, housing services and direct partnerships with treatment providers, Keller said.
At the time, the city had no staff dedicated to homelessness or housing.
“Our city had 100% outsourced this challenge to the nonprofit sector and to the county and the state and everyone else,” he said.
The city’s answer used to be – get on a bus to Joy Junction, Keller said.
That changed with the creation of Albuquerque’s Health, Housing and Homelessness Department. Keller said it was one of the first steps toward what is now the Gateway system — a network of sites offering 24/7 services to unhoused residents.
“The Gateway system is up and running, and now tonight, it will take care of 1,000 people,” Keller said. “We went from zero to 1,000, and just like crime, we have a long way to go.”
There are about 5,000 unhoused people on city streets, he said. “We built a system that has a fighting chance to actually help those people going forward.”
The Gateway system includes:
- A 660-bed Westside shelter offering wraparound care.
- A family shelter housed in a converted hotel, serving 100 families nightly.
- A 24/7 drop-off center for first responders—the only one of its kind in New Mexico
- Daily transportation from the streets to the shelters.
- Specialized housing at former DMV sites, including for people recovering from addiction.
- A sobering center and, coming soon, a young adult facility on San Mateo.
Keller said these elements mirror successful models in cities like San Diego, Denver and San Antonio.
The shift, he said, came from recognizing that a one-size-fits-all solution doesn’t work.
“Some people just need a job,” Keller said. “That’s why we brought back the Better Way Forward program—paying folks to help clean downtown and water plants while living in Gateway housing.”
Housing and zoning reform
In total, he said, the city and its partners have added 5,000 housing units in the last four years — double the total of any previous administration. Zoning changes now allow more housing options, from duplexes to four-story buildings and hotel conversions, but funding remains the biggest barrier.
“We still need 15,000 more units,” he said. “But now we have a plan—and a system—to get there.”
Keller credited the Chamber for pushing the city to take ownership of its homelessness and housing challenges.
“You asked us to stop avoiding the issue,” he said. “We’re finally doing the real work.”
Economy, downtown and everyday infrastructure
Keller said the city can’t rely on federal policy when global deals, like a planned solar panel project, fall apart due to things like tariffs. Instead, he said, Albuquerque is focusing on local solutions and rebuilding from the ground up.
The city is investing in youth and small businesses, backing programs like the Job Training Incentive Program and helping local companies grow by adding a few jobs at a time. Keller said it’s a return to grassroots economic development — building the economy one job at a time.
He also pointed to growth in the city’s defense and tech sectors, fueled by federal spending at Kirtland Air Force Base and Sandia National Labs, especially around satellites and directed energy.
But economic development isn’t just about jobs, Keller said — it’s also place-based.
The city is trying a new approach to revitalizing downtown.
“We are going to let go of the political power and the ownership of downtown and we are going to give it to downtown,” Keller said. “How refreshing is that?”
The city created a tax increment district (TID) for downtown that could generate $200 million over time. A new governance structure, currently in the works, would let downtown stakeholders decide how to use that money.
Albuquerque is also planning to launch a business improvement district (BID) downtown this fall. Keller said the BID will help businesses organize events, activate public spaces and attract tenants. The city plans to pay into both the BID and TID as a downtown property owner.
Long-stalled projects are moving forward, Keller said, with CNM’s film academy opening this winter at the Rail Yards—the site’s first permanent tenant in decades. The city is also working with UNM to bring a downtown campus, inspired by Arizona State’s impact on Phoenix, with sites near Civic Plaza under review.
The city is also building the long-planned Rail Trail, a seven-mile loop connecting downtown neighborhoods with art, storytelling and walkable space.
Even projects stuck in limbo — like a stadium for New Mexico United — are close to breaking through, Keller said.
Keller said Albuquerque has stayed focused on major, long-standing challenges and built systems meant to outlast any single administration. The city has weathered protests, pandemics, and changes in state and national leadership, he said, and is showing real progress.
“We’ve been tested. We are trusted to hold this together, and Albuquerque is making a comeback,” Keller said.