homelessness

This week, the Albuquerque City Council rejected a move to make it easier to create safe outdoor spaces for people experiencing homelessness. This comes in the wake of an injunction from a judge to create more indoor shelter space for folks on the street. The injunction also limits clearing of encampments, as well as jails and fines for people sleeping outside.One city councilor says the city could have responded to the injunction with additional safe spaces and it needs to do more.

Author Patrick Smithwick's new book "War's Over, Come Home" describes his family's harrowing attempts to find his son, Andrew, a decorated Marine who did two tours in Iraq, but has since struggled with PTSD and homelessness.

The resolution approved by the council tasks the Santa Fe city manager with finding a suitable place for a safe outdoor space, which would house people in structures much like small cabins, with group facilities like bathrooms.

Similar proposals have proved controversial. Last year a proposal for an encampment at Santa Fe’s Midtown Campus was abandoned after opposition from nearby residents.

The City of Santa Fe announced it will bring back a no-camping policy that would prohibit sleeping in parks. With around 150 people unhoused on the streets of Santa Fe each night, the city will also begin strategizing to meet the needs of that community.

After shutting down a large encampment at Coronado Park last week, Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller and other city officials are highlighting the status of the Gateway Center, which will provide an array of services, including emergency shelter and medical care, to the city’s unhoused population. Construction is underway and the first phase of the center should open next summer.

Controlled encampments or safe spaces for people who are unhoused are becoming more common around the country as housing costs keep rising. In Albuquerque, the city council approved the idea then reversed course and passed a moratorium on them. In Santa Fe, plans for a safe space at the Midtown campus also hit opposition. On this week’s Let’s Talk New Mexico, we’ll talk about managed encampments.

Stakeholders, residents, and policy makers in New Mexico are grappling with whether to create a system of controlled encampments for unhoused people. Wednesday night the Santa Fe City Council heard a similar proposal.

On the next Let’s Talk New Mexico, we’re looking past the day shelters and soup kitchens to ask how chronic homelessness can be solved in the long term. We’ll be tackling the issue with representatives for city governments, non-profit organizations, and folks who offer trauma-informed care to those who have experienced homelessness first-hand.

Pete's Place was opened more than a decade ago because in the cold Santa Fe winters, people who were drunk or high and had nowhere to go could and did freeze to death. It has likely saved many lives. But the shelter has lately become a focus of frustration for some local residents and businesses, who say more people are living on the street outside, that their behavior is antisocial and they sometimes cause damage.