housing

New Mexico’s state government is taking part in a program for the next two years to improve housing and health policy, and a wide range of state agencies will participate.

Ahead of the legislative session that starts January 16, several health and civil rights advocates are pushing for the state to invest more in addiction treatment and housing. They are also calling for the state to put fewer resources towards what they call criminalization tactics.

Santa Fe residents will vote next week on whether or not to adopt a mansion tax or an excise tax on buyers of homes over $1 million. The tax would add 3% on the amount a buyer pays over $1 million. So, if a home costs $1.1 million, the buyer would pay $3,000. That money would then go to the city's Affordable Housing Trust Fund.KUNM’s Megan Myscofski sat down with Santa Fe mayor Alan Webber and Office of Affordable Housing Director Alexandra Ladd who says this will make the money the city puts into affordable housing more consistent by diversifying it.

Santa Fe voters will decide in November whether to instate a “mansion tax” or extra tax on buyers of houses over $1 million. Dozens of residents turned out ahead of a city council vote on the proposal Tuesday, and most voiced frustration with the high cost of housing in the city.

Federal funds for New Mexico’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program are slated to run out this August. Winter Torres is the director of the New Mexico Eviction Prevention and Diversion Program, which helped get the money out across most of the state and is wrapping up this week. Torres told KUNM she sees New Mexico slipping back to pre-pandemic levels of eviction with fewer resources to keep people housed.

About half of renters in Albuquerque and Santa Fe are cost-burdened, meaning that they spend an outsized portion of their paychecks on rent. That’s according to a new study from Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, and those statistics are in line with much of the rest of the country.

New Mexicans need to earn about $20 per hour to afford a modest apartment in much of the state, according to an annual report on housing affordability released by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Like much of the country, New Mexico is dealing with a crunch on affordable housing. Rent in the state has increased 70%, just since 2017, according to the Legislative Finance Committee. Rick Jacobus is an expert on inclusionary housing who works with cities to plan for more equitable options. He spoke recently in Santa Fe and told KUNM’s Megan Myscofski that while many factors go into the lack of lower- and middle-income housing, the underlying problem is we have built a system that’s overly defensive.

Every five years Albuquerque has to report to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, on how the city is promoting fair housing for protected classes of people – based on things like race, religion, sex, or disability. The draft report assessing the city’s fair housing was published this week and it highlights Albuquerque’s housing inequities.

A recent webinar discussed the costs of fire mitigation, home insurance, the need for better communication with homeowners living in the WUI, and how towns can put this information into practice.