Ep. 17 Housing, Growth, and Santa Fe with Alan Webber

Former Santa Fe Mayor Alan Webber joins Housing Matters to reflect on the progress, challenges, and opportunities that have shaped housing in Santa Fe over the past decade. From increasing housing production and expanding affordable housing tools to preserving the character and diversity that make Santa Fe unique, Alan shares lessons from his time in office and his vision for the city's future. The conversation explores how housing, transportation, affordability, and community planning all work together to support a thriving Santa Fe.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

This is Housing Matters, the Housing Trust podcast, where we share stories and insights about affordable housing and making homeownership a reality. I'm your host, Ramon Tiger Abeta. Welcome to another episode of Housing Matters. In this episode, we will talk with Alan Weber, former mayor of Santa Fe. Alan, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Thank you, thank you, thank you. It's great to be here. I love I love the space. I love the housing trust, and you know I'm a big fan.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for being here. And also, um, before we get into our topic, housing in the city of Santa Fe, how's your time right now now that you're out of office? Is do you have a lot of you're finding a lot more time on your hands? The the phone stop ringing? Is it does it still ring? How's it been?

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Well, there's lots of uh benefits to being uh on sabbatical and being not on the firing line. Uh, but I do miss the people and I miss the energy of the work. But it's also good to recalibrate and try some new things.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

You can't miss the late nights though, right? The city council meetings and the two, three in the morning meetings.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

I think what I had not I was not aware of, uh maybe you remember this from your time in on the city council and you're still engaged on the school board. There's a stress level that comes with the work. Right. And over time your body simply assumes that stress is normal when it's really quite not normal. Right. And when you stop, is when finally your shoulders come down from being up over your ears and your breathing becomes more normal and life becomes a little more relaxing.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

You know what I was remembering the other day, Mayor, is one of our first city council meetings was at the Henevewa Chavez Center. And I think it went to three or four in the morning. It was nuts. Uh, that's the long even in my county days as manager, that's the longest meeting I've ever. I think we started at like four in the afternoon and went to like four in the morning. That was a marathon.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Well, when I uh you're bringing back old memories, I don't know if it's uh PTSD or good news, but it's fun to think back about some of the things we tried eight, eight, nine years ago now. When I first came into office, one of the things I wanted to do was have city council meetings, formal meetings in every district in the city. That's right. And remember that the first one was uh on the south side at the library, yep. And then we we had one at the school board uh using their office space or their meeting room space. Uh we had one at the rodeo grounds, and they were always well attended. You know, when you when you take public business out to where the public is, people show up. Right. But then we had this little thing called COVID. That's right, and that changed meetings totally. That became the real pivot point for a lot of things. Uh people forget about what a game changer COVID was. I've frequently not called that to mind because it it was so uh demanding. It changed everything.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:55

Um, and meanwhile, our city government adapted, people moved on. We we actually uh you never want to say you benefited from COVID because it was such a horrible thing that cost people's lives um and their livelihoods. Um but there were some things in city government that benefited from it. We suddenly upped our technology game. Right. We had never had uh laptops, tablets, cell phones for for people working in the fields, remote meetings, Zoom meetings, all kinds of things that had to be created in the moment. Right. And brought city government real advances, but at a very painful, painful cost.

SPEAKER_01 3:35

Yeah, that that's that's so true. During your time as mayor, how did housing show up as an issue for the city of Santa Fe?

SPEAKER_00 3:43

I I think it predated my time as mayor. If you go back to my campaign for office, your campaign for office, eight, nine years ago, the number one issue in the city was housing. Uh, I used to say our top three priorities are housing, housing, housing. Uh, in the ten years before I became mayor, the city had permitted fewer than 200 new units per year. Wow. Some of that was due to the economics of the time. Remember the housing crash that happened because of the thousand eight.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

I was I was counting manager at the time.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

2007, 2008 uh was really troubling. And then other parts of the country came out of it faster than we did. Plus, we had some things on our books that housing harder to produce. So you imagine a city of our size and of our desirability, uh, with fewer than 200 new units per year over a 10-year period. That's a mathematical explanation for how critical the housing issue really was. And I think people understood that it affected all parts of our community, not just housing. So I think the uh the critical connection is housing equals people. When you talk about housing, you talk about who can afford to live in Santa Fe, whether families that have been here for decades, for generations, for multi-generations are able to live here because of the affordability of housing, workforce housing, housing at all parts of the spectrum. What happens to empty nesters? What are their options? And so I think the the issue for uh for the city has always been, first and foremost, the consequences of having few, not enough housing choices, too few options for people. Not just uh the amount of housing overall, right, but the kinds and options of the way that people get to choose the housing that's right for them, whether it's a rental for somebody who's young and just trying to get started, something you you're uh devoted to, which is people who are trying to get into their first home, that's right, and become a homeowner and create some equity, start a family. Housing at every step of life is a real determinant of how well people can live. And we had as a community, unfortunately, had too many stops and starts, too many speed bumps that slowed things down and made it more expensive, or didn't let housing get built at all because of neighborhood opposition and the politics of housing. Because Santa Fe does have the ability to determine not just how much housing gets built, but what kind, the quality of the work. And part of our city's brand has to do with the look and feel of Santa Fe, right, which could sometimes be more expensive to produce a house. It can add cost simply because of the demands for design. It can add cost because of delays from the decision-making process. If you're in the construction business, and my my wife's family, her dad and her brother and nephew all are home builders. And so she grew up going to construction sites. Oh, okay. And when you watch how housing gets built, you realize that time is money. Yes. And when there are delays, either because of politics or bureaucracy or a recession or restrictions that slow things down, tariffs that drive up costs, then it becomes harder for the city to produce or help produce the entire spectrum of housing that we need in order to keep Santa Fe with a diverse population.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

And I I think a lot of times uh you said something that made me think back in my county days when I worked for the county and I worked in planning and land use. And now working in the private sector, if you've never worked in the private sector, you don't realize time is money. And so I think sometimes some of the problems that we experience are unfortunately not enough private experience inside of government to kind of have an appreciation for that and understand like, you know, we're not being pushy out here and trying to get that, you know, inspection scheduled because we want it scheduled right away. There's a lot of work that still needs to be done and subcontractors piling up and time piling up and and like you said, cost.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

Yeah. Well, I think what what Santa Fe can do to make it easier and better for people to build the housing that we need is simply more collaboration. It's a cliche to say we need better coordination, more teamwork, more collaboration, but it is true. And frequently the people who are on the private side of the uh equation are impatient with the people who are on the public side. Yes, the demands are significant on both sides. And if you end up saying we're we're really all trying to get the same outcome, which is affordable housing, more options, more choices, done well, because it's not just how much, it's is it good for Santa Fe?

SPEAKER_01 8:37

Right.

SPEAKER_00 8:38

Then I think we'd have a uh a better shot at creating our future. I I think this really what I I left office realizing that the city's future is really hanging in the balance right now. And some of it involves housing, but housing is often a surrogate for all the other issues that surround housing. When I first got into office, I created a transition team. You remember back then you get elected in March and three weeks later you're in office. So we we didn't have a transition team of two months. We had a transition team that took over after I was already in office. But the first one I appointed was housing and neighborhood livability, because those two things have to go hand in hand. It's not just more housing for the sake of housing. Right. There has to be a good fit between what makes this such a special place to live and the affordability that is paramount with people trying to find places they can afford to live in. Right. And if we just produce more housing and it doesn't work for the city, not just aesthetically, but in terms of density, quality, energy conservation, water conservation, amenities, access to amenities, parks, schools, transportation has to be a piece of it. Right. Are we ever going to come up with a a transit and multimodal approach that makes it possible for people not always to own a car?

SPEAKER_01 9:57

Can we do that in a place like Santa Fe that didn't develop with a traditional grid pattern with you know blocks and straight lines, straight paths from one to, you know, either east-west or north-south?

SPEAKER_00 10:08

Because the roads here are just I mean, it's just kind of well, it's not just the roads, it's the density pattern. If you study the intersection or the overlay of land use and transportation, it's very hard to have good mass transit and multimodal options if the density is so low that you can't serve it. Now, here's the kicker. What happens when self-driving cars become the norm?

SPEAKER_01 10:32

Right.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

And would we in the future, and probably not in the not too distant future, be better served to if people can't uh we're we subsidize transit heavily in this community. If you look at the numbers between school-age kids who ride for free and seniors who are discounted, and a whole variety of other ways in which we subsidize transit usage, if we took some of that money and turned it into a credit card that you could use to hire a use Uber or Lyft or a self-driving driving, right, then we'd have more efficient transit and less dependency on everybody having to own a car, pay their insurance bill, deal with repairs. Because let's face it, we have a lot of people in Santa Fe who are income stressed. Right. We have a lot of people who are struggling to make ends meet. The affordability crisis, yes, it starts with housing. That's the number one issue. Number two is childcare, daycare, and well-supervised support for young children before their school age. Health care is very expensive and getting more expensive under the Trump administration. If you could make transportation less expensive and more affordable, then you would help people be able to make ends meet without sacrificing food, health care, the overall issues for livability for their family.

SPEAKER_01 11:52

And that's something that we see that's very practical here when you qualify someone to buy a house. Usually the thing that keeps them from qualifying is the car payment that they have. And you're right, if you if you could eliminate that, the other thing I think of too is when you're designing these subdivisions and laying it out, you might not need as wide of roads or as many parking spaces, as big a driveways, because they are not so dependent on vehicles. And I was told a story by your former public works director when you first came on as mayor, John Romero. We were talking about the narrow roads here in Chierra Contenta, which was my city council district, because I was getting a lot of complaints from residents about people parking on the wrong side of the road or I can't get in and out of my driveway. And he was explaining to me the problem is narrow roads. And he said, and they purposely wanted narrow roads, thinking that would discourage people from owning a vehicle. But that didn't turn out to be the case at all, especially when I look at my own situation with my children. As soon as they're old enough to drive, guess what? I bought them a car and I'd figure out the parking or a street problem later because I was tired of picking them up at one in the morning after a basketball game that they just got back from in Raton. So it's like, or taking them at five in the morning to camp. It's like they can drive now, I'm buying them a car. And I think we saw that here in Tierra Contenta. So everybody had several vehicles, not enough parking spaces, so they're blocking driveways. And and then they did the whole shared driveway concept, and that caused headaches for the city. But he explained to me the thinking was they'll be discouraged from buying vehicles, and that didn't work. But I tend to agree with you though. I think when these are self-driving cars, and now with Uber and Lyft, they didn't have that in the 90s when they designed this, then you might see something like that.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

It's it's a balancing act. I am a great believer in urban design that in some instances actually creates disincentives to automobiles having always the priority.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

Right.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

Uh, Western cities typically sacrifice almost everything to the automobile. If there's a problem, widen the street, cut down the trees, get rid of the sidewalks, make the street wider. That's a western land.

SPEAKER_01 14:08

Well, and they said that was the difference between like LA and New York, right? Yes.

SPEAKER_00 14:11

And and many Western cities continue to have extremely wide roads and more lanes than they need. And that provides great access for cars, but it disincentivizes other ways of getting around, bicycles and so on. It's a blend. You've got if you don't offer a good option, the disincentive doesn't work, as you're describing with your kids. Right. If you can provide a good option that says we can get you where you want to go safely, efficiently, and less expensively than owning a car and car payments and gasoline prices going up and on and on, then people will make that choice because it's a good choice. But they have to have a choice. Without the choice, all you have is a disincentive.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

Right.

SPEAKER_00 14:53

I I guess my point is that the reason I said the future of the city is hanging in the balance is that all these things are interrelated. So now that we're doing a revision on our general plan, yeah, and we're doing a revision to chapter 14, our zoning code, and we're seeing the pieces of city government and regional government work more collaboratively toward a theory of the city's future and the regions, I think there's reason to think that we can figure this stuff out. The warning yellow light is nobody in America has figured this out. If you look at this, particularly in the West, if you look at the cities in the West that are our size and with our degree of desirability, nobody in America has managed to pull this off, this Rubik's Cube of getting all the pieces to click together, the housing costs, the housing availability, the housing options meets transportation, meets conservation objectives with water and energy. It it's a vision of a future that really is quite special. And Santa Fe is not yet out of the running to make it work. Alone among cities in the West, we still have the ability to put it all together. That doesn't mean that it's easy or or simple because there are a lot of competing interests.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:08

But I do think we have a shot at getting it right, which is very exciting.

SPEAKER_01 16:13

So looking back, what progress are you most proud of when it comes to housing and the city of Santa Fe?

SPEAKER_00 16:19

Well, I think we made some progress. It's obviously an all ongoing effort to get it right. I remember early on in my time in the mayor's office, and you were on the city council, one of the first things that happened was something that people didn't believe was possible, and that was auxiliary living units were approved. Right. People had predicted that no political support would ever manifest itself for guest houses and for all of these little NC casitas, little casitas.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

What it basically said was if you've got a single family home and you want to add a mother-in-law apartment or a little casita, you can do it. And it was a consequential vote. It actually was really important to make that statement. And it happened because a lot of people came out and testified, particularly a lot of young people, saying if you want us to live in this city, yes, you need to produce these auxiliary dwelling units. That that really began to demonstrate the level of support for doing things differently. And over the eight years that I was in office, the number of units that we as a city were able to permit, even during COVID, the the lowest was in the neighborhood of 400 per year, and the highest was around 900 per year. So that meant we were really changing from less than 200 to double or triple or quadruple that amount every single year. We passed the 3% the excise tax on uh the million dollar million dollar homes. You were quietly working behind the scenes to make that happen. And as an advocate for uh recognizing that we've got a lot of expensive homes changing hands, if we took a little bit of that money and put it into the affordable housing trust fund, it could make a big difference. Once the affordable housing trust fund is put out onto the streets, there's a 3X use for that. So a million dollars turns into three, four million, and you're really off and running.

SPEAKER_01 18:13

Well, and here's something that's really genius about the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. That money gets deployed. When that money gets paid off, it's restricted and we recycle it. It goes back again. You don't know when it's gonna be, but it happens eventually. People refinance or sell. And so it it continues on and on.

SPEAKER_00 18:31

Yeah, it's like it's a revolving in that way. And it's really important. The city has to continue to feed that. We were doing every year meeting a minimum amount, make sure that it was going forward. I think that was important. I think the vote at the end of my time in office that changed our living wage and actually linked it to the increase was linked to cost of housing. It's the first time it's been done in the United States. That formula is innovative and really speaks to the heart of the matter, which is if you're going to have a living wage, the number one determinant of whether or not it really is a living wage is the cost of housing. I think that was important. I think progress at Midtown is important. There'll be units there. The fact that Tierra content to phase three is now actually in a position to move forward. It was deadlocked for years and years and years, and finally now it is locked is off the door, and we can open that and see developments there.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

Well, and you put out an RFP or RFQ to sell land in the Northwest Quadrant. The housing trust was successful in getting that. Is that 225 acres on that side of town, the northwest side of town, where because of that vision and putting that out and making that land available for organizations to take advantage of, we'll see affordable housing on that side of town.

SPEAKER_00 19:53

Yeah, and I think that's important. This cannot simply be a south side solution. I think what the other thing that I would say that doesn't get spoken about much because it's kind of uh invisible. What I was really pleased to see while I was in office were the members of the city council willing to take some hard votes on zoning decisions for housing. Yeah. You know, you I'm smiling about it because the politics were complicated. Frequently, whoever's district it was could vote against it, knowing that there'd be enough votes on the other side of town to get to get it passed because we knew it was the right thing to do.

SPEAKER_01 20:27

Right.

SPEAKER_00 20:28

People were willing to acknowledge that it's the right thing to do, even if you have to take some political heat. And yes, there will be neighbors in the in the meeting. There will be a a chamber full of people who are very upset. But if you're trying to get the city's future squared away for the best of uh outcome for everybody, there were courageous votes taken by the city council in those housing decisions that I think are going to pay dividends uh in in the future as you see the housing come online. We did see, I looked at the data before I left office, uh, last year, for the first time in anybody's memory, rental prices actually went down in Santa Fe. Now that's unheard of. It's unheard of anywhere, but it's specifically uh unheard of here because Santa Fe continues to be such a desirable place to live. We're always gonna have people wanting to move here or come here or stay here or come back here. And so the demand is not gonna taper off. And to see strong demand and rental prices actually go down, I think says that we're on the right track. It doesn't mean we've got it licked. This isn't too early to declare victory. Right. But I think there should be some positive emotions, some some sense of congratulation shared around town, not just with the city government, but with the building community, with the people who are in the rental market, saying this is a good thing for our whole community if we can uh reduce the rate of increase or even see it go down.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

So, mayor, we wrap up our podcast the same with all of our guests. And uh you asked me what St. Peter's gonna ask me when I when I go up to the big pearly gate. That's a different podcast. That's a different show. We'll invite you to that one. Yeah, we'll invite you to that one.

SPEAKER_00 22:10

I want to be on the actor's studio.

SPEAKER_01 22:12

But uh no, but we really there's so much to city government. We could probably have a bunch of different types of shows related to just government itself and everything that you're responsible for. Um, but our last question on on uh this podcast, we ask all our guests is why does housing matter to you?

SPEAKER_00 22:31

Well, I I think I've tried to address that in the course of this discussion. Housing is not a thing. It really is more than a house. It's more than a building, it's more than a unit. That's table stakes. What really is the meaning of housing is the people who live in your community and the quality of life that they're able to sustain. The genius of Santa Fe has always been the diversity. It's not aspen, it's not a city where only the wealthy can afford to live. This is a city with history and diversity as its DNA. And so I think for me, in my time in office, and as I look at the people I know and uh and have met in different walks of life, they all treasure the city's people. And the housing is is a way of deciding how we're gonna accommodate the people who make Santa Fe a unique place to live. So for me, in my not just in my role in the mayor's office, but as somebody who loves Santa Fe, I want to see that diversity continue and Santa Fe stay a kind of place where working men and women, young people getting started in life, people who've moved away can come back and pick up their lives here. I think that's that's gotta be our future.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

Well, mayor, thank you for being our guest. And uh, you are listening to Housing Matters, the Housing Trust podcast. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Housing Matters, the Housing Trust Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review. To learn more about our work and the latest at the Housing Trust, visit Housing Trust Online.org. If you are interested in partnering with us or supporting our mission, we'd love to hear from you. You can find our contact information on our website.