Make it Easier to Build the Housing we Need

Housing Matters By Alexandra Goldman, THP’s monthly column originally appearing in the Taos News.

It’s not news that Taos has a housing problem.

In Taos County, a family of four earning the median income of $77,500 can only afford about half a home at the average sale price. That’s a shortfall of up to $300,000.

We all know something needs to change. Yet conversations about our housing crisis often focus on factors outside of our control. We cannot control the cost of building materials. We cannot control the country’s tax structure, which rewards using housing as an investment vehicle instead of as a home. And we cannot control who moves to Taos and how much money they bring with them.

But there is a lot we can control locally here in Taos. There are pathways towards a pro-housing Taos, with affordable homes for our friends, our children and ourselves. Almost all land use policy is local, which means it’s a place you can have an impact.

Land use policy dictates whether a community can exclusively build sprawling single family homes or whether they can create smaller, more affordable multi-family buildings. It has a significant impact on how long it takes to build a home and how many expensive experts are required to navigate the process. In short, local land use policy has a huge effect on the cost and availability of housing in Taos County. A recent study by the Pew Charitable Trust found regulatory barriers — like land use policies — are one of the main drivers of New Mexico’s housing shortage.

Land use code updates are currently ongoing in Taos County, the Town of Taos, and the Village of Questa, which is a tremendous opportunity to lay the groundwork necessary for more affordable housing.

We can start by making it easier to build the kinds of housing — affordable — we want to see. We know multifamily housing is more affordable by design, as several households share the cost of land and infrastructure. But what is the easiest type of housing to build in Taos County?

Large, expensive, single-family homes.

That’s because this kind of housing is “by right” almost everywhere across the county — which means it doesn’t need the approval of a planning and coning commission or the county commission or Town of Taos Council to be built. If you can get all your documents in order — and finance it, of course — then you can build it. As a result, there are dozens of large, sprawling houses being built across Taos County at this moment.

Compare this to multi-family homes which are only “by right” on 16 percent of the land in Taos and 0.04 percent of the total land in Taos County. While it’s a start, only 22 percent of this land is vacant, so we’re talking about only a fraction of a fraction of the land in our County where you can build new affordable, multi-family homes by right.

What does it mean if you want to build housing that is not by right? It means you have to apply for a special use permit or conditional use permit or create a planned unit development or subdivision — all involved processes that can take a very long time. A study done in Santa Fe County showed that an approval process taking three years versus one year adds approximately 20 percent to the cost of a new home — and this cost is always passed on to the future buyer or renter.

Building housing that is not by right also gives the broader community, as well as elected or appointed officials, the ability to reject a proposal. As we will discuss in future columns, local land use decisions are easily and often swayed by homeowners who don’t want to see change, who may have misplaced biases against affordable housing and who benefit from the housing shortage that keeps their property values high.

So when multi-family, affordable housing is not by right, it means it is slower and more expensive to build — and more likely to be rejected. In practice, this means that when it is not by right it is less likely to be built at all.

To make Taos a pro-housing community, we need to make affordable housing easier to build. We can begin by addressing land use issues in our own backyard, which are in our control. Over the next year, the Town of Taos, Taos County and the Village of Questa will have community meetings about their land use code update. Though many of our public officials are already pro-housing, they need and want to hear from you: Show up and let them know we need to make multifamily housing buildable by right.

I’ll return next month to discuss other land use code changes which can enable more affordable housing across Taos.