A tale of two cities: Santa Fe built, Los Alamos constricted

Building enough housing really does help affordability

For years, I’ve been writing about two truths that many people in this region don’t like to hear: first, that building more housing actually helps with affordability, and, second, that Los Alamos’s refusal to build enough housing for its own workers forces displacement onto neighboring communities. Today’s Santa Fe New Mexican gave those arguments the front-page treatment they deserve—with data to back them up.

Supply works: the evidence is local now

The top-of-the-fold story, “Hundreds of new apartments help slow rent increases in Santa Fe,” written by Mike Easterling, lays out the numbers: Between 900 and 1,100 new units came online in Santa Fe this year, and the rental market transformed. Rent growth, which had been climbing at punishing rates, slowed to just 0.5% in early 2025. Occupancy rates dropped from 92% to 85%. Instead of tenants’ competing with each other for housing, landlords are now competing with each other for tenants. This works out really well for renters: Landlords who were offering four to six weeks of free rent a few months ago are now offering ten to twelve weeks, along with $500 gift cards and waived fees, according to Easterling’s reporting.

Developer Peter Aberg calls the supply/demand balance “unprecedented, certainly since we’ve been working in Santa Fe.” He goes further: “Rent growth has stalled and, in some cases, declined a little bit because of all this new supply.” This is a developer—someone whose business depends on charging what the market will bear—acknowledging that supply actually matters.

“At this pace, rent growth will likely remain limited for several years as new units are completed and occupied,” Mayor Allan Webber wrote in a memo to the City Council. “This is a positive trend for rent affordability.”

Supply skeptics have long dismissed those of us who say we need to build more. But we see how it’s playing out in real life, outside of economics textbooks. In a city where rents increased 74% between 2017 and 2024—about two and a half times the national rent increase—supply is finally beginning to meet demand. And that is bringing down housing costs.

The New Mexican article quotes Alex Horowitz from the Pew Charitable Trusts, who told state lawmakers in August: “Why are rents rising so fast? ’Cause there aren’t enough homes.” Other Southwest cities—Austin, Dallas, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Antonio—saw rents actually fall by 1.4% to 6% after their states made it easier to build housing. See more of Horowitz’s work on affordability here.

The verdict is in: cities that build see rent stabilization or rent decreases. Cities that don’t build see continued price escalation. Santa Fe finally built, and rents stabilized.

Los Alamos exports its housing crisis

While Santa Fe’s surge shows what happens when a city builds, Los Alamos illustrates what happens when one doesn’t.

The second front-page story by Easterling, “The LANL effect: Growing workforce at the lab puts strain on Santa Fe’s housing market,” documents the regional spillover I’ve been tracking with the help of housing policy expert Daniel Werwath: both of us are quoted in Easterling’s LANL piece. The Lab’s workforce has grown more than 50% since 2018. According to the Lab itself, LANL now employs “about 18,000 people,” and according to Easterling’s reporting, it plans to add another 800 to 1,000 in the coming fiscal year. Nearly a quarter of those employees—4,172 people—now live in Santa Fe County, up from 2,900 in 2020.

The bit where I’m quoted: see full article here. Note that while I am a commissioner, I do not speak for the commission, only for myself.

As Werwath told the New Mexican: “The labs are creating a lot of new jobs and not building enough new housing to absorb them. They are very high-paying jobs people are coming into—in some cases $300,000 or $400,000—and there’s nothing to buy in Los Alamos.”

Mike Loftin from Homewise adds a piece of context about who is in what kind of housing: “My understanding is that even though all these people are retiring from the lab, they’re not leaving,” he told Easterling. “So that means more homes have to get built. And Los Alamos is constricted in what they can build.”

That word—constricted—is doing a lot of work. Yes, Los Alamos County is the smallest in the state, with very limited developable land. But the real constraints aren’t just geographic—they’re regulatory. Los Alamos chose a suburban pattern of development even though we aren’t the “sub” or any “urb.”

Los Alamos future growth estimate from 1969

Several decades ago, when town planners imagined a population of up to 30,000 people by 1985 (see the 1969 newspaper excerpt above), they made a fateful decision: to pivot away from the compact housing that defined the Manhattan Project era and embrace low-density sprawl instead. Here’s the backward logic in their own words:

“Unless emphasis is shifted more to single family construction the current housing shortage will be aggravated.”

I hope it is obvious that this makes absolutely no sense at all. When you have very little developable land, making it illegal to build anything other than land-gobbling detached single-family homes is the very worst response to a housing crisis.

This and the population graph above are both from an October 1969 issue of the Atom, an early Los Alamos newspaper

But that’s exactly what Los Alamos did. And by the 1980s, the town was effectively “built out.” That’s what happens when you make it illegal to use land efficiently. The result is a landscape of surface parking lots, expensive (but aging) single-family homes, car dependence, downtown commerical vacancies, and scarcity of amenities masquerading as “small-town character.”

Today, the 10,000 employees who commute into Los Alamos can thank the planners of yesteryear for their long drives and high housing costs—and they can thank every County Council since for preserving that same exclusionary pattern under the banner of “protecting neighborhood character.”

Werwath cuts to the chase: “We’re building just enough new housing to absorb the new jobs being created at Los Alamos.” Not jobs created in Santa Fe—jobs created in Los Alamos that Los Alamos refuses to house.

Growth isn’t the problem—policy is

It’s worth saying something plainly: the problem isn’t that LANL has created jobs. High-wage, high-skill jobs are a strength for the region. The problem is that every level of leadership—the Lab itself, Los Alamos County, and the state—has failed to pair job growth with housing growth. For every job you create, you need to work just as hard to ensure there’s a place for that worker to live.

LANL hasn’t done that. County leaders haven’t done that. The state hasn’t done that. Only Santa Fe has stepped up its game.

Blaming the housing problem on Lab job creation is like blaming a chef who cooked a nice meal for not having enough chairs at the dining table. There is a persistent idea in the region (I hear it from Lab retirees as well as Santa Feans who are anti-LANL on principle) that the solution to all our problems is degrowth. The Lab should slash jobs or shut down entirely…actually both labs should…actually all industry should leave the state because it creates demand for housing…actually we should wall off our state from “outsiders” and create a sort of Chinese-like hukou system where only people born here get to live here, and they must remain in the village where they were born.

I do have gripes with LANL (I wrote them up in a letter to the editor, in fact), but job creation is not one of them. I believe jobs are good, growth is good, and we can build enough housing for everyone.

And Santa Fe is showing us how.

Why this evidence matters

When someone claims “supply doesn’t help affordability,” you now have local proof that it does. When Los Alamos resists density, you have documented proof of regional harm. When officials wring their hands about “luxury apartments” being part of the problem, you can point to Santa Fe’s 2025 apartment boom and the stabilized rents that followed.

And as Pew’s statewide analysis found earlier this year, New Mexico’s 60 percent rent increase since 2017 stems from the same root cause: an undersupply of homes driven by restrictive regulations and outdated zoning. Santa Fe’s experience shows that the opposite—building more—works.

The New Mexican articles also validate something else: the connection between regional employment centers and housing demand. Los Alamos—county leadership, Lab leadership, residents—can’t pretend the county’s no-growth policy has been cost-free. Santa Fe can’t pretend apartments are bad. Northern New Mexico can’t pretend it’s a bunch of isolated jurisdictions: we are a unified economic region. We are one housing market. We all must work together.

What now

If you care about housing affordability, Easterling’s reporting is critical. Use his articles at planning commission meetings when projects face opposition. Share them when people claim building doesn’t help. Reference them when discussing regional planning.

We don’t have to keep having circular debates about whether supply matters. Santa Fe built a thousand new apartments, and rents stabilized. Los Alamos didn’t, and its housing crisis spilled outward. The newspaper finally caught up to the data—time for policy to follow.