Fixing the guardrail: practical solutions for homelessness

Part 4 of a 4-part series on homelessness in northern New Mexico

Catching up on the series so far:

In Part 1, “Why are there so many homeless people in Santa Fe?” I challenged the common belief that homelessness is primarily a result of individual failings. Instead, I looked at how housing scarcity—not personal behavior—is the key driver.

In Part 2, “Why ‘Just Build More Treatment Centers’ Isn’t Enough,” I explored why focusing solely on addiction or mental health services doesn’t solve homelessness. Treatment can help, but without housing, recovery often fails.

Part 3, “‘Lightly housed’: housing insecurity in northern New Mexico” focused on the vast number of people experiencing housing insecurity who never show up in homeless counts: couch surfers, people staying in unsafe situations, and families clinging to housing by spending far more than they can afford.

Now, in Part 4, we’ll look at how to fix the upstream causes of homelessness—especially our region’s chronic housing shortage—and spotlight the policies and local reforms that are already working in other cities.

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Photo by nikko macaspac on Unsplash

Imagine you’re standing by a river watching people drown. Your immediate instinct is to jump in and save them—and you should! But if you look upstream, you notice people keep falling in at the same spot where the guardrail is broken. You can spend all your resources pulling people out of the water, or you can fix the guardrail.

Our region’s approach to homelessness has been almost entirely focused on rescue: emergency shelters, mental health services, addiction treatment, job training—all for people who’ve already lost the roof over their heads. These interventions save lives and are absolutely essential! But they’re downstream reactions to an upstream problem.

In my time reporting on this crisis, I’ve learned we need both. We must continue pulling people out of the river while also fixing the guardrail. The good news is that northern New Mexico has everything it needs to implement solutions that work—if we’re willing to challenge some comfortable assumptions about how we’ve always done things.

The upstream fix: housing supply

My goal with this series is to make one argument clear: Housing scarcity is the root driver of homelessness. We aren’t seeing homelessness rates in northern NM rise because suddenly people began losing their minds, suddenly people started doing drugs who weren’t before, suddenly people decided “you know, I just feel like living on the street.” Nope: It tracks with skyrocketing housing costs.

Rising housing costs have helped to push up homelessness throughout the state. From 2017 to 2024, the number of people without homes increased by 87%, more than double the nation’s 40% rise. In Albuquerque, the number of unhoused people jumped by 108% over the same time period. Additionally, the share of chronically unhoused people in New Mexico increased from 33% in 2017 to 40% in 2024. Even relative to neighboring states that are also facing affordability challenges, such as Arizona (26% chronic unhoused) and Colorado (25%), New Mexico’s struggles stand out. -Pew Charitable Trust article on New Mexico’s housing shortage

Los Alamos created thousands of new jobs but didn’t build enough homes. Santa Fe has, time and again, blocked new housing through restrictive land-use rules and neighborhood defenders making the process long, unpredictable, and very expensive.

The result is a regional game of housing musical chairs where someone always loses.

Legalize it. Build it.

But we know what works. Cities like Houston, Minneapolis, and Austin dramatically increased housing supply at all price points—and reduced homelessness.

Houston: Reformed minimum lot sizes and built 80,000 new townhomes. Combined with Housing First, homelessness dropped 29%.

Minneapolis: Allowed more housing types, eliminated parking mandates, added housing at triple the statewide rate. Rents haven’t risen in eight years.

Austin: Legalized ADUs, ended single-family-only zoning in some areas, fast-tracked affordable units.

What might this look like in New Mexico?

Los Alamos: from exclusion to inclusion

Despite recent land-use updates, most residential land still excludes dense housing. Additional reforms could include:

• Allowing naturally more affordable housing options like duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, and ADUs by right everywhere

• Eliminating parking mandates (parking is expensive and takes up a lot of precious land)

• Streamlining approvals through administrative review

Longer-term options:

• Upzone more areas for mixed-use housing over retail

• Use public-private partnerships (include Triad in the process, they’ve proven they can do this) to build workforce housing

• Capture rising land values to fund affordable housing

Santa Fe: beyond height restrictions

Height restrictions and “character” preservation have made new housing difficult in much of Santa Fe, driving up costs for everyone.

Solutions:

• Permit taller buildings by right in more places, but especially corridors like Cerrillos and St. Francis

• Reduce lot-size minimums to allow more density

• Expedite development approvals to reduce time and cost

• Think about rule subtraction, rather than rule addition: where can simplification help?

As Pew researcher Alex Horowitz told me when we spoke in February: “Housing affordability depends on having one clear set of rules, rather than requiring discretionary permitting and a vote for every single apartment building.” Make sure you read Horowitz’s full piece on New Mexico here.

Think regionally

Housing markets don’t stop at county lines. Los Alamos’s shortage pushes workers to Española, Santa Fe, even Los Lunas—driving up costs regionally and hurting business from top (LANL) to bottom (daycare forced to close for lack of staff). Coordination between counties is essential.

Promising ideas:

• Shared housing needs assessments across counties

• Regional housing trust funds for workforce housing

• Zoning alignment to avoid shifting the problem elsewhere

• Transit-oriented development connecting housing to job centers

Downstream response: prevention and services

Housing supply changes take time. In the meantime, we need to support people before they fall into crisis. Eviction prevention is key. Preventing homelessness is far cheaper than managing it. The following programs can be scaled up and better funded to meet our housing crisis:

• Emergency rental aid ($500–$2,000) vs. $35,000/year for chronic homelessness

• Utility assistance to avoid shutoffs

• Legal help to keep tenants in their homes

• Landlord incentive programs

Housing First still matters

For people already unhoused, Housing First works better than treatment-first. Core elements include:

• Immediate housing without preconditions

• Wraparound support services

• Flexible substance-use disorder treatment and mental health care

• Job training tied to real opportunities

How to help: We all have a part

What individuals can do

• Show up at local government meetings. Housing policy is shaped by those who speak up

• Support pro-housing candidates who back zoning reform and regional cooperation

• Join or form advocacy groups like the Los Alamos Interfaith Coalition on Homelessness, which is raising money to help people facing homelessness in Española

• Volunteer with service organizations like LA Cares, the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness, and the Santa Fe Housing Coalition

• Speak up even if your voice shakes. Push back on NIMBY narratives about how any new housing will bring traffic, shadows, criminals, or ruin “neighborhood character.”

What elected leaders can do

• Eliminate parking mandates entirely. This single tool has an outsized impact. Half-measures don’t change development economics. Cities eliminating all requirements see immediate cost savings and more housing.

• Allow ADUs everywhere by right and make them easy. This helps young families and seniors while preserving neighborhood character. Eliminate owner-occupancy requirements and streamline approval.

• Move routine approvals to staff review. Stop forcing code-compliant projects through multiple public hearings. Administrative approval cuts costs, delays, and political drama.

• Legalize housing diversity. Allow duplexes and small multifamily by right everywhere. Stop making every project a parcel-by-parcel fight.

• Lead regional coordination. Stop exporting housing problems to neighboring communities. Create housing compacts and transit-oriented development.

• Take pressure off staff by championing reforms yourself: Ideas are not going to come from planning staff. Here’s the American Planning Association’s Housing Accelerator Playbook: Be a leader—use it.

• And finally: Stop accepting/admiring excuses. “It’s financing, it’s the market, it’s labor, we’re out of land, Bob keeps sending me angry emails about shadows and traffic and noisy children and views.” There are things out of our control: yes. So do the things you can control. Bob isn’t on the dais: you are.

What organizations can do

• LANL and its parent institutions can summon up some courage to visibly and materially support workforce housing and to advocate for policy change.

• Nonprofits can coordinate regionally instead of siloing and duplicating efforts.

• Faith communities can offer transitional housing, safe parking lots, and advocacy.

• Hospitals and schools can document the impacts of housing instability and build public will for change.

What journalists can do

Media coverage shapes public perception—and too often, local reporting on homelessness and housing mindlessly perpetuates common myths and misinformation.

• Journalists often dehumanize people experiencing homelessness, perpetuating bigotry against this group. Get to know some individuals. Always remember that behind every unhoused person is a story.

• When it comes to housing, the media frequently frame neighborhood opposition as the main story, describing housing proposals as “controversial” simply because a handful of angry residents show up to object. This elevates the loudest voices while ignoring broader community needs.

• Homebuilders (the people, notably, who build homes) are portrayed as villains by default, while wealthy landowners with vague “neighborhood concerns” are given an unscrutinized platform—even when their concerns are often rooted in self-interest, misinformation, exclusion, racism, classism, or fear of change.

• Land-use policy, zoning codes, and housing economics are rarely explained, leaving readers with no context for understanding why housing is scarce or expensive.

We need to do better.

• Journalists must distinguish between controversy and obstruction, and stop treating any opposition as inherently legitimate without investigating its basis.

• Instead of centering anti-housing voices at rowdy meetings, center facts: What would the proposed housing do? Who would it serve? Is the status quo really better than change? What policies are driving scarcity?

• Push back on misinformation, don’t just repeat it. Verify claims about traffic, school crowding, or environmental impact instead of uncritically quoting them.

• Interview people who suffer from the lack of housing, not just those who want to stop housing. Interview workers whose long commutes separate them from their children for an extra hour or two a day. Interview small business owners who can’t find staff because of a lack of housing. Talk to the machinist who lives in his car. Humanize the downstream effects of inaction.

Getting started

This crisis didn’t happen overnight—and it won’t be solved overnight. But every month we delay, more people fall from housed to unhoused. The sooner we act, the more effective (and less expensive!) our solutions will be.

Some readers may still be wondering: how do we pay for all this? The answer is simpler than it seems. First, prevention saves money, as we’ve established already in this series. Second, New Mexico has the money. More than $6 billion in capital outlay funds remain unspent—some sitting idle for years, tied up in bureaucracy or earmarked for projects that were never fully funded. We’re not broke. We’re disorganized. What we lack isn’t resources, but focus—on housing, prevention, and upstream solutions that actually work.

Step one is recognizing that homelessness is a housing problem. Once we see that clearly, the solutions become obvious. Only by understanding the real cause is real change possible.

For more information about local housing and homeless advocacy opportunities, contact the Los Alamos Interfaith Coalition on Homelessness, attend Los Alamos County Council meetings, or reach out to the Santa Fe Housing Action Coalition. The solutions are within reach—if we’re willing to reach for them.

Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash