Why are there so many homeless people in Santa Fe?
Housing insecurity in northern New Mexico: Part 1
This is the first in a four-part series on homelessness in northern New Mexico. When I first started reporting for Boomtown, one of my earliest discoveries was that Los Alamos—despite being one of the wealthiest counties in America—does indeed have unhoused people. As I got to know their stories and the gaps they’re falling through, I began studying homelessness more broadly. What I’ve learned is that many popular narratives about homelessness are simply wrong, and this misinformation traps us in approaches that don’t work. Over the course of this project, I’ll explore this issue from multiple angles, starting with this four-part series that challenges how we think about the problem.
A flashpoint on Cerrillos Road
On any given day on Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe, outside the Interfaith Community Shelter formerly known as Pete’s Place, you can see the visible face of the region’s homelessness crisis. The shelter has become a lightning rod for community frustration, with nearby businesses reporting over 2,200 police callouts to the area in 2024 alone.
“We have broken glass all the time and property crime all the time,” said Yvette Roybal, who runs the GMC dealership next to the shelter, in an interview with KOAT. Business owners have organized cleanup events and filed lawsuits against the shelter. In nearby Española, tensions have boiled over at town halls, where some residents proposed busing homeless people to other states and others threatened violence, drawing cheers from the audience.
The City of Santa Fe declined to renew the Interfaith Community Shelter’s 10-year lease, leaving it on a month-to-month lease, with its future uncertain. But there are an estimated 300-400 unhoused people in Santa Fe. Where will they go? The same question is being asked across northern New Mexico: What to do about the people living in tent encampments along Española’s Rio Grande to those sleeping in cars in Los Alamos parking lots?
But focusing on the conspicuous crisis can obscure a deeper problem: how our neighbors end up homeless—and why our current approach keeps failing.
Beyond individual behaviors
When concerned residents discuss how to solve homelessness, they usually focus on the people they can see: “Get those people mental-health services and addiction treatment!” they cry (when they’re feeling generous). These interventions do matter—but they miss the structural forces that create homelessness regardless of individual circumstances.
Understanding why requires stepping back from the crisis at the Interfaith Community Shelter to examine a bigger question: Why do some wealthy communities have high rates of homelessness while some poorer communities have low rates? The answer challenges everything most people think they know about who becomes homeless and why.
The worst game of musical chairs ever
Imagine a reality-TV island with 95 houses and 100 families. The gates open, and everyone rushes to grab a house: the first one in the door stakes a claim. Five families lose—no matter how responsible or hardworking they are. You can look at those families and come up with reasons why they didn’t make it, but this is a cruel victim-blamey distraction from the game setup: when you design for scarcity, someone is always going to lose.
This “musical chairs” analogy, popularized by researcher Gregg Colburn, explains why cities with similar rates of addiction or mental illness can have vastly different homelessness rates. If addiction rates were the cause, we’d see consistent correlations. We don’t.
Homelessness isn’t strongly tied to poverty on a city-wide basis, either. Cities like San Francisco, Boston, and Santa Fe have high incomes—and high homelessness. What they also have in common is housing scarcity.
“The places in the United States with the highest rates of homelessness are the most affluent places,” Colburn told me when I interviewed him last year. “Seattle has four times the per capita homelessness of [struggling] Cincinnati.” It’s not that individual behaviors don’t matter, he said; you can look at any one person and point to things they did that led to losing their home. But why certain cities see a lot of homelessness is due to the number of homes that exist…and the number of homes that don’t.
The Los Alamos connection: scarcity by design
Los Alamos offers a perfect case study. When Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) expanded its workforce to nearly 18,000 people in just a few years, those people needed a place to live. But the local housing supply barely budged. Just like pouring liquid into a cup, if you don’t expand capacity, it overflows.
“There’s a long-standing rule of thumb: add at least one home for every 1.5 jobs,” said Alex Horowitz, a housing policy analyst for Pew Charitable Trusts whom I interviewed while he was talking to New Mexico legislators in February. (To see his analysis of the problem, click here.)
Los Alamos didn’t come close to this housing goal. And it wasn’t only due to physical limits—it was a choice to remain exclusive.
The result is that homes that once housed teachers, veterinarians, and county workers when I was a kid now go for $500k+. Rents hover around $2,500 per month. A teacher earning $45,000 spends more than 60% of their income on housing. That’s not sustainable.
‘I am getting crippled’
Nearly 70% of LANL employees now commute from outside the county. Their relatively high salaries raise housing costs in Santa Fe, Rio Arriba, and other neighboring counties. Española, not a wealthy town, might normally be a more affordable community, were it not for the high Lab salaries pushing up prices.
Santa Fe housing costs, of course, are also very high: The median sales price of a home in Santa Fe was $605k last month, according to Redfin. “One thing happening with the lab expansion, and lack of housing in White Rock [and] Los Alamos, is that rents for those of us in Santa Fe—non lab employees—are skyrocketing because lab people are forced to live here,” one Santa Fe resident told me. “I make more than I’ve ever dreamed in my life and I am getting crippled with rent to the point that it is affecting my retirement savings.”
A thriving job center like LANL is a good thing—if we build housing to match. If we don’t, lower-income people get priced out. Remember, the last person standing loses the housing game.
The regional cascade
It’s not just Los Alamos that’s allergic to building more housing. Santa Fe hasn’t kept up with housing demand either, citing height limits and “historic character.” In both cities, well-organized neighborhood defenders have used every tool to stop or slow development. This creates a regional cascade: when housing in Los Alamos disappears, the economic pressure created by people seeking housing ripples outward.
When housing is this tight, any crisis—a job loss, a breakup, a rent hike—can push someone out. And when they fall, we blame visible behaviors like addiction or mental illness. But high-income people struggle with those things, too: CEOs can get depressed, Santa Fe Prep kids may be snorting buckets of cocaine. The difference is, wealthier people can afford to fall apart indoors.
New Mexico is missing tens of thousands of homes—38,000 low-income units alone—and with fewer roofs than residents, people at the margins are pushed out.
This creates a cascading effect that’s hard to see when you’re just looking at suffering souls milling about on Cerrillos Road. But until we understand the upstream forces, our downstream efforts will continue to fall short.
Update:
Two days after this story was published, The Santa Fe New Mexican reported that the Interfaith Community Shelter may be ousted from its longtime home at 2801 Cerrillos Road, a city-owned facility. Shelter leaders allege the mayor plans to terminate their lease and replace them with an out-of-state nonprofit—without a City Council vote. City officials have offered little public explanation, prompting concerns from community members and at least one City Councilor. The shelter warns that such a move could halt progress on their planned new facility, disband their volunteer base, and leave 80 nightly guests without food or support.
Next up: Why “just build more treatment centers” misses the point, and what happens when we focus on symptoms instead of causes.
I appreciate the analogies and am looking forward to the follow on articles. Still, what the average person sees in Santa Fe, are not the ‘five families left out bc there are only 95 homes.’ What we see are largely single people, with obvious mental health challenges, and the crime is undisputed. I hope you will be addressing the reports that many of our homeless do not want to be housed — is that accurate? I think we have two, nearly distinct populations to address: those with drug addiction and mental health issues, and those who are the poor working families. One solution will not fit both of those groups. And, I do believe people deserve to enjoy public spaces, especially parks, without undue harassment. Capitalism is the main problem IMO, and that’s one big nut to crack! We must keep trying. That also means holding people accountable for criminal behavior. Obviously not all poor people break windows and defecate in public. I worry it is such an intractable problem that frustrations build and then the housed wreak havoc on the unhoused. And permitting for housing definitely needs more flexibility. Again, thanks for your reporting.
The historic character excuse is lame. When a modern employer like LANL creates jobs it needs to insist that the city benefited allow more housing in proportion to the jobs created.