On Wednesday, July 8th 2020, The City of Santa Fe City Council will hold a Governing Body Meeting. In addition to several other items slated for discussion on the consent calendar, the Council will hear requests for approval of contracts awarded through RFP 20/15 to use Affordable Housing Trust Funds (AHTF) and General Funds to support housing contracts as follows:

  • *SF Civic Housing Authority (Calle Resolana) – $200k
  • SF Civic Housing Authority (Country Club A) – $140k A
  • SF Habitat – $80k
  • SF Recovery Center – $50k
  • Youthworks – $40k
  • SFPS Adelante – $60k

*Santa Fe Civic Housing Authority’s proposal to build a two-story, 45-unit multifamily development at 1115 Calle La Resolana.

Attend the virtual meeting, here.

As a broad-based community coalition dedicated to expanding the accessibility and affordability of quality housing options in Santa Fe, our central goal is to create systems-level change for affordable housing policy that adequately responds to our current housing access and affordability crisis.

As a Coalition, we consistently support initiatives that seek to address housing accessibility and affordability in Santa Fe and, importantly, we encourage and participate in collaborative and inclusive engagement in order to adequately address this issue.

There’s no question that Santa Fe is in the grips of an extreme shortage of affordable housing. According to CBRE (which conducts regular rental market analysis), rental occupancy rates in apartment complexes are the highest they’ve been since tracking began, at 98.13%.

This means large apartment complexes in the city are functionally at 100% occupancy, with only a small number of units unoccupied do to maintenance and turnover. When occupancy is this tight, rental rates inevitably and rapidly increase. In Santa Fe, half a decade of extremely tight rental markets means rental rates have increased over 46% in just the last five years. Most alarmingly, the 2018 Census data reports that 85% of renters earning less than $50,000 a year in Santa Fe are paying more than they can afford for housing.

The consensus among housing planners, local housing non-profits, and City affordable housing staff is that we simply don’t have enough rental housing to serve the number of renter households in our community.

As such, we cannot afford to be dismissive of any initiatives that would seek to address this growing problem. Rather, we would urge the City of Santa Fe, housing non-profits, communities and other stakeholders to work together to address community concerns and realities while developing sustainable solutions that work.

#Housing4All #BetterTogether