Following is a guest opinion column submitted by Jaemes Shanley.  Mr. Shanley is the President of the Mark Twain Neighborhood Association located in the mid-heights and he is the Vice President of the District 7 Coalition of Neighborhoods which boasts membership of 14 neighborhood associations. Mr. Shanley was not compensated for his column and it is being published “free of charge” as a public service to the public by www.PeteDinelli.com.

BACKGROUND INTRODUCTION

It was on February 18, 2026 that the Albuquerque City Council voted 5 to 4 to reject a series of sweeping amendments that Mayor Tim Keller sought to the city’s zoning laws mandating upzoning in all established residential areas of the city.  The debate exposed tensions between affordable housing activists, investors and developers on one side and on the other side were existing homeowners, property owners and neighborhood associations.

Supporters wanted to double or triple density to boost housing supply in all existing neighborhoods, eliminating rights to object or appeal by adjoining or affected property owners. Proponents argued that “flooding the market” with more housing would result in making more affordable housing available for sale or rent. Opposing homeowners, property owners and neighborhood associations argued there was a need to preserve historical areas of the city, to preserve existing neighborhood character, tranquility and livability and to prevent gentrification and no  property tax increases brought on by change in zoning, improvements or a new purchaser.

JAEMES SHANLEY ARTICLE

ALBUQUERQUE CORRIDORS – AFFLICTION AND OPPORTUNITY

BY: Jaemes Shanley, Albuquerque resident.

If I learned anything from my 35-year career in the world of “big corporate” it was “what gets measured gets managed”.

“INNOVATION CORRIDOR”

In early spring last year, a friend of mine sent me the presentation made January 27^th, 2014 by a group of ABQ community “experts” at a luncheon of the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties (NAIOP).  It lays out a proposal for a 5.25 mile “Innovation Corridor” running along Central Ave. from Washington to Atrisco, just west of the Rio Grande River. The vision offered of the potential of this corridor was inspiring: $940 million in new investment and more than 100,000 new private sector jobs by 2024, created in a context of thriving commerce, walkability, and interlinked community innovation.  

The catalytic “thread” for its realization would be a BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) system running along Central.  With then Mayor Richard Berry using this presentation and a [ $125 million] funding grant from the federal government as justification and impetus.  The BRT was ultimately realized as the ART we all know today, but too few of us actually use it.  Some of the alternative proposals from other experts (School of Architecture professors etc.) and community members offered at that time make for painfully nostalgic reading today.

The cognitive dissonance produced by reading this presentation   triggered a “mission” to measure the reality on Central in 2025, which did not seem to reflect any of the “promises” of this 2014 presentation.  If anything, it was the opposite.

JOURNEY ONTO ALBUQUERQUE’S CORRIDORS

Thus began a  journey onto Albuquerque’s corridors to try and quantify their condition.  Beginning at Tramway & Central in March 2025, I covered  its length to the ART terminus beyond Unser Blvd. NW.  What I found was so striking and disturbing that I felt compelled to continue, which I did, adding:

• San Pedro from Gibson to Montgomery.
• San Mateo from Gibson to its end point at I-25 NE.
• Menaul from Tramway to Rio Grande Blvd. and down to Bellamah north of Old Town.
• 4^th Street from Coal SW to Los Ranchos NW.
• The entirely of Zuni Rd. from east of Wyoming to its end at Morningside SE.
• Lomas Blvd. from Tramway to its intersection with Central east of Old Town.
• Wyoming Blvd from Trumbull in the International District to Paseo Del Norte in the far northeast heights.

Among the 6,050 discrete properties I have documented along or adjacent to these corridors are the following:

• 3,271 commercial premises, of which 740 (18%) are empty, closed, for lease, or abandoned
• 198 free-standing empty whole buildings with combined enclosed space of 1.9 million square feet
• 287 vacant lots totaling 217 acres
• 140 fast food outlets, 262 restaurants, 81 cannabis shops, but only 31 grocery stores. I can’t count high enough to include massage parlors and car washes.
• Large, paved parking lot areas underused all over the place
• Unhoused people concentrated or dispersed throughout

These quantitative and qualitative indicators will, I am sure, be replicated as I extend this effort to other ABQ corridors (Juan Tabo, Eubank, Candelaria, Carlisle, 2^nd & 3^rd Streets, etc.).

Long before I became afflicted with this “obsessive compulsive corridor disorder”, others in our city, most notably the former East Central Ministries (now reconfigured as Street Vision), the Center for Housing Economics, and New Creation ABQ,  focused on the International District, were documenting huge numbers of vacant lots and abandoned houses within residential areas that stand year after year as wasted opportunity for near term housing. On multiple sites they have initiated redevelopment and refurbishment by aggregating parcels of funding from private and government sources.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Integrated Development Ordinance (IDO) is essentially all of the city zoning laws on how properties are zoned for residential, commercial or industrial use development. The IDO includes zoning and subdivision regulations to govern land use and all development within the City of Albuquerque. It establishes the City’s system of planning citywide. The IDO allows the Albuquerque City Council to amend it every two years. This amendment process has resulted in upwards of 140 amendments in the last two years resulting in mass confusion to the public.

The Integrated Development Ordinance (IDO) is the legislated framework of rules by which the official “vision” for Albuquerque’s development documented in the Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Comprehensive Plan is executed. It is dense and granular. The most definitive guidelines and parameters for land use are contained in its zoning provisions and restrictions.

During  the recent “IDO amendment season” much debate occurred around whether or not “priority #1” for Albuquerque should be re-zoning and “permissive” (unaccountable to adjacent neighbors) rather than “conditional” (subject to notification and consultation with community) re-configuration of neighborhoods city-wide.  Little attention or discussion focused on corridors.

A vocal and passionate segment of the community argued that the only way to make housing affordable in Albuquerque would be to remove any zoning restrictions that could potentially question or obstruct higher density housing development by anyone on any street in any single-family home neighborhood city-wide.

I am not going to wade into the merit of elected officials dictating permissive development rules for the single-family home neighborhoods where 66% of Albuquerque’s residents are housed, but I do know what those residents see every day when moving beyond their own neighborhoods.  It is not other neighborhoods.  It’s the corridors they use to navigate through the city.

The impression these corridors convey to the public is not inspiring. It presents a city afflicted, not one that is thriving.  As an Albuquerque resident throughout the 1970’s, a regular visitor from 1982 thru 2006, and full-time resident since 2007, I know from lived experience that Albuquerque has seen MUCH better days.

ALBUQUERQUE RESIDENTS SEE DECLINE

What Albuquerque residents see when car driving, bus riding, biking or walking along most of our major corridors today is a troubling spectacle of a city grappling unsuccessfully with forces of decline:

• An unhoused population numbering in the thousands, existing as nomads within our city limits, subject to the depredations, vulnerabilities and sometimes desperate behaviors that will inevitably accrue to being placeless within an urban context.
• Empty unused built structures, some casualties of homeless concentrations, but most the consequence of an economic change that has transitioned commerce away from local businesses to national “big box”, ultra discount, and online retailers with which few local businesses have capacity to compete.
• Acres of vacant land lots along or adjacent to corridors which, by their very existence, contradict the assertion by some that “we have no more land for infill development”.
• “Got Space”, “Available”, “For Lease” signs on most strip malls, commercial retail and multi-unit office buildings city-wide.
• Vast parking lots less than half used .
• Large (many new) apartment buildings, most advertising units for rent, with ground floor commercial spaces for lease at higher vacancy levels than the apartment units above them.
• Relentless expansion of thrift stores, Goodwill Industries facilities, and other operations serving our growing population of economically marginalized, while the diversity of iconic locally owned businesses that served Albuquerque’s once growing and thriving middle class steadily shrinks, declines, or disappears.
• Encampments of the unhoused pitched against the walls of empty buildings that contain the basic amenities of civilized life to which they lack access (running water, toilets, heating/cooling, stability, security, shelter from elements)

Each of these 8 corridors present contradictory absurdity juxtaposed with the notion of Albuquerque we justifiably hold: that of a “special place” totally unique geologically, geographically, culturally, and historically.  

Having lived in or repeatedly worked in more than 50 cities throughout the world, I know this cradle we call Albuquerque, with its distinctive and dramatic vistas to the east and west, and the verdant belt of the Rio Grande and bosque running through it, has no identical rival.

WHAT IS A CITY?

Wikipedia devotes more than 10,000 words to the definition and description of “city”.  The nucleus and constant of a city is buildings.  The ancient cities we discover archeologically, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Mezoamerica, and Chaco Canyon are collections of buildings that housed and sheltered people.  Nowhere does Wikipedia characterize a city as a combined population of the housed (placed) with the unhoused (placeless).  Its brief reference to homelessness describes it as a growing problem for cities, not as an intrinsic characteristic. 

A large population of unhoused people, obliged to subsist in its midst as indigent nomads, is a blatant contradiction of the foundational concept of “city”. 

When I visited India in 1994, for the first of what would be many trips, I was appalled by what I saw. There were desperately poor people living in hovels that appeared to be constructed of scraps and refuse.  Yet those poor people were better off than our unhoused Albuquerque neighbors today scattered city-wide and concentrated along east Central or adjacent to the I-40 overpass on First Street, because those poverty stricken in India had at least stable place of shelter, and no authorities were routinely and pointlessly coming by to “sweep” them down the street to another “placeless” location. 

WHAT IS “THE KIND OF CITY WE WANT TO BE”?

I believe that if you were to canvas the residents of Albuquerque to solicit their desires and description of the city they would like Albuquerque to be, the overwhelming majority would state unequivocally that they wish Albuquerque to be above all a city where:

• THEY DO NOT SEE unhoused people wandering or encamped on our streets, sidewalks, and alleys or wandering citywide with shopping carts containing their worldly goods because every resident has “place” providing the most basic amenities of urban life.
•  THEY DO NOT TRAVEL along city corridors that are blighted by declining businesses, vacant premises, and vacant lots.
•  Local businesses and households are not obliged to invest heavily in fencing and security to insulate against the desperate behaviors of people obliged to subsist within our city in desperate conditions.
•  Innovative locally owned businesses established in categories of the economy not captured by national chains or online retailers are overtly supported to maximize their potential for growth locally and beyond.
•  Economic development prioritizes not just “jobs” but career path opportunities in Albuquerque that can restore an upwardly mobile working middle class.
•  Household income and home prices have a relationship that permits purchase of a starter home at a relatively early stage of working life.
•  Albuquerque’s abundant charms and attractions are not diminished or neutralized by all too visible problems it is failing to adequately address.

It is worth noting, when considering this might be a daunting challenge, that the nation of India, since my first visit in 1994, has moved more than the entire population count of the United States from extreme poverty to a position within their middle class.

REALITY CHECK: FACTS THAT MATTER

 Consider the following facts as a reality check for Albuquerque:

• Albuquerque’s population in 2018 was 559,677. In 2026 it was 558,046.  That is a 0.3% decrease.
• Albuquerque’s City Budget in 2018 (the last delivered by administration of Richard Berry) was $956,728,000.
•  The 2027 City Budget proposed by Mayor Keller to City Council is $1,466,195,000. That’s a 53% increase.
•  The oft cited “shrinking” of household size over the past 20 years in Albuquerque, if extrapolated to continue for the next 20 years, with maximum impact on housing supply, will require adding 525 units of housing per year, a rate we are already vastly exceeding.
•  Commercial and multi-family real estate research publisher Berkadia reports apartment vacancies in Albuquerque currently stand at more than 7% indicating oversupply, not under supply.
•  Among 21 major US cities plus Vancouver and Montreal in Canada, Albuquerque experienced the 5^th highest inflation of median home prices between 2020 and 2025 at 51%.
• Of the 16 cities in that group with double digit home price inflation (includes the cities most often cited for having eliminated zoning restrictions), Albuquerque is unique for having negative population growth.
•  Smaller and theoretically less expensive housing options like townhouses, duplexes, quadraplexes, accessory dwelling units (ADU’s) and small multi-unit apartments are and have been “legal” in Albuquerque for a long time.
•  Of the 1,370 small home units I counted along the 8 corridors I surveyed, 40% were townhouse and duplex units, many of them relatively new.

THE HOUSING “CRISIS” IS  AFFORDABILITY, NOT SUPPLY

We do have a real “crisis” in housing for Albuquerque, but it is not supply.  IT’S AFFORABILITY!  As I witness driving around, we are building housing, especially apartment complexes, at a blistering pace city-wide, faster than our demographics demand.

Most of the apartment complexes I see today in Albuquerque have signs offering available units.  Price is the problem.  Given the fact that 50% of households earn less than $76,000, if their monthly housing costs (rent, mortgage, utilities, insurance) exceed $1,900 at the high end it is not “affordable”.  For a single person household working a 40 hour week at $15/hour affordable housing costs cannot exceed $858 per month!

The entire, often hysterical, debate over the “housing crisis”  at State, County, and City level has excluded the one causal factor that points to Albuquerque’s contradictory exceptionalism (high housing cost inflation with no supply shortage) and which will continue to strangle housing affordability no matter how much we densify or build.  That is “urban land price inflation.”

When I arrived in Albuquerque in 1969, Eubank and Montgomery were the “outer limits” on the east side.   We could take our cars at night up to the foothills community of Glenwood Hills, point them west, turn the headlights off, and coast in the dark on Montgomery all the way to I-25 without stopping….or being stopped by the police.  Most of the west mesa was still part of the 7 Bar Ranch owned by the Black family.  The cost of the land on which single family houses were built in the 1950’s, selling new for less than $15,000, was negligible.

Not so today.  As we have built up against the limits to our sprawl, land has become an increasingly finite commodity and that is where the true impact of supply constraint is driving housing price inflation.

An interesting current illustration can be found on a now vacant lot being sold in Nob Hill.  The 1,293 sq ft single family home built in 1947 has been scraped from the site.  The 16% of an acre vacant lot is on the market with an asking price of $249,000.  The Bernalillo County assessed market value of that land is $53,635 with 1/3^rd of that value being taxable at the rate of 0.042254% = $755.36 per year property tax on the land. 

For those who can afford to acquire land in Albuquerque, property taxes are a trivial price to pay while sitting on the investment for future capital gains as it inflates continuously and exponentially when infrastructure or development occurs around it. Land is assessed as 1/3^rd of the total property value when improved with a building (house) and other infrastructure. 

Consider what the value of any housing built on this lot will be, for example a two-family duplex or townhouse, each of them 1,650 sq. ft. leaving 50% of the lot for landscaping, driveway, parking etc.  At an averaged construction cost of $200/sq ft, each unit will have a built cost of $330,000.   Add the cost of the land and you have a unit cost to the developer before adding profit to selling price of $455,000 each.   That’s not heading toward affordability.  The post construction County reassessment of the property value will also add a dramatic valuation and annual property tax increase.  Even squeezing a fourplex onto this lot will not yield “density” that is “gentle” from a cost and price point of view.

Any housing policy discourse in Albuquerque and Bernalillo County that does not seriously include and consider the implications of land price inflation and taxing policy is doomed to wallow in the status quo.  Current reality fully validates the work of economists Thomas Piketty and Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz who demonstrate the contribution of urban land price (expressed in housing unaffordability and resulting concentration of ownership in the hands of the investor class) to the income inequality that underlies so many of our current ills. 

To dismiss books like Broken City, by Canadian urbanist Patrick Condon, who unpacks the issue of urban land price inflation across the English-speaking world is to announce you have not read it.

FLEEING COMPLEXITY

Oversimplification and distraction does not solve complex problems. It simply kicks them down the road.

• That’s how an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU), also referred to a casita, ordinance gets passed in the city and over the next 2 years yields only 15 permits.
• That’s how a Safe Outdoor Spaces ordinance gets enacted to try and improve the situation for the unhoused and in the ensuing 2 years only one organization in the City (New Creations Church) is able to scale the financial and logistical obstructions imposed to establish an SOS facility.
• That’s how the City expends hundreds of millions of dollars to buy, build, renovate, construct and contract a vast Gateway System while the visible and countable scale and state of street homelessness is relatively unchanged.
• That’s how we can propose new zoning regulations to permit “bodegas” in the middle of neighborhoods city-wide when even small businesses located on our corridors with access to many more customers are being squeezed by oversized national competition to the brink of extinction.
• That’s how we are bombarded with benchmarking statistics from other cities that bear nothing in common with Albuquerque to justify radical changes to our land use policies.
• That’s how we surrender our economy and commerce to out of state businesses and property owners who harvest the cream (profits, executive salaries, middle management salaries, capital gains) and export it to their headquarters out of state. When we are milked dry, they leave their abandoned premises on our corridors (Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, Franklin Plaza) for years waiting to profit from the land appreciation.
• That’ s how (or perhaps why) we expend great fanfare and funds on Rail Trails, giant tumbleweed sculptures, Rt 66 Visitors Centers, State Fairgrounds Master Planning projects while our most pressing and visible crises persist unresolved…..homelessness, income inequality, housing unaffordability, commercial decay.

RESTORING ALBUQUERQUE’S WHOLE  ATTRACTIVENESS

The commerce that can contribute jobs and higher wages for households depends on restoring Albuquerque’s whole attractiveness to the entrepreneurs, professional practitioners (ie. doctors and mental health professional!), and skilled laborers who will move here with their families to lead and participate in the repair and recovery of our corridors and thus our city. 

Albuquerque needs to utilize the opportunity presented by existing but unused built structure and vacant land as an accessible and core element of a priority program to produce greater housing density and affordability and, most importantly, to effectively end homelessness.

Among its many blessings Albuquerque has an  extraordinary and large eco-system of individuals, non-profits, and coalitions of knowledgeable, experienced, skilled and, above all, deeply committed individuals working tirelessly from every angle to make things better.  A rightly prioritized effort that engaged this community in coordinated partnership with City, County, and State government could accelerate real progress way beyond anything we are seeing.

The “seeds” of a rapid supplemental program of relocation from street homelessness to “intentional supported communities” can be found in the volume of built structure of all sizes we have sitting empty beside the very people who need their shelter. The City and the County have toolkits of “carrots” and “sticks” by which these assets could be engage, short or long term to good effect.  

We should never allow ourselves to lose sight of the fact that, as a wise and knowledgeable community leader states repeatedly when discussing this, “people are dying”.

CONCLUSION

We can and must  fix Albuquerque! If we fix the corridors and the human calamity that is dispersed along them, we can fix Albuquerque.  If we fix Albuquerque the rest of the State will benefit.  A State of New Mexico that is not handicapped by urban affliction in its largest city cannot fail to be one of the most attractive in the nation.

Referenced Corridor surveys, summaries and supporting data are publicly available at:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dlMLlHv7tc1V5sIBSujL4oZyN3UQufpE?usp=share_link

Respectfully yours,

JAEMES SHANLEY

Jaemes1@mac.com

COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS

Jaemes Shanley hand delivered his in depth survey to Mayor Tim Keller and all 9 City Councilors. However, it is understood that not a single one of them acknowledge receipt which is a lack of  common courtesy by elected officials. Such lack of common courtesy was the nature of the hostile debate surrounding the mandatory up zoning amendments where the “cold shoulder” was given to  people with opposing thoughts and who were simply ignored or even vilified, especially by city councilors such as the likes of Tammy Feiblekorn.

The term “affordable housing” is about as misleading as it gets. It is a term way too often used by elected officials and politicians to simply declare a crisis with inflated numbers that shows there is not enough housing that allows the poor or low-income people to rent or buy a home and call their own. Housing prices and rental costs never come down. The more appropriate term that should be used is “subsidized” housing where it’s clear what is needed is subsidized funding for those who cannot afford to buy outright or rent and need assistance.

The housing shortage crisis  declared is related to economics, the development community’s inability to keep up with supply and demand and the public’s inability to purchase housing or qualify for housing mortgage loans. The shortage of rental properties has resulted in dramatic increases in rents. It is clear that the City of Albuquerque and the state of New Mexico are suffering from a shortage of housing, but that does not mean it is all affordable housing.

The Jaemes Shanley article provides an in-depth survey and analysis of the city’s corridors with an informed, viable approach to address the city’s affordable housing crisis. The James Shanley column and survey provides a reasonable, rational, measured and well thought out approach to address the city’s affordable housing crisis.  As a separate editors comment and and analysis, a major emphasis by Mayor Keller and the City Council  should be placed upon the use of vacant commercial properties or buildings for conversion to affordable housing as opposed to forcing the doubling or tripling of neighborhood density, destroying historical neighborhoods and leading to gentrification.

Mayor Keller, the Albuquerque City Council and affordable housing activists, investment speculators and developers would be wise to listen to and act upon the Shanley proposals rather than enacting a wave of amendments every two years to the city’s already complicated zoning laws. They should knock it off with ignoring or vilifying those they disagree with especially when it comes to mandatory up zoning and the Integrated Development Ordinance.

___________________________________________________

POSTSCRIPT

The link to related articles  are  here:

City Council Votes 5 To 4 Along Party Lines to enact “Safer Community Spaces Ordinance” Reinstating Immigrant Protections; Commentary: The Killing Of US Citizens By ICE Agents Could Easily Happen Here

ABQ Journal Dinelli Local Columnist Opinion Column: “Council Was Correct To Reject Forced Upzoning”; POSTSCRIPT: Commentary On The Votes of City Councilors Tammy Fiebelkorn, Nichole Rogers, And Joaquín Baca