At two different points in my adult life, I found myself precariously housed. Both times, within about a month of losing stable housing, I found work in hospitality: first behind the front desk of a hotel, and later as a night auditor and manager at another.

Neither job was glamorous, they were hard. Hospitality is exhausting and unpredictable work but at moments when I was being told I was overqualified to make coffee and underqualified for jobs requiring supervisory experience, hotels valued what I offered. I spoke multiple languages, I could talk to people, I could solve problems at two in the morning (some including tools and electricity, which looking back on, is insane. I should not use tools!).

Most importantly, I could pay my rent. I remember one month where tip money kept me from being overdrafted.

Both properties had received public incentives at some point in their development. Both brought new activity to Downtown-area neighborhoods, one in an abandoned hospital and the other in an abandoned motor lodge. For me, personally, they provided something even more basic: a foothold when I desperately needed one.

I don’t work in hospitality anymore but I haven’t forgotten that feeling, and I think about it when I have the ability to comment at council, volunteer in Strong Towns, or just enjoy a 9-5 lifestyle. It also probably explains some of my frustration watching what is happening a few blocks from my home in Downtown.

A neighborhood becoming a neighborhood

Sawmill is one of the most interesting parts of Albuquerque because it hasn’t stayed “frozen in time.” The neighborhood takes its name from an industrial history that is still visible everywhere, but over the last few decades it has gradually become something else: apartments, affordable homes, breweries, museums, hotels, restaurants and public spaces layered onto and between older industrial uses, slowly being replaced. If I’m frustrated about this story, i am also frustrated that so much of what is happening in Sawmill I wish were also happening in the Downtown Core.

Soon, if everything goes according to plan, the Rail Trail will stitch the neighborhood more directly to Old Town and Downtown. This is what cities do and what helps make them interesting, they change, and often incrementally. From Industrial sites to mixed use neighborhoods of various incomes and personalities.

At 1010 18th Street NW, Sun Capital Hotels wants to replace a former office/industrial building with a dual-branded Hampton Inn and Home2 Suites. The proposal has bounced between designs and would have 143 rooms, and the developer has sought approximately $40 million in industrial revenue bonds from the city. Local reporting says the project would create around 40 permanent full- and part-time jobs.

This isn’t a hotel being dropped into the middle of a quiet residential block. On one side is the enormous, industrial-inspired Explora complex. Nearby are the multistory Sawmill apartments, Ponderosa Brewing, Sawmill Market and Hotel Chaco. The street itself is enormously wide, a remnant of the area’s industrial past that, as someone who regularly bikes through here, feels much more plagued by speeding than congestion.

I pulled up the requests that the developer made through the city’s portal to see what they had to say about these issues. The site is zoned NR-LM (non-residential, light manufacturing), and the project previously received approval for a five-foot variance above the 55-foot height allowed under the applicable overlay. DMD also approved its traffic circulation layout for building permit review, with the files showing clear setbacks to respect the residential side of the neighborhood and reporting that the development shouldn’t have material impacts that are negative and finally, that the structure meets all zoning requirements. In short, this is not some skyscraper being rammed into a sleepy neighborhood. It is urban infill in an urbanizing neighborhood. The reaction, however, makes it seem like this isn’t a natural evolution in an urbanizing, industrial area.

The “character”

Opponents have raised a familiar assortment of concerns: traffic, parking, scale, neighborhood character, the presence of a national hotel brand and whether a project like this deserves public incentives. My State Senator, Debbie O’Malley, who helped found the Sawmill Community Land Trust and continues to serve as an informal adviser, joined land-trust board members in opposing the subsidy. Sawmill Area Neighborhood Association President David Stryker raised concerns about the hotel’s proximity to nearby single-family homes. And Heritage Hotels, the company behind Hotel Chaco, Hotel Albuquerque and Sawmill Market, has also opposed the project.

Heritage’s Adrian Perez told KRQE that Sawmill did not need a “major brand” and argued that if a national chain wanted to enter such a culturally sensitive area, it should do so without tax abatement. I find some of these arguments difficult to take seriously. I have stayed at an Ibis Hotel in “culturally sensitive” parts of Paris. And Econo Lodge in “culturally sensitive” parts of many American cities.

The proposed building is replacing an office building in a formerly industrial district. It sits beside large contemporary buildings that themselves reinterpret the industrial history of Sawmill. The developer says its design will use brick and metal elements inspired by that same industrial Southwestern aesthetic. On the single-family home side, traffic will be directed away and there is a “neighborhood edge” which prevents taller components of buildings from abutting lot lines.

So when we talk about protecting the historic character of this particular site, what exactly are we protecting: the warehouse? This is the recurring problem with “neighborhood character” as a land-use argument: the concept becomes remarkably slippery the moment we ask what it actually means. Is it the buildings, the people, the income level, the brands we allow in, or simply a particular time in a neighborhood’s history that we have arbitrarily decided represents its authentic final form?

Sawmill’s character today exists because Sawmill changed.

Turning industrial land into homes changed its character. Explora changed its character. Hotel Chaco changed its character. Sawmill Market changed its character. The apartments changed its character.

And thank God they did!

The traffic argument is even stranger

The traffic objection is especially frustrating to me because I actually travel this street without a car. Eighteenth Street does not strike me as a street suffering from too much congestion. It strikes me as a street suffering from being enormously overbuilt for its present context.

I would welcome more parked cars along portions of it if they visually narrowed the roadway and forced drivers to behave like they were traveling through a neighborhood instead of an industrial access road. However, without developments like this, it will remain an industrial access road. Do we want neighborhood life or not?

There is another problem with the traffic argument: the hotel replaces a 25,000-square-foot office building. The developer argues that the current/previous use generates commuter trips concentrated around peak periods, while hotel arrivals and departures are more dispersed. He also expects some guests to arrive by Uber or taxi and then walk to Old Town, Sawmill Market and nearby businesses. I have worked the front desk, anecdotally, this is true! Even on days where every room was booked (Balloon Fiesta for example), people arrived at any number of times.

I don’t think opponents have offered up a valid traffic analysis, nor is slow traffic inappropriate in a neighborhood in central Albuquerque. More importantly, if our response to activity in Sawmill is that there are too many cars, then the urbanist answer shouldn’t be stop adding destinations. It should be give people better ways to reach them.

In this neighborhood, we can build the Rail Trail, widen and improve the sidewalks, put Eighteenth Street on a road diet, and keep connecting Sawmill more directly to Downtown and the rest of the city by transit (something the new Route 8 routing has already started to do). The Lime scooters already scattered around the neighborhood suggest there is demand for getting around without a car and the frequent users I see on them around Sawmill seems to support this, and a real bikeshare system could add another option. If we’re worried that new development will generate car trips, we should make the alternatives easier, safer and more convenient rather than keeping an oversized industrial road surrounded by underused land and calling that a solution to traffic.

The controversy gets a bit interesting when we talk about Heritage Hotels, one of the most vocal opponents of the project and, simultaneously, one of the companies most responsible for what Sawmill looks like today. They have built and managed some of the best properties in the city, including Hotel Chaco which is a stunning building, as well as Sawmill Market has become one of the most visited destinations in the city, and Heritage has invested substantially in precisely the kind of urban redevelopment I spend an enormous amount of time wishing Albuquerque did more often. I am glad those projects exist! I want them to succeed. Which is exactly why it is so frustrating to watch the company pivot from being an agent of neighborhood change to arguing that another hotel somehow threatens the very character its own developments helped create.

One of Heritage’s arguments has been that a national hotel brand does not belong in such a culturally sensitive neighborhood, which sounds compelling until you look at what is actually being proposed. Sun Capital is a local company, the project is locally owned and would be locally developed and managed, even if the sign outside eventually says Hampton Inn or Home2 Suites. To me, it makes some of the rhetoric about an invading national chain feel a little overheated, particularly when the economic concern sitting beneath all of this is impossible to ignore: Heritage already operates some of the most prominent hotels in the immediate area, and this new hotel would compete with them.

I can understand a fear of having to compete, but Hotel Chaco is a luxury property, and Downtown Albuquerque News pointed out during this controversy that rooms were starting at around $300 per night. Councilor Baca raised what seems to me like an extremely obvious point: maybe it is actually good for Sawmill and Old Town to have a hotel serving a different price point. We talk about wanting mixed-income neighborhoods, about avoiding communities that become accessible only to one economic class, and about making room for different kinds of people, so why would we suddenly desire a monoculture when it comes to visitors? Someone coming to Albuquerque should not have to choose between a motel beside the interstate or on a stroad and a $300-per-night luxury hotel. A healthy neighborhood should be able to accommodate more than one kind of visitor, just as it should accommodate more than one kind of resident.

This is also where my frustration with the hotel itself turns into a broader frustration with how power works in Albuquerque and New Mexico more broadly. Senator Debbie O’Malley has joined the opposition to the project not simply as an individual constituent but as an elected official with a long institutional relationship to the neighborhood. She helped create the Sawmill Community Land Trust and continues to serve as an informal adviser to it, while Heritage has substantial commercial interests in the immediate area. After I criticized O’Malley in an Instagram comment, someone pointed me toward her campaign-finance reports and Jim Long’s political contributions, something I had not been aware of and which immediately made me uncomfortable enough to start digging through the records myself.

None of this indicates corruption, at least not legally. I have not found evidence that O’Malley has violated an ethics statute or conflict-of-interest law by speaking against this project, nor does the existence of a campaign contribution establish some cartoonish bag-of-money quid pro quo. Attorney friends when asked gave me the (non-legal advise) that it probably isn’t an ethics issue as-is, but it is still “f•cked up.” I definitely agree with that. When an elected official with longstanding institutional ties to one organization opposing a project is also politically supported by someone whose company owns competing hospitality businesses nearby, it is entirely reasonable for their constituents to ask what role those relationships play in the political process. Albuquerque is a small city, and sometimes “Small-buquerque” is charming we all know everyone, you run into three people you know buying groceries, and it’s easy to find how new friends intersect in other social circles, but that intimacy becomes troubling when the same small circle of political, neighborhood, business, and institutional actors repeatedly appears on every side of a land-use decision.

This is why predictable and upfront rules with transparent processes are important. The more our development process depends on relationships, informal influence or relationshps, who knows who, and which politically connected person becomes angry at a particular proposal, the less confident anyone can be that similar projects will actually be treated on the rules. That is unfair to developers, but it feels even more unfair to everyone else who has a stake in what a neighborhood might become but, like most of us, doesn’t have the institutional power to put a thumb on the scale.

Government by vibes

This is ultimately where the fight stops being about whether anyone personally likes a Hampton Inn. If a project is allowed under the city’s planning framework, meets the relevant design requirements, goes through the required review, adjusts in response to legitimate concerns, and otherwise satisfies the rules Albuquerque itself created, what exactly remains for a developer to do? Secure the blessing of every neighborhood association? Make sure nobody with an existing business nearby feels economically threatened? Demonstrate that enough politically influential people find the architectural vibe sufficiently Southwestern? The same applies to the IRB. I am completely open to questioning whether Albuquerque uses these incentives too readily, whether we demand enough public benefit in return, or whether our development economics have made us too dependent on tax abatements in the first place. But those are arguments for changing the policy, not selectively changing the expectations for one project. At some point, a regulatory system has to mean something beyond “these are the rules unless someone important objects.”

This inconsistency also irks me because, at the same time this project was delayed, the Council approved a $25 million IRB for another Sun Capital hotel near Journal Center, with roughly the same promises of jobs and future tax revenue. Maybe there are technical distinctions that justify treating the two differently, but if there are, tell us what they are. Instead, after already spending months, if not years, working through the development process, this project gets sent into another six weeks of neighborhood negotiations. If hotels shouldn’t receive IRBs, change the policy; if this hotel doesn’t meet the criteria, explain why. What bothers me is watching rules that seem perfectly adequate right up until the right people object.

This is how we end up complaining endlessly about vacant lots and empty buildings while making it incredibly difficult to do anything with them. Predictability gets treated like some special favor to developers when it is really just a basic expectation of competent government: we can’t ask someone to invest millions of dollars under one set of public rules only to discover that following them earns you admission into an entirely different political contest. And we especially can’t spend years asking why nothing gets built and then shake down the people who actually show up wanting to build something.

I also resent the claim that visitors somehow do not benefit New Mexicans, an argument I find particularly hard to swallow given my own history. Tourists do not staff our hotels or do all the work that makes a city or the industry run; New Mexicans do. The industry absolutely deserves criticism, hospitality can be precarious, physically exhausting and badly managed, and workers deserve better pay, stronger protections and actual pathways upward, but those are arguments for improving hospitality work, not for pretending this work has no value.

Hospitality kept me housed. When I could not get other employers to figure out what to do with me, hotels did. When money was tight enough that filling up a gas tank was something I had to think about, having a job I could reach easily on my bike made an enormous difference. Maybe I try too hard to romanticize those years, and I certainly do not want our entire economic-development strategy to amount to “more service jobs,” but I also refuse the strangely class-blind idea that employment somehow becomes unimportant when the business creating it serves visitors. There are people in Albuquerque right now for whom forty new jobs close to where they live would matter quite a lot.

More broadly, I think Albuquerque needs to become more comfortable with the radical proposition that we are allowed to have nice things, including nice things that other people might want to visit. We deserve neighborhoods that have lots of nice things and none of this requires turning Albuquerque into Denver or Austin or Phoenix or whatever city people are currently terrified we might become; it requires having enough confidence in Albuquerque to let Albuquerque continue becoming itself.

Sawmill isn’t finished and it might not ever be - that’s okay

A few days ago I attended the public meeting at Explora about the next section of the Rail Trail, another project that has attracted its share of neighborhood anxiety, and what i noticed more than the opposition was how many people were genuinely excited about building something. People wanted the connection, wanted safer walking and biking, wanted the vacant right-of-way turned into something useful, and wanted the neighborhood stitched more closely into Old Town and Downtown. Afterward I went to Ponderosa for a Strong Towns happy hour, which put me almost directly on the other side of the property where this hotel would sit, and standing there made the entire argument over scale and compatibility feel even stranger than it already had.

Looking around the site, Explora is a massive building and the Sawmill apartments are also multistory. Ponderosa emulates the old industrial fabric that predates it. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, replacing an obsolete, ugly industrial building with a five-story hotel is apparently the thing that threatens neighborhood character.

Walking toward Ponderosa, I also found myself thinking again about being younger and much more frightened about money, about the enormous relief of finding a hotel willing to hire me and about biking to work because I could not comfortably afford gasoline.

I hope this hotel gets built, both because I think the project itself makes sense and because I worry about what it says when something this ordinary becomes this difficult. More importantly, I hope Albuquerque learns to become a little less afraid of allowing its neighborhoods to accumulate new layers. Sawmill is special because people spent decades cleaning up an industrial landscape, protecting affordability and transforming old land into something more useful; allowing another useful thing to exist there does not invalidate that work, i think It continues it.

Sawmill isn’t finished, and neither is Albuquerque. That should be something we are excited about.

I recently found myself sitting in Denver Union Station with a friend, enjoying a drink while waiting for a train and planning excursions around the city.

Around us, commuters hurried toward platforms. Travelers rolled their suitcases across the polished floors, families gathered for snacks, cyclists passed through on their way in and out of downtown, and convention goers met up to discuss their day’s events over a sip. Some people were clearly headed somewhere while others seemed perfectly content to stay exactly where they were.

The station was alive. As we sat there discussing future urbanist adventures in Denver, we reflected on how Albuquerque has a building intended to play a similar role. It sits at the corner of Central Avenue and First Street and connects trains, buses, bicycles, pedestrians, and some of the most important transportation investments our city has made in recent decades. Its architecture pays homage to one of the most beloved buildings in Albuquerque’s history.

Yet much of it remains hidden away behind locked doors! As Albuquerque celebrates the Route 66 Centennial, much of the conversation has focused on neon signs, motels, diners, and the mythology of the Mother Road. Those places definitely play a big part in our story but Albuquerque’s transportation history stretches back decades (and centuries) before Route 66 arrived.

At the center of that story stood the Alvarado Hotel. For generations, the Alvarado welcomed rail passengers arriving in Albuquerque. Built by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and operated as part of Fred Harvey’s famous hospitality empire, it became one of the defining landmarks of the city. Its distinctive Southwestern architecture helped shape how visitors imagined Albuquerque and the broader Southwest. It was not simply a train station, it was a destination in and of itself.

People arrived, lingered, met friends, ate meals, or spent the night there. It was a place where transportation and city life overlapped. Like so many American downtown landmarks, the Alvarado eventually became a casualty of changing transportation patterns and misguided urban renewal policies. As passenger rail declined and suburbanization accelerated, the hotel fell into disrepair. In 1970, it was demolished. The promise of urban renewal was that old places would be replaced by something better, modern, and adapted to the age of the automobile.

Instead, Albuquerque lost one of its most important civic spaces. Much of Downtown’s historic fabric disappeared in the decades that followed, replaced by parking lots, office buildings, and infrastructure designed primarily around moving suburban commuters in and out of the city core. What had once been a place increasingly became a collection of destinations separated by empty space.

To its credit, Albuquerque eventually recognized that loss. In the early 2000s, the city opened the Alvarado Transportation Center. Drawing inspiration from the original hotel’s architecture, the project sought to repair one of the most visible wounds left by urban renewal. It created a new intermodal hub linking local buses, regional transit, Amtrak (and later, the Rail Runner and Albuquerque Rapid Transit), and pedestrians.

In many ways, the project succeeded. Today, thousands of people pass through the center every day. It remains one of the most important pieces of transportation infrastructure in New Mexico and is one of the anchors of Downtown. It serves visitors arriving by Amtrak, It welcomes commuters traveling between Albuquerque, Belen, and Santa Fe, and It connects neighborhoods throughout the city.

But there is still something missing. The architecture came back (mostly), but the life did not. One of the most beautiful spaces in the entire complex is the waiting room. Some years prior to the pandemic, it even housed a small coffee stand where commuters could grab a drink before boarding the Rail Runner. Today, despite the elegance of the room itself, it remains largely inaccessible to the public.

This feels like a tremendous missed opportunity, especially now. Just last week, Albuquerque celebrated the opening of the first completed segment of the Rail Trail adjacent to the transportation center. After years of planning and discussion, the project is beginning to take physical shape. The Rail Trail has the potential to become one of the city’s most transformative public investments, connecting neighborhoods, destinations, transit, and public spaces throughout the urban core, and it now has a beautiful ramp passing directly next to the Waiting Area and its patios.

Yet as we invest millions of dollars creating new connections around the Alvarado Transportation Center, one of the key public spaces at its heart remains dormant.

Other cities have chosen a different path. Denver’s Union Station has become one of the most successful transportation hubs in the country. The station serves local transit, regional rail, intercity trains, and buses. But transportation alone is not what makes it successful.

Union Station is filled with life. The building houses restaurants, bars, coffee shops, retail space, event space, and a hotel. People gather there regardless of whether they are catching a train. They meet friends, work remotely, grab drinks with colleagues, enjoy lunch, or simply take a break on publicly-accessible benches (and restrooms!). The station functions as both infrastructure and public space.

Los Angeles offers an additional lesson. Like Albuquerque, Los Angeles shares a connection to the Fred Harvey legacy. Recently, Los Angeles Union Station has breathed new life into portions of its historic Harvey House spaces, reactivating them with restaurants and hospitality uses that celebrate the station’s history while bringing new activity into the building.

These projects are succeeding because they understand something we forgot during the twentieth century: the best transportation hubs are not simply places to pass through, they are places people choose to be.

That brings us back to Albuquerque. What if the waiting room at the Alvarado were reopened and reimagined? What if, instead of sitting largely unused, it became home to a restaurant, café, brewery, or better yet, a Harvey-inspired hospitality concept that celebrated Albuquerque’s transportation heritage? What if the space served not only Rail Runner commuters and Amtrak passengers, but also Downtown residents, tourists, office workers, cyclists, and Rail Trail users?

The construction of the Rail Trail, which now passes next to the waiting area, should be leveraged here. The elegant waiting room should definitely be adapted, but it also sits next to a patio that is not used as it should be, and this patio fronts the rail trail and could help bring a potential Harvey-style brewpub out into wider view. The waiting area patio also sits at the corner of Central Avenue and First Street in addition to the new Rail Trail segment. It occupies one of the most visible corners in Downtown Albuquerque. Yet today, the space feels underutilized and disconnected from the energy that should surround a major transportation center.

Imagine tables beneath umbrellas, shade canvas providing relief from the afternoon sun, coffee service in the morning, lunch service throughout the day, drinks and conversation in the evening. The image above shows us that the old Alvarado already did the hard work for us so we don’t even have to be creative, we can just copy from the past! Imagine all this activity spilling outdoors. Imagine the waiting room opening onto the sidewalk instead of turning its back to it. Visitors arriving by train could immediately encounter a vibrant public space rather than a locked door and an empty patio.

Good urban spaces rarely stop at the walls of a building. They blur the line between indoors and outdoors, between transportation and destination and between movement and arrival. The doors and arched windows between the patio, Rail Trail, and the room itself help make this possible, leaning into both the history of the Alvarado as a space as well as good urbanist forms.

The patio could do for the Alvarado Transportation Center what the outdoor plazas and gathering spaces have done for Denver Union Station: transform infrastructure into a place. Perhaps most importantly, it would help activate one of the most visible corners in Downtown Albuquerque.

Of course, some readers will immediately raise another concern. Anyone who has spent time around the Alvarado Transportation Center knows the area faces real challenges. The station serves as one of Albuquerque’s primary transit hubs, and many people experiencing homelessness, untreated mental illness, or substance use disorders spend time nearby. While photographing the station for this article, one man became visibly upset that I was taking pictures and asked what I was doing. Ignoring these realities would not be honest, but it would be similarly dishonest to pretend that locking doors has solved them.

The Alvarado is already one of the most monitored public spaces in the city. It houses an Albuquerque Police Department substation, transit security personnel are regularly present, and the facility is covered by cameras. Those measures all have a role to play, but security alone cannot create a great public place. A space cannot be surveilled into feeling welcoming.

Cities succeed when they create more ordinary reasons for more people to use public space. Urbanists often describe this as creating activity diversity. The more different kinds of people who have ordinary reasons to occupy a place throughout the day, from the commuters grabbing coffee, to cyclists taking a break, office workers eating lunch, tourists arriving by train, families meeting friends, residents enjoying happy hour, the more naturally a public space begins to regulate itself.

This isn’t about displacing vulnerable people or pretending homelessness doesn’t exist. It’s about recognizing that public spaces function best when they serve many different users at once. Hospitality itself becomes a form of stewardship. Every additional person meeting a friend, reading a book over coffee, or stopping after work adds another set of eyes to the station and another reason for the space to feel like it belongs to everyone.

Denver, again, offers a useful example. Union Station has faced many of the same challenges surrounding homelessness, addiction, and public safety that Albuquerque continues to wrestle with. Yet the city did not respond by emptying the station or abandoning its restaurants, cafés, hotel, or public gathering spaces, locking them behind heavy doors. Instead, Denver has worked, sometimes imperfectly, to balance safety measures with continued investment in the activities that make Union Station a destination in the first place. The lesson I draw from this is not that activated public spaces eliminate complex social problems but that that cities are better positioned to address those problems when their civic spaces remain full of ordinary life rather than standing empty behind locked doors. Albuquerque continues to avoid investing in itself with the fear that unhoused people would also use provided amenities. The upstream solution (building homes and providing more robust healthcare) is important here, but creating spaces that are used by everyone is something we can learn from Denver on this.

In recent years, the western section of the Downtown Core has begun to show signs of renewed energy. The Arrive Hotel, Ex Novo’s renovation efforts, and ongoing investment have helped create new activity 7 blocks west of the railroad tracks. Meanwhile, parts of Downtown along the tracks themselves have struggled. The departure of the movie theater during the pandemic left a major hole in the area. Restaurants have come and gone and seem increasingly hard to keep going. Some blocks still feel disconnected from the broader momentum emerging elsewhere in the core, and one of the last vacant lots where the old greyhound terminal used to be, still is waiting to be developed into hundreds of units of needed housing, after years in limbo.

A reactivated waiting room would not solve every challenge facing Downtown, but cities are not revitalized through megaprojects alone, but often through smaller decisions that are impactful when taken together. Small interest points such as a restaurant here, a café there, inviting patios with shade and seating, compound overtime to create spaces worth lingering in. This type of revitalization through small decisions can help create reasons for people to spend time in public. Activating the space with a Harvey-themed restaurant and brewpub would be a meaningful way to make the Alvarado a destination in and of itself.

Urbanists often talk about “eyes on the street.” Active public spaces feel safer because they are filled with ordinary life. People sitting, talking, eating, reading, working, and waiting create a sense of stewardship and belonging that no amount of security theater can replicate. A lively waiting room reimagined as a hospitality space would create eyes on the station while It would also give people a reason to visit and stay. It would make the transportation center feel less like an isolated piece of infrastructure and more like an extension of Downtown itself. In Denver, Union Station is sometimes called “the city’s living room.” Why not make the Alvarado ours?

Most importantly, it would help fulfill the promise that inspired the creation of the Alvarado Transportation Center in the first place. Albuquerque probably cannot rebuild the original Alvarado Hotel, urban renewal saw to that half a century ago, but we can still learn from what made it special.

The original Alvarado succeeded because it welcomed people. It was more than a transportation facility, It was a true gathering place and even a front door to the city for visitors and burqueños alike. The Alvarado Transportation Center has successfully restored much of the architectural hole that was formed when the hotel complex was destroyed. Now, what remains is restoring a lot of the life that followed the old complex.

As the Rail Trail begins to take shape, as Albuquerque celebrates the transportation history that helped build our city, and as Downtown continues its painfully slow but encouraging revival, perhaps it is time to ask a simple question:

Why does one of Albuquerque’s most important public spaces still sit behind a locked door?

On January 28, 2026, I sat in Albuquerque’s City Council chambers and watched councilors work through a lengthy series of proposed amendments to the city’s Integrated Development Ordinance, Albuquerque’s zoning code.

Most of the evening focused on housing legislation. Proposed changes that would have made it easier to build duplexes, corner stores, small apartment buildings, and other forms of “missing middle” housing were systematically stripped from the package. Supporters argued these reforms would make Albuquerque more affordable, walkable, and resilient over time. Opponents argued they would change “neighborhood character,” were “rushed,” or would destroy home values, or conversely, cause waves of gentrification (or even both at the same time!).

By the end of the night, only a handful of meaningful reforms remained. One amendment, however, stood apart from the others.

Councilor Renée Grout proposed prohibiting adult entertainment and adult retail uses from Main Street corridors throughout Albuquerque, including Central Avenue. The amendment was packaged alongside restrictions on cannabis retailers and other uses deemed undesirable. During discussion, Grout stated with a laugh that the amendment would “not affect drag performances,” but that it was intended to help “clean up” Central Avenue.

Members of Albuquerque’s drag and burlesque communities quickly disagreed. They recognized something familiar in the language, things that to us are easily heard dogwhistles. “Clean up.” “Family friendly.” “Protecting children.” For generations, these phrases have often been deployed against LGBTQ communities. Sometimes explicitly, and sometimes indirectly, and even sometimes unintentionally. But the result has been the same: certain people become less welcome in public life. In February, the amendment passed into law, with Grout joined in support by Democrats Peña and Baca, as well as Republicans Bassan, Lewis, and Champine, and passed despite Councilor Fiebelkorn highlighting the 1st Amendment and 5th amendment issues of the legislation, as well as the fact that this proposal wasn’t about health & safety that zoning is supposedly about, but instead about legislating morality.

Reflecting on the debate, I thought about a history that few Albuquerque residents know, or even Americans in general, and thought about how these dogwhistles are being used across the country to target LGBTQ people through the legislative process, walking back decades of progress. In Albuquerque, the zoning code provided a more quiet and discreet way to target the community than more overt techniques, like we’ve seen in state legislatures in other states. Given that this amendment came late at night, without being published much in advance, and having been packaged with so many other amendments and proposals, it certainly felt pre-meditated.

It has also struck me that the amendment not only prohibited certain businesses from locating on Central Avenue but the extraordinary degree to which Albuquerque’s zoning code attempts to define sexuality itself. Most people imagine zoning as a dry collection of rules about parking lots, setbacks, landscaping, and building heights. Yet buried within the Integrated Development Ordinance are pages devoted to defining “adult entertainment,” “adult retail,” “specified anatomical areas,” and “specified sexual activities.” The code painstakingly categorizes exposed breasts, buttocks, erections, masturbation, sodomy, erotic touching, and a host of other forms of sexual expression.

There is something profoundly strange and concerning about this. We have seemingly accepted the idea that a land-use code should concern itself not only with where buildings sit on a lot or how traffic moves through a corridor, but also with categorizing bodies, sexuality, performance, and expression. We need to be asking why.

The conventional answer might be that these regulations exist to protect public health and safety. Yet unlike regulations governing fire codes, structural engineering, sanitation, or environmental hazards, adult-use restrictions often operate in a very different realm. They seek to regulate visibility and they attempt to determine which forms of expression belong in public space and which should be pushed elsewhere.

This should give us pause, particularly because Albuquerque has already learned the limits of using zoning and regulatory authority in this way. In the early 2010s, the city attempted to shut down Pornotopia, an adult film festival at Guild Cinema. The effort ultimately failed in court on First Amendment grounds after Albuquerque’s attempts to restrict the event were successfully challenged. The case served as a reminder that governments do not enjoy unlimited authority to suppress speech or expression simply because some residents find it objectionable.

Albuquerque has experienced this dynamic before. In 2006, Pride Gym, a private gym and sauna serving gay men in the Wells Park neighborhood, also a Main Street Area subjected to this IDO Amendment, became the subject of a heavily publicized and violent police raid. Officers wearing bulletproof vests executed warrants, detained patrons, and temporarily shuttered the business over allegations that alcohol was being served without a license. In the background, New Mexico was passing a long list of well-meaning drunk driving legislation under the leadership of Governor Bill Richardson. These well-meaning alcohol laws were used to justify anti-gay harrassment and this particularly violent police raid. Contemporary news reports described patrons being ordered to the ground, questioned, and photographed. One man’s hip was broken in the communal showers and he was left there by authorities in handcuffs. Community members compared the operation to harassment and to the abuses of Abu Ghraib, arguing that the scale of the enforcement action bore little relationship to the alleged violation.

Whether we believe liquor regulations were technically violated (i do not) misses a larger question. Why did a suspected licensing violation result in the deployment of armed officers, the closure of a community institution, and headlines that reinforced longstanding fears about queer gathering places? The episode illustrates how regulatory authority can be stretched far beyond its original purpose when directed toward marginalized communities. Laws adopted for legitimate public purposes can become tools for surveillance, intimidation, and exclusion when applied selectively or aggressively.

The history of LGBTQ communities is filled with similar examples. Throughout much of the twentieth century, queer bars, bathhouses, clubs, and community centers were frequently subjected to extraordinary scrutiny under health codes, liquor regulations, nuisance ordinances, and zoning laws. During the AIDS crisis, bathhouses became particular targets. Critics often portrayed them as threats to public health, yet many also functioned as places where safer-sex education, mutual aid, community organizing, and public health outreach occurred. As scholars of queer urbanism have noted, these spaces were rarely just commercial establishments. They were institutions through which communities cared for one another during periods of grief, discrimination, and political neglect.

Albuquerque’s recent debate over adult uses on Central Avenue and other main streets feels less like an isolated zoning amendment and more like another chapter in a much longer history. The mechanism changes. Sometimes it is zoning, sometimes it is liquor enforcement, sometimes it is even health regulations, nuisance laws, or policing. The underlying question remains consistent: who is permitted to gather, to be visible, and to create community in public life?

This history is part of a much larger and older question: To what extent is zoning truly being used to address health and safety concerns, and to what extent is it being used to enforce cultural preferences and moral judgments? For generations, LGBTQ spaces have been described as nuisances, blights, threats to children, threats to public morality, threats to property values, threats to public health, or obstacles to revitalization. The specific justification changes with the era. What remains remarkably consistent is that queer spaces are repeatedly asked to justify their existence in ways that other businesses are not. In fact, it may be one of the oldest questions in American zoning. Books such as The Color of Law explore how land-use regulations were often used to maintain segregation long after courts prohibited explicitly racial zoning.

Throughout the twentieth century, zoning was repeatedly used to separate uses considered undesirable from those considered respectable. Sometimes this involved heavy industry, but even that was generally a smokescreen. Zoning was more often about people and where certain people belong. Immigrants, poor residents, renters, people of color, sex workers, and LGBTQ communities were in the crosshairs of zoning fights. Alternative forms of housing, alternative forms of entertainment, and building codes often stood in for these targeted communities. The language was usually neutral and technical. The outcomes were often social and moral. Early zoning codes, as documented in Yoni Appelbaum’s Stuck, sought to restrict laundries and businesses ran predominantly by Chinese Americans, as a way to restrict these groups from public life through the sanitized language of the zoning code.

I found myself wondering whether the issue before City Council was really about land use at all. The amendment did not emerge from concerns about building safety, traffic engineering, drainage, or infrastructure capacity. It emerged from a desire to shape the cultural character of a corridor. That is a very different exercise, and one that deserves far more scrutiny than it often receives. It is also hardly the first time that Central Avenue, or Albuquerque more broadly, has become a battleground over who belongs in public space.

The amendment also creates uncertainty for existing businesses. During the debate, community members pointed to Self Serve, Albuquerque’s longtime sexual health and wellness store, which was for sale at the time. While existing businesses may continue operating under nonconforming-use provisions, questions remained about what would happen if ownership changed, a use lapsed, or an expansion required new approvals. A law presented as targeting hypothetical future businesses suddenly had implications for institutions that had already become part of Albuquerque’s community fabric.

Long before Central Avenue became the subject of redevelopment plans, zoning fights, and revitalization strategies, Route 66 was home to many of Albuquerque’s most important queer spaces. Today, thousands of cars pass through East Central every day without realizing that some of Albuquerque’s most important LGBTQ institutions once stood along this corridor.

The Albuquerque Mining Company, known simply as “The Mine” to generations of patrons, operated for decades along Central Avenue, previously as 999 “The Nines.” Other venues were also present: the Albuquerque Social Club and Sidewinders remain but places like Foxes, and countless other spaces that survive mostly through photographs, fading memories, and stories passed between friends, were also present. Some were also found in different parts of the city, such as Lesbian bar Crickets in the South Valley, but many were along our main corridor.

Like many cities in the United States, in the twentieth century, LGBTQ communities often found homes in places that mainstream society overlooked. Older commercial corridors that were aging (much like Central), mixed-use neighborhoods, boarding houses, downtowns that had fallen on hard times were places queer people began to build homes in. These were also places where rents were lower, buildings were older, and people could create communities largely outside the scrutiny of institutions that frequently rejected them.

Central Avenue possessed many of those qualities. For queer Burqueños, these businesses were not merely businesses. These were places where people found roommates, jobs, relationships, support networks, and chosen family. They were places where people could meet others like themselves in a world that often told them they were alone.

Urbanists frequently speak of “third places” like coffee shops, bookstores, parks, and gathering places that help knit communities together. For many LGBTQ people, queer bars and community spaces performed exactly that function. Sometimes, I’ve seen that they were described as “infrastructure for belonging.” Recently, I’ve been reading Queer Urbanism, a collection of essays examining the relationship between LGBTQ communities and cities, particularly in the relationship of the community with San Francisco and the Bay Area. One theme appears repeatedly: urban form matters and the allowance of all types of structures, home forms, business types, and typologies is important in allowing diversity of community to flourish. Many of the spaces that sustained queer communities were precisely the kinds of places modern zoning often discourages or prohibits altogether.

In San Francisco, single-room occupancy hotels and boarding houses provided refuge for young gay and transgender people who had been kicked out of their homes or left hostile communities in search of safety. Many were operated by immigrants and people of color who understood that survival often depended upon mutual support. These buildings offered affordable housing, community, and a chance to start over. People looked out for each other, as they often resorted to dangerous jobs such as in sex work, and made space for each other as they sought safety, fleeing homophobic and transphobic homes elsewhere.

Over time, many of those neighborhoods were transformed by urban renewal, freeway construction, and land-use regulations that treated older urban forms as problems rather than community assets. Highways sliced through neighborhoods, buildings were demolished, and residents were displaced, often given less money than their properties were worth. In San Francisco, like may places, neighborhoods that were primarily associated with minority groups, including Queer people, were often targeted. Many of the SROs of the Tenderloin, for example, were leveled for freeway construction.

The language used to justify these projects was rarely overtly hostile. Instead, it was couched in the neutral language of planning.These included words that are quite broad such as blight, redevelopment, modernization, and public improvement. Zoning presented itself as a technical exercise but it determines who gets to be visible in a city, where people can gather, what businesses can operate, and which forms of community are allowed to exist.

Behind every land-use regulation lies a vision of who the city is for. Albuquerque’s history is different from San Francisco’s, but not entirely. This city has its own history of urban renewal, displacement, and exclusion. Portions of neighborhoods were demolished to make way for highways such as South Broadway, Downtown was hollowed out in pursuit of modernization, and our own boarding houses disappeared and older commercial districts were reshaped around automobiles, even leveling blocks of buildings to make way for parking.

Along the way, many of the informal spaces that supported marginalized communities also vanished. Yet Central Avenue endured! Route 66 remained one of Albuquerque’s most eclectic corridors, a place where artists, immigrants, students, musicians, service workers, entrepreneurs, and LGBTQ residents could continue to carve out space for themselves.

That history deserves to be remembered, particularly in discussions about how to bring the street back into focus for the city, and particularly when the Queer community was making a home on the avenue as other communities abandoned it.

As Albuquerque celebrates Pride Month and the Route 66 Centennial, we often tell stories about neon signs, classic cars, diners, and motels. But there is another Route 66 history, too. A history of chosen families that moved into the avenue when others were abandoning it. A history of people creating community when institutions failed them. A history of bars, bookstores, bathhouses, clubs, and gathering places that allowed people to be themselves. It’s a history hidden in plain sight along Albuquerque’s main street.

If Albuquerque is serious about revitalizing Central Avenue, we should be asking how to welcome the people and institutions that helped keep the corridor alive when others wrote it off. That includes artists, immigrants, musicians, small businesses, and LGBTQ communities. A city that values its history should not use zoning to erase the very communities that helped create it.

Before we decide which uses belong on Central Avenue and which do not, it may be worth remembering who found refuge there in the first place.

When Charles Marohn writes about transit, it’s usually worth paying attention. His recent piece on Albuquerque Rapid Transit (ART) is no exception. Unfortunately, it gets something important backwards. Not in a small, technical way, but in a way that flips the story entirely. Part of what makes this harder to read is that it isn’t abstract. As the communications chair for Strong Towns ABQ, I’ve already had to engage with how this piece is being received locally, where it’s made a noticeable splash and is shaping how people understand both the ART and Strong Towns. That’s part of why the framing matters here, because the version of the system being discussed is already starting to take on a life of its own, even though it doesn’t quite reflect how ART was actually designed or operates today.

Chuck’s claim is straightforward: ART only became successful after Albuquerque “broke out” of a federally constrained, overly branded, closed BRT system and moved toward an open, integrated model. That would be a compelling critique!

It just isn’t what happened. The problem isn’t that ART improved after breaking free of a flawed design, it’s that the flawed design being critiqued was never the one implemented in Albuquerque.

What’s being described is a system that was planned as a closed BRT corridor, one that prioritized branding over function and forced riders into transfers at either end of the closed BRT corridor, and that only later became useful once the city allowed it to behave more like a bus network again. There’s also an assumption embedded in that timeline, that the improvements associated with ABQ Ride Forward are what made ART successful in the first place.

But that sequence doesn’t really hold up here. ART was planned as an open system from the beginning, the service patterns reflect that, and the network changes Chuck credits with improving it haven’t been implemented yet. It’s worth taking a closer look at how those assumptions took shape, and why they don’t quite match what was actually built. It’s also worth exploring where Chuck’s critique could work, and how, on the other hand, the ART represents a very Strong Towns style implementation of transit.

The System He Describes Never Existed

The core premise of the argument is that ART was originally designed as a closed system that forced transfers, and only later evolved into something more flexible.

But ART was planned as an open BRT system from the beginning. From day one, ART vehicles have continued beyond the guideway, running east along Central, north on Louisiana, and into the broader network. One-seat rides were not a post-hoc fix. They were part of the operating plan before the system opened. One of my first public input comments was that I wished to have this type of service, stating that I supported the creation of BRT along Central, but would still love to have the service continue to Uptown, as several others stated as well. This ended up in the plan, and, in the implemented service from the first day of operation.

The idea that riders were “forced” to transfer at the ends of the corridor is simply not reflected in the service design, the grant materials, or actual operations on the ground. What Marohn is describing is a common failure mode of BRT systems, but It just doesn’t describe Albuquerque.

This Was a 20-Year Process, Not a Federal Experiment

To understand ART, you have to go back. Central Avenue has always been the spine of Albuquerque’s transit network. Long before the ART, the city recognized that if transit was going to work anywhere, it had to work here. In 2004, Albuquerque launched Rapid Ride, what then-Mayor Martin Chávez famously called a “poor man’s light rail.”

It was a modest system that included red and gold branded buses, with “stations” spaced further apart, about a mile each, and with faster service than the local Route 66. It still, however, ran in mixed traffic on a corridor that was, functionally, a stroad(Or as Ray Delahanty says, “the Mother Stroad”). In hindsight, Rapid Ride reads a lot like a “quick-build” approach to transit, an incremental step that tested the corridor, built ridership, and made the case for doing more, without requiring the city to get everything right all at once.

And it worked!

For a generation of Albuquerque riders, including a lot of us who grew up in New Mexico, Rapid Ride was the first time transit felt usable, even legible. It proved the demand, it built our ridership, and it made the case for good transit in Albuquerque. For me, it remains a nostalgic aspect of life in this city. From High School hang outs with friends, to undergrad commutes to campus. It was a proof of concept for higher quality transit in Albuquerque, and was intentionally created to test the validity of studies stating that Central Avenue was well-primed for rapid transit. Rapid Ride would succeed as a proof of concept, showing that Central Avenue was ready to support rapid transit.

However, Rapid Ride also revealed the limits of the corridor.

Buses bunched, travel times were inconsistent, and most importantly, the corridor itself, Central Avenue, was doing too much while being designed for too little. It was a main street trying to function like a highway. For both Chuck and I, the fact that America’s Main Streets are treated as highways is offensive and counter to the human experience of community, safety, and place that we all crave.

Something had to give.

ART wasn’t a leap into “innovation theater.” It was the next step in a process the city had been working through for nearly two decades.

The Bottleneck Was Real. ART Fixed It.

Before ART, the biggest constraint on Albuquerque’s transit network wasn’t a lack of branding. It was congestion, especially through the central corridor and across the Rio Grande. Rapid Ride buses got stuck, they bunched, and they couldn’t reliably extend service westward. Commuting to campus, I often remember seeing people descend from the Rail Runner platform to the Rapid Ride station, whispering under my breath “go, go go!” hoping we would depart before the first traveller arrived. When they did arrive, the lack of all-door boarding meant that sometimes, i timed waits at the train station of up to ten minutes. The spine of our system wasn’t holding.

The system’s spine was also its choke point. The dedicated busways fixed that.

It created consistent travel times through the city’s most important corridor. It allowed service to extend further west and It improved reliability not just for ART riders, but for the network as a whole. For me, those ten minutes are no longer spent sitting outside the train station. In fact, from my home in Downtown to the University, ten minutes is a fair expectation for "getting up the hill.”

It goes beyond this, too, because transit systems don’t succeed corridor by corridor. They succeed as networks. For many years, talk of expanding service elsewhere in the city was hampered by the congestion often experienced on Central and in its buses. At public input, planners mentioned this was a key reason a dedicated busway was needed. Central was simply too important and as the trunk line of the entire network, any issue on Central reverberates across the city, and in turn, Central was a choke point for improvements that we are now planning and implementing.

ART didn’t fragment Albuquerque’s system. I argue that It unlocked it.

Transit for a Strong Town

This is where the critique becomes especially strange.

In Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, Marohn lays out what good transit should look like.

• Frequent service.

• Connecting the places people actually go.

• Competitive with driving.

• Not constrained by congestion.

• Integrated with land use and walkability.

It’s a clear framework and ART checks every one of those boxes.

It connects Albuquerque’s primary employment centers: Downtown, UNM, Uptown, and the hospital systems. It links some of the city’s densest neighborhoods with both higher-income areas like Nob Hill and lower-resourced areas like the International District.

It runs frequently, along the city’s strongest corridor, where transit demand already existed.

Crucially, it is not stuck in traffic. This last point is not cosmetic, It’s everything.

You cannot build a reliable transit system on a corridor where buses are treated like every other vehicle. We cannot scale service if our highest-demand route is also our least predictable. ART made transit competitive along Central in a way Albuquerque had never achieved before.

That is not a failure of Strong Towns principles.

It is a case study in them.

And it’s not just theoretical alignment, it shows up in the outcomes. Studies of the Central corridor have found that ART has generated significantly more value than comparable areas in the metro, in some cases multiple times over, reinforcing the tax base along what is, and has long been, the city’s main street. That’s not incidental. It’s exactly what you would expect when you invest in a corridor that already carries demand and make it more reliable, more walkable, and more productive. When Urban3, a firm closely aligned with Strong Towns thinking, has evaluated Albuquerque, their work has pointed in the same direction, and during visits to the city, their team, including Heather Worthington in her recent lecture in Albuquerque, has highlighted ART as a strong example of how corridor investment can translate into long-term fiscal resilience.

It makes the framing here feel even more misaligned. This wasn’t a city chasing the appearance of innovation. It was a city following through on what works and now seeing the results.

Fixing a Stroad, Not Just Running a Bus

There’s another piece of this that often gets overlooked, and it is surprising this isn’t included in Chuck’s critique. ART wasn’t just a transit project: It was a street project. Central Avenue, before ART, was one of the most dangerous corridors in the country. High speeds, inconsistent crossings, poor lighting, long distances between safe pedestrian access points. A classic stroad. In Confessions, Chuck nicely describes the hostility of Springfield, MA’s transit corridors, its stroad-choked train station, and lack of thought for pedestrians. He envisioned how good transit and real streets could change this dynamic. In Albuquerque, that is what we have been doing.

Where the busway was installed, ART changed the dynamic that Chuck describes in Confessions.

Stations created regular crossing points, the street was redesigned to calm traffic, areas with 4 lanes of general traffic were reduced to 2 lanes, lighting improved, pedestrian space was expanded and became more legible and more humane. The “mother stroad” was again becoming a real main street.

The result?

Fatal and serious injury crashes along the ART corridor dropped dramatically—by roughly 65%, according to Nick Ferenchak of the UNM Center for Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety.

That’s not incidental! That’s what happens when you stop treating a street like a highway and start treating it like a place.

Strong Towns talks often about stroad repair, about narrowing the focus of a corridor, making it either a productive street or a high-speed road, but not both.

ART started that work, and it saved lives, and for those of us involved in the input process, and the planning process, and the execution, this was one of the goals from the outset.

The “Improvement” He Cites Hasn’t Happened Yet

Marohn credits Albuquerque’s network redesign, ABQ Ride Forward, with improving ART by making it more integrated and increasing one-seat rides.

But those improvements haven’t been implemented yet.

ART’s current success is based on the system as it was originally designed and launched. Frequency restoration from the Pandemic is still years out, major expansions of one-seat service to the westside are still planned, not delivered. So if ART is performing well today—and by ridership, safety, and corridor outcomes, it is—that success belongs to the original system. Not to changes that haven’t happened.

To Chuck’s credit, Jarrett Walker, who planned the ABQ Ride Forward Recovery Network, is also dumfounded by the incredibly slow timeline of implementation. I have no doubt that when these changes are implemented, the utility of ART will only grow, and I share Chuck’s passion and interest in that. But neither the original FTA grant nor the design precluded these service changes. ART’s current success was laid out in our planning, in the FTA grant, and in all the work we did to build it.

On Branding, and What It’s Actually Doing

One of the places where the critique lingers the longest is on branding, and to be fair, this is where there’s something real to engage with. If a federal grant is effectively rewarding a city for producing a nicer-looking bus — if “innovation” is reduced to distinct paint, stylized stations, and a logo that photographs well — then yes, that’s a problem. It’s not hard to find examples where branding has been used to signal improvement without actually delivering it, and in those cases the critique lands cleanly.

A good example might be in the Toronto suburbs, where the York Region Viva BRT is often cited as a system with strong branding, well-designed stations, and even segments of dedicated infrastructure, but without the level of service to fully match. What makes examples like Viva frustrating isn’t the presence of branding itself, but the mismatch between branding and performance. Distinct visual identity is a widely accepted best practice in high-quality transit systems around the world, part of how frequent, reliable service is made legible to riders. When it works, it clarifies the system; when it doesn’t, it exposes the gap between what a system presents itself as and what it actually delivers. Chuck’s article paints the ART similarly to Viva: as a well-branded system shaped by federal requirements but not delivering on that promise. The issue is that this isn’t how ART was designed, nor how it operates in practice.

I interpret Chuck’s critique here as resembling what Ezra Klein has described as the “everything bagel” problem, where well-meaning requirements accumulate into something that is supposed to do everything at once and, in the process, risks losing sight of what actually matters. If branding is treated as a requirement in and of itself, something to check off rather than something to use, then it can become exactly that kind of add-on.

But that’s not what happened in Albuquerque.

To understand why branding looks the way it does here, you also have to go back to a moment when the system had very little identity at all. Before ABQ Ride, before Rapid Ride, transit in Albuquerque was still widely associated with SunTran, which had come to represent a system that people didn’t trust. Reliability was inconsistent, the experience felt fragmented, and moments like the bus fires lingered in the public imagination in a way that made transit feel not just inconvenient, but fundamentally broken and dangerous.

What the city faced at that point wasn’t just a service problem, It was a legitimacy problem.

The shift to ABQ Ride, and the reconstruction of the Alvarado Transportation Center in the image of the Harvey House that had once stood there, having been destroyed in the urban renewal wave, were part of a broader effort to rebuild both the system and the story around it—an effort that wasn’t limited to a single corridor, but aimed at making transit feel coherent, recognizable, and rooted in Albuquerque’s own history. It was also rooted in a very Strong Towns style effort of leaning into our community and shared civic history.

Rapid Ride was part of that shift, not just as a service improvement, but as a system that people could identify and understand. It carried its own visual language, its own presence along Central, and it helped establish the idea that transit in Albuquerque could be something you recognized, rather than something you had to decipher.

ART builds directly on that lineage.

I wanted to also point out that ART wasn’t just branded as a standalone “premium” service, though it is, it became the foundation for a broader effort to unify the system itself. The visual language, wayfinding, and identity developed through ART have been extended across ABQ Ride, helping to tie routes together into something that feels coherent rather than fragmented. In that sense, ART isn’t just a product within the system; it’s part of how the system is being reintroduced to the city, making it easier to understand, easier to navigate, and easier to trust.

When we talk about how the culture of the city’s main street is often communicated, it is hard to ignore the influence of Route 66, and it plays a large part in why the ART signage feels the way it does. The visual language draws from the neon and iconography that have long defined Central Avenue, which gives it a kind of familiarity that generic transit branding rarely achieves. It doesn’t feel like something imported; it feels like something that belongs.

And importantly, this wasn’t just a top-down imposition. There was a genuine bottom-up element to how this came together from our planners, designers, business owners, and the community using the moment of investment not just to meet federal criteria, but to make the system more legible and more connected to the city itself. Even some of the project’s opponents engaged with that idea, as in the “Make ART Smart” campaign, which argued not against branding but for a different way of pairing it with curb-side service. That’s a different dynamic than the one being described because the issue isn’t whether branding exists. To me, It’s whether it substitutes for performance or helps communicate it. It also highlights that even in something as contentious as a rapid transit project that included design, placemaking, stroad repair, and upzoning, that the community came together on this — everyone in the room wanted improvements in the streetscape that ART brought about.

In Albuquerque, it does the latter. It signals where the frequent service is, where the system is most reliable, where the investment has been concentrated. It reduces the cognitive load of navigating transit in a city where that hasn’t always been easy, and it ties individual routes into something that feels like a system rather than a collection of disconnected parts.

The Federal Transit Administration doesn’t actually prescribe how branding should function any more than it prescribes exactly where a dedicated guideway should go. There’s flexibility there, and Albuquerque used that flexibility in a way that aligned with best practices rather than simply checking a box. So yes, there is a version of this critique that holds. If branding is treated as a requirement rather than a tool, it can become part of the problem.

But ART isn’t a case where branding replaced performance. This is a case where a city that had already begun rebuilding trust in its transit system used branding alongside real, physical, and operational improvements, folding it into a broader effort to make transit visible, understandable, and rooted in place.

I just don’t think this is innovation theater.

It’s a city making use of the moment it was given.

If You Want a Cautionary Tale, Albuquerque Had One

What makes this critique even more frustrating is that Albuquerque already rejected the kind of project Marohn is warning about. In the mid-2000s, among the success of the Rapid Ride, the city pursued a streetcar plan along Central. It would have run in mixed traffic, stopped every few blocks, and required transfers at either end (sounds familiar). In addition, it would have lacked a dedicated lane through the corridor.

In other words, it would have looked impressive—and functioned worse than the buses it replaced. What Chuck imagined was happening with the ART was planned for the street car.

That project failed by one vote at the Albuquerque City Council. A young urbanist at the time, I remember the contentious discussions about the street car. On one hand was the rhetoric that Chuck is right to critique: this would be an infusion of federal dollars that ABQ could use to attract tourists, development, and appear modern. On the other were urbanists, who may have liked some aspects of the proposal, but who worried about a street car that could get stuck in traffic, with far too many stops, and which would lead to an inferior form of service for riders. And in hindsight, local planners have been blunt: that failure was a blessing. Andrew de Garmo, speaking on the podcast Stop Requested discussed this, stating that ART is more robust, more flexible, and far more useful as a transit spine.

If we’re looking for “innovation theater,” that’s the project to study.

Not ART.

Where Marohn Is Right—and Where It Matters

There is a real critique here. Federal funding does tend to reward visible transformation and It can push cities toward capital-heavy projects. It doesn’t always evaluate whether infrastructure is placed in the right location. Those are valid concerns!

Albuquerque didn’t fall into that trap. It used federal funding to solve a real problem, on the corridor where it mattered most, in a way that preserved flexibility and improved performance, made more productive, safe streets, and reinforced the city’s longterm fiscal resilience. If anything, ART shows that local decision-making still matters more than federal checklists and that an engaged planning philosophy with clear goals and outcomes are important. It also underlines the importance of political capital and knowledge within these processes.

Where the FTA does require a certain percentage of fixed guideway for a dedicated BRT (there is a Small Starts category for other, less intensive forms of express transit), it doesn’t prescribe where they should necessarily be situated. A critique is that many cities were placing bus lanes in far-flung areas, where it was politically easier to take a lane for buses, but then merging them into traffic where dedicated transit space is most important. Albuquerque’s ART project placed them where it was most important, particularly and controversially, over the Rio Grande and through dense neighborhoods. Dedicating lanes over one of Albuquerque’s few bridge crossings to transit can’t be understated: it was controversial. With several bridges and a large, far-flung population on the western side of the river, our bridges are frequently congested. The street car likely would not have even crossed the river at all. Where Albuquerque almost fell into a trap chasing federal dollars for a flawed street car concept, we avoided those pitfalls with ART.

This Was Incrementalism, Not Theater

There’s a tendency to treat projects like ART as big, top-down transformations. But that’s not how it happened, at least not in our city.

• Study the corridor.

• Test the concept with Rapid Ride, a relatively quick-build solution

• Watch it succeed—and strain.

• Then invest where the system breaks.

That’s the Strong Towns playbook.

And that’s what Albuquerque followed.

The Risk of Getting the Story Wrong

Chuck is right about one thing: we should be skeptical of systems that prioritize appearances over performance, but that skepticism cuts both ways.

If we misdiagnose a system that is working—one that improves access, supports development, reduces crashes, and anchors a network—we risk learning the wrong lesson.

ART isn’t perfect. There’s more to do. Frequency needs to improve, the network needs to grow, and we need to implement the ABQ Ride Forward Project.

But it’s not a cautionary tale about federal overreach.

It’s a case study in what happens when a city gets a lot of things right—and sticks with it long enough to see it through.

That’s what ART represents here.

Not a departure from Strong Towns principles, but an example of what it looks like to apply them in a context where the path is neither purely incremental nor entirely top-down, but something in between.

And if anything, that feels like the more interesting lesson.

Not whether federal funding can produce “innovation theater”, it clearly can, but what it looks like when a city manages to avoid that outcome, even within those constraints.

Because that’s where there’s something to learn.

Learn more about ART!
From me: “Successful Transit in Albuquerque? It’s Real”

From City Nerd, Ray Delahanty (Youtube): “They Transformed a Nasty Stroad With BRT”

Podcast on Spotify Stop Requested: “Redesigning ABQ Ride’s Network from the Ground Up with Andrew De Garmo”

About the author: Jordon McConnell, a nonprofit healthcare and education professional with a background in humanities and French, channels his passion for French urban planning to reimagine Albuquerque’s urban form. His unique perspective emphasizes equitable and holistic community development, aiming to enhance the city’s quality of life for all.

In 2011, the City of Albuquerque began studying the idea of implementing a bus rapid transit (BRT) system along Central Avenue. Bus rapid transit is a form of mass transit that can vary in look and implementation, but generally requires level-boarding platforms for buses, off-board fare payment, dedicated transitways, and signal preemption at intersections (giving buses priority for green lights). By 2016, this idea was put into action, becoming the Albuquerque Rapid Transit (ART) project. The City sought to replace the aging Rapid Ride system with a better experience, improving passenger comfort, safety, speed, and reliability on the system while also encouraging new, denser development along one of the city’s main thoroughfares.

The project proved to be controversial and lawsuits attempted to block ART, but construction began in earnest in 2016. At the end of construction, the city had a pair of rapid transit lines running 12 and 14 miles respectively, including 11 miles of shared, dedicated transitway. The system featured enough of the attributes of a true BRT that it was awarded the first Gold-Level service standard in the United States by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. Controversy continued after its initial opening, as buses provided by BYD Industries proved unable to service the ART routes, causing the system to be delayed. By 2019, the City procured new replacement buses and put the system into regular operation after a two-year delay. In its first few months of service, before the COVID-19 pandemic, the ART succeeded in surpassing the old Rapid Ride’s ridership by over 30%.

Despite this, in 2018, Mayor Keller infamously stated that ART was a “bit of a lemon.” This is a sentiment still felt by many Burqueños, some of whom feel that the project was a waste of money, poorly executed, or unnecessary. Is ART, in fact, a waste? Or is it an essential and successful piece of transit infrastructure and a catalytic part of the city’s urban history?

In a solid rebuke to the project’s detractors, including the Mayor, ART is actually exceeding ridership expectations despite the after-effects of the pandemic and shows a path forward toward a more urban, more equitable, and lower-emission Albuquerque. While concerns about the project’s initial design and implementation are valid, it is important to acknowledge the game-changing nature of ART and the long-term benefits it can bring to Burqueños.

Why Was ART Built When the Rapid Ride Was Already There?

A common view held by detractors is that the ART project was redundant or unnecessary as the previous express bus system on Central Avenue, the Rapid Ride service, was adequate. Let’s address this first. Though the system had “Rapid” in the name, it was a misnomer, as the Rapid Ride failed to accomplish the goals of a true rapid transit system. ART, however, was designed to complement the urban fabric of the corridor while enhancing and providing a more advanced, faster, and more efficient transit option along the corridor.

As Albuquerque continues to evolve into a medium-sized metropolis approaching a million people, investing in rapid transit is not just a matter of convenience but a strategic necessity. Rapid transit projects like ART play a pivotal role in addressing the escalating challenges posed by traffic congestion, air quality, and the demand for more sustainable transportation options. By embracing efficient and environmentally friendly transit solutions, Burqueños can ensure that our transportation infrastructure aligns with our city’s growth trajectory – fostering economic development, reducing urban sprawl, and enhancing the overall quality of life for residents. In this context, ART can do what Rapid Ride simply could not.

Here’s the context:

The Rapid Ride had lower frequencies than what we enjoy with ART. The best frequencies enjoyed on Rapid Ride (every 15 minutes for each line, or about every 8 minutes where they shared their route), are the minimum frequencies for ART on weekdays. For those of us who routinely used the Rapid Ride to commute, these frequencies were rarely actually the case, with buses often delayed.

A large part of ART’s success is due to its dedicated busway, which Rapid Ride lacked. The frequency of Rapid Ride was often worsened by interactions with traffic congestion. This led to “bus bunching,” where a bus falls behind schedule while the next bus catches up to the delayed bus, leading to a situation where both buses arrive at the same stop close together or at the same time. It was not uncommon for bus bunching to cause up to 40-minute delays on Rapid Ride buses! In addition to traffic congestion, this phenomenon could be caused by passenger boarding and disembarking. At busy stops such as Alvarado Station (especially after a Rail Runner train arrived) or UNM at Central and Cornell, buses were often held up for as long as ten minutes while large numbers of passengers boarded the bus and paid their fare.

As a BRT system, ART was designed to offer even greater efficiency and quality of service compared to traditional bus systems (including the Rapid Ride), by incorporating dedicated bus lanes, modern stations, signal priority, and other features. In allowing vehicles to bypass traffic congestion as well as allowing passengers to board the bus at all doors, ART was designed to stay on schedule and deliver a better experience for passengers. In addition, the level-boarding enabled by the station platforms also allows for faster boarding for folks who use mobility aids, such as wheelchairs, as well as families with strollers, bicycles, and other wheeled devices.

Another complaint is that the system was implemented along Central Avenue, rather than Lomas Boulevard. In short, the decision came down to a few major factors:

• Central is the backbone of the city’s transit network and often had full buses that prohibited expansion on other routes, such as San Mateo.

• At the time, Central hosted the busiest bus routes in the city, so there was a need to improve travel times and service quality along this corridor. BRT along Central would impact and improve service for the highest number of riders as well as increase capacity to allow for future expansion to other corridors.

• Central Avenue is a mixed-use corridor running through the city’s densest neighborhoods, a prime corridor for rapid transit, linking homes to job centers.

• Rapid transit along Central Avenue provides the biggest potential for increasing housing, commerce, and investment in the city.

• The introduction of the ART system also aimed to encourage economic development and revitalization along the Central Avenue corridor, similar to how BRT systems have been used in other cities, such as along the Cleveland Health Line, to stimulate local economies.

• For example, shifting rapid transit to the center lanes helps calm auto traffic while allowing transit to remain fast and efficient, and in doing so, induces people to spend more time (and dollars) at shops and restaurants in Nob Hill and EDo, resulting from a safer, quieter environment.

• Placing ART on Central Avenue aligned with broader City planning goals, such as promoting sustainable transportation, reducing traffic congestion, and enhancing the quality of public transit.

• Travel demand patterns and congestion levels were factors in selecting Central Avenue as the route for ART. Placing the system where there is higher demand and traffic congestion, simply offered more benefits.

Decisions like where to make rapid transit investments are complex and involve numerous considerations. Ultimately, the choice of Central Avenue over Lomas Boulevard for the ART system resulted from a combination of factors that aimed to maximize the benefits for the city, its residents, and its transportation infrastructure.

How ART has Succeeded

Beyond its functional transportation utility, ART has also succeeded in reimagining Albuquerque’s urban landscape. Its design philosophy, focused on safer streets, efficient movement, and pedestrian-oriented streetscaping, has revitalized the aesthetics of the station areas and made Central Avenue a safer and more enjoyable corridor. The incorporation of dedicated bus lanes, sheltered station platforms, and pedestrian-friendly features enhances the overall ambiance, transforming Central Avenue into a more vibrant space that encourages people to walk and explore. Here are just a few of the ways ART has been a success.

Connecting Albuquerque’s Urban Hubs:

Albuquerque’s cultural richness extends far beyond Downtown, flourishing along the Central Avenue corridor, crafting a vibrant and diverse cultural landscape. While Downtown remains a vital urban destination within this corridor, cultural facilities and captivating locales are scattered across the city’s expanse. The true triumph of ART lies in its remarkable ability to unite Albuquerque’s varied urban centers. As it strings together neighborhoods and cultural hubs, it sparks interactions among diverse populations, forging connections that transcend socioeconomic boundaries. This success serves as a powerful symbol of unity and shared experiences.

What sets ART apart from many other rapid transit projects in the United States is its unique role in bridging both the wealthiest and most economically challenged areas in the region. This connectivity significantly impacts residents’ access to job opportunities throughout the city. At a public meeting about the project in 2014, Tim Trujillo spoke with a resident who lived on the West Side and worked near Sandia Labs who stated that ART and the changes it brought would allow her to cut her commute time in nearly half and spend more time with her family.

With future improvements to the corridor, particularly along the eastern stretches of Central Avenue, Albuquerque is leading by example in promoting urban equity in our country. A transportation system like ART, which serves a wide cross-section of socioeconomic populations, provides a valuable tool for individuals to access enhanced education and employment opportunities, offering transformative pathways toward economic empowerment for all.

A Revolution in Transit-Oriented Development:

As mentioned previously, ART’s alignment was carefully planned to intersect with areas that showed potential for growth. This deliberate approach has spurred transit-oriented development, attracting businesses, residences, and entertainment venues that are located in close proximity to ART’s 21 platform stations. The convenient access to rapid transit is already encouraging new development along the corridor. New multi-family residential developments such as the Broadstone Nob Hill bring in dense, market-rate housing that helps relieve pressure on rent prices while providing residents with transit-adjacent lifestyles.

The City has also worked to create more affordable housing along the corridor, such as the new Hiland Plaza Apartments at Central and Jackson, which will primarily house low-income families. Future developments are already planned to break ground throughout the corridor, including a recently awarded grant to transform the Uptown Transit Center into a dense, transit-oriented neighborhood. Zoning reforms that were implemented in 2016 in anticipation of ART helped bring these projects online, and the potential for further zoning reforms along important transit corridors could help push these improvements further. Ultimately, this growth in transit-oriented development will lead to an Albuquerque with stabilized rent prices, diversity in neighborhood and housing choices, and built-in support for local retail and restaurants.

Lifesaving Pedestrian Improvements and Increased Foot Traffic:

Throughout the ART corridor, project design includes improved streetscaping features such as wider sidewalks, landscaping, benches, public art installations, and pedestrian-friendly crossings. These elements make the station areas more visually appealing and inviting for pedestrians. HAWK signals, which are pedestrian-activated signals that stop traffic for crossing, help prioritize the pedestrian experience and facilitate safer crossings on Central. The improvement in safety is now documented in the data, too, and dramatically at that. Nicholas Ferenchak, professor in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering and leading the Center for Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety at UNM, has studied Central Avenue and found ART to have significantly contributed to improved safety on the corridor. In the years since ART has been in service, his research has found a decline of 65% in serious and fatal injuries, mostly due to “lowered vehicle speeds and prohibiting left turns.”

The significance of these statistics extends beyond mere numbers. ART’s impact is particularly profound when viewed through a social justice lens. The neighborhoods served by ART encompass diverse demographics, including many individuals and families who are disproportionately low-income, PoC, refugees, immigrants, and new Americans. In the realm of social justice, concerns have often arisen over rapid transit projects potentially contributing to gentrification, displacement, and inequitable access. However, ART’s remarkable safety enhancements coupled with its commitment to inclusivity challenge these critiques. It stands as a model that demonstrates how public infrastructure projects can be vehicles for positive change, fostering both safety and accessibility while promoting economic equity for all residents, regardless of their background or circumstances.

In areas like East Downtown and Nob Hill, ART has helped create a “Main Street” feel, slowing traffic, and encouraging small business and residential development. ABQ Uptown has attracted retailers with their artificial construction of Main Street-esque facilities. The redesign of Central to accommodate ART allows for neighborhoods along the corridor to compete by leveraging their authenticity as true Main Street neighborhoods. ART provides an alternative to car travel, reducing dependence on private vehicles. As people shift to transit for more of their travel, they are more likely to walk to and from transit stations (and therefore by local businesses) instead of driving, especially for short distances. When combined with the transit-oriented developments mentioned above, we have a Central Avenue primed for human-centered growth and activities.

While ART construction did bring short-term challenges and growing pains, it’s crucial to emphasize the lasting benefits. As seen in cities like Portland, Oregon, during the MAX Light Rail construction in the 1980s, disruptive rapid transit projects initially caused local businesses to close along their routes. However, over time, these projects have been credited with revitalizing neighborhoods and promoting local businesses. Areas like the Pearl District in Portland and the Midtown Exchange in Minneapolis have become thriving urban centers with a strong focus on local businesses. These examples demonstrate that the initial disruption may well be worth it. ART’s long-term vision prioritizes pedestrian-friendly environments, convenient transit, and community vitality. As a result, these neighborhoods are more resilient and authentic, making ART’s enduring impact a compelling success story.

Elevating Sense of Place with Improved Aesthetics:

ART’s design philosophy acknowledges the importance of aesthetics, transforming the streetscape into a more inviting environment. This has created an appealing atmosphere that draws people to explore the area, whether for shopping, dining, or leisure. Decisions to move median plantings and trees to the streetside provide shade and decrease the urban heat-island effect as trees mature. Trees placed along the sides of a street live longer than those placed in the center of the street as in the previous configuration of Central Avenue. With increasingly hot weather resulting from climate change, the provision of shade and cooler urban spaces has become an essential aspect of planning for the future. New lighting was also installed to help complement the visual appeal of the surroundings and the historical nature of the street while simultaneously addressing safety concerns and ensuring that pedestrians can comfortably navigate the area during both day and night.

Finally, ART’s dedicated stations serve as landmarks and neighborhood anchors, with distinctive designs that set them apart from regular bus stops. This helps establish a clear identity for the ART system, making it easily recognizable to passengers, including visitors, and contributing to the system’s overall branding. ART stations offer amenities such as sheltered waiting areas, seating, and real-time arrival information. These features enhance the passenger experience, making the system more attractive to potential riders and encouraging higher ridership.

Through-the-Roof Ridership:

As of June 2023, ART has not only recovered but exceeded its pre-COVID ridership, hitting over a million riders between January and June of this year. This figure placed ART as the 6th busiest BRT in the United States, just behind heavy hitters like Los Angeles Metro’s Orange Line and Boston’s Silver Line. It is actually ahead of Richmond’s Pulse Service, Indianapolis’s Red Line, and even the Cleveland Health Line, which inspired many of the United States’ BRT projects, in ridership (National Transit Database, 2023). With increased ridership continuing, it is poised to continue on this trajectory of success. With recent cuts to ABQ Ride’s regular bus system accounting for a 30% reduction in service for most local routes due to a bus driver shortage, ART’s ability to outperform the rest of the system is a testament to its utility and ability to attract riders. ART’s ridership success is also happening while downtown office vacancies remain high in the aftermath of COVID-19. Having started service only a few months before the pandemic, it is hard to avoid wondering what ridership on ART could be today had it never happened. Despite that, we can now look forward to ART cementing its place within the post-pandemic urban fabric of Albuquerque.

While exceeding pre-COVID ridership levels is a positive sign, continued investment in maintaining and improving the system will be important to ensure its long-term success and continued positive impact on the community. Improving ridership and ART’s success will include future changes to land uses along transit corridors and constructing new ART lines to bring benefits to more of the city while also enabling more people to shift their travel to transit and away from private vehicles.

What Can ART Do for the Future of Albuquerque?

It is important to view ART as a foundational step towards a more comprehensive rapid transportation network. Initial setbacks should be taken as lessons learned, and future improvements and adaptations should be made to optimize the system’s performance and efficiency. In embracing ART, Albuquerque has demonstrated a commitment to sustainability and environmental responsibility. By promoting the use of public transportation, the City is making strides toward reducing carbon emissions and minimizing the environmental impact of individual commuting choices. In prioritizing transit-oriented development along the Central Corridor, ART also works to decrease housing market pressures and create more choices for Albuquerque residents by providing diverse neighborhoods to live in. This is a success that resonates far beyond the confines of city limits, as it sets an example for other communities to follow, particularly other cities in the West that struggle to get projects like ART off the planning table.

The 24-Hour Economy

Soon after being elected, Mayor Keller stated he wanted Albuquerque to invest in its 24-hour economy. One area where Keller and the city council can support the 24-hour economy is in implementing late operating hours for ART. Late-night transit options improve accessibility for individuals who work late-night or early morning shifts, have evening social commitments, or need to travel during non-traditional hours. This inclusivity ensures that the transit system meets the needs of a diverse range of riders. A robust, late-night transit service can encourage people to enjoy nightlife activities, such as dining out, attending events at Popejoy or Downtown, and visiting entertainment venues up and down the corridor. This can boost local businesses and contribute to a vibrant urban environment. Late-night transit can serve as an alternative to ride-sharing services, which are expensive during peak nighttime hours. Like many cities, Albuquerque struggles to bring inebriated driving under control. By providing an alternative to expensive taxis and ride-share services, we can cut down on this dangerous behavior.

As mentioned previously, ART serves as a connection to better employment opportunities for many in our city, and late-night hours would only enhance and expand that access to more people. Serving all three of the major hospital hubs, the University, Downtown, Uptown, and Nob Hill, ART already connects the densest neighborhoods in the city with many of our largest employers. Nurses and custodians working overnight, hotel workers, and restaurant and bar employees would all benefit from later hours on ART. If we care about having a 24-hour economy, ART plays a major part in ensuring we have one.

Improving Dedicated Busways

ART’s dedicated bus lanes are a key component of its success, but there are areas where they can be improved. For example, in sections where ART runs in a shared or dual-directional busway, many passenger vehicles become confused and cross the lane, which can be dangerous. One solution that could be employed on these dual-direction busways is to install short, center-running curbs that are low enough for the buses to straddle, but high enough to direct traffic from side streets from crossing Central Avenue. Examples of this exist on Indianapolis’s Red Line, another BRT project built at the same time as ART. In addition to the bi-directional lanes, ART would benefit from dedicated lanes on Copper and Gold downtown. Though these lanes would replace parking spots, it would help increase speed for ART through the downtown core. A queue jump heading east from 10th Street may also help ART vehicles circumvent congestion that can happen at 8th, Central, and Park, particularly when cruisers are taking to the streets (though recent closures of the roundabout that essentially divide the circle in two have helped alleviate this concern on Sundays).

Future Expansions of ART are Needed

The changes mentioned above are changes that are all readily available to be implemented quickly. But what about further down the line? We have already seen how ART is helping to change land use and increase safety, transport efficiency, and job accessibility. These are not changes that need to be constrained to the present ART Corridor. At present, several important job centers and corridors are absent from ART service, including the Montgomery corridor, much of 4th Street, Cottonwood Mall, and the Journal Center.

Imagine an ART line connecting the Sunport or Downtown with the Journal Center and the Westside. In addition to these areas, a key restraint to more development of multi-family housing at Mesa del Sol is the lack of high-capacity transit. A common complaint about ART is that Central Avenue already had good transit and that the money should have been invested to improve transit elsewhere. Though we have touched on why it was appropriate to develop Central Avenue first, the heart of the critique IS very relevant. Much of Albuquerque DOES need more investment and there are people who would happily leave their car at home if it was more convenient for them to do so. The City’s “ABQ Ride Forward Initiative” is currently looking at ways to rebalance the bus network so that wider parts of the city would have greater access to frequent bus lines. This is definitely a step in the right direction. However, the initiative is simply a rebalancing, moving around current infrastructure without adding anything new. What would investing more in the transit system look like?

ART Can Catalyze the Creation of “Urban Villages”

With an expanded ART network, we could begin reimagining areas of the city so that amenities, housing, retail, and employment opportunities could be accessed over a wider territory. Creating what are called “urban villages,” mixed-use areas with medium to high density that can anchor otherwise suburban areas, is a strategic approach to fostering sustainable urban development and vibrant communities. In Uptown, we are slowly seeing the district infill with new apartment buildings, hotels, and amenities. Winrock Town Center may very well become a new urbanist infill project, in addition to the Uptown Transit Center being rebuilt as mentioned before. As Uptown slowly becomes an urban center in its own right, we should imagine how we can create urban villages in other areas of the city. Imagine how a rebuilt, enhanced ART Blue Line could help transform the area around Cottonwood Mall. Currently, the Cottonwood Mall area is a crossroads of the West Side, connecting various West Side neighborhoods to nearby metro communities like Corrales and Rio Rancho. It is home to one of the largest high schools in the region and near the Southwest Indian Polytechnic Institute. A new ART line could help densify this area, adding options for employment, entertainment, and commerce, and over time, alleviating cross-river commutes.

The images above paint a picture of how Cottonwood and other areas of the city could be reimagined as new “urban villages,” serving as hubs within sectors of the city. With a good rapid transit system connecting them, Albuquerque would be much better suited to meet the challenges and demands of the 21st century.

Improved Regional Connectivity

If you are a New Mexican living far from Albuquerque with a chronic illness such as cancer, HEP-C or HIV, it is likely that you travel into the city regularly for continued treatments. Albuquerque serves as a regional healthcare and services destination hosting some of the only specialized medical, educational, and business centers in the state. It isn’t uncommon for residents in underserved outlying communities to delay care or other activities due to a lack of transport and means. Good public transit inside the city can help create the environment to better support regional transit as well. As Rio Metro slowly improves the Rail Runner to (hopefully) run hourly throughout the day in the next decade, that could bring additional rider demand into the city. But what do you do once you get to, say, Montaño Rail Runner Station?

An expanded ART could better connect the Rail Runner to regional job and services hubs at UNM Health Sciences Center, Journal Center, Cottonwood, and Sandia National Labs, as well as other areas that aren’t necessarily surrounding a station. Suddenly, a lot of those motorists from Santa Fe, Los Lunas, and Los Alamos who did not want to deal with a 40-minute bus ride or a $20+ Uber have options, lessening congestion on I-25 and improving environmental outcomes. With improved regional bus and rail connections, these benefits can extend to underserved populations, who desperately need fewer barriers to accessing care, education, and opportunities. Many New Mexicans would love to have expanded rail and bus options from Albuquerque and expanding ART can help lay the groundwork to make that possible. As the state’s central hub for just about everything, we can leverage ART to help promote better health outcomes and economic prosperity throughout New Mexico.

Where Should ART Expand Next?

Let us know in the comments below, or reach out to the team at UrbanABQ for further discussion!

*BRT Ridership for Cleveland Health Line reflects passenger numbers as of May 2023.

All photos of ART were taken by the author.

What I was looking at was not some exotic urban fantasy. It was something North American cities used to produce naturally: a neighborhood meeting ground. A place woven into daily life, a place where housing, transit, commerce, and public life still recognized each other, and the neighborhood character was defined by the actual characters that lived inside it rather than stucco homes with uniform setbacks.

Albuquerque used to have more of this too. Vestiges of it remain, if you know where to look (Castle Coffee on Carlisle, for example, or the newer Grandma’s Coffee in Nob Hill. Imagine these possibilities throughout the city!).

For Pete Dinelli, a former city councilor and mayoral candidate, however, this prospect appears to inspire not delight but dread.

In a recent Albuquerque Journal op-ed, Dinelli praised the conservative bloc of councilors who voted to gut or reject some of the city’s modest pro-housing and pro-livability reforms. He described neighborhood-scale retail as a likely “magnet for crime,” cast duplexes and casitas as threats to neighborhood stability, and portrayed people advocating for more homes as radicals bent on destroying Albuquerque’s neighborhoods.

It was a revealing piece not because it offered a serious diagnosis of the city’s housing problems, but because it so clearly expressed the old fear at the heart of Albuquerque’s anti-housing politics: the fear that neighborhoods might have to change to allow other people in. Like many members of Albuquerque’s anti-housing coalition, Dinelli is a supply skeptic. He acknowledges that housing costs are a problem, but refuses to accept the basic implication: if a city has made it difficult to build enough homes, then it will become more expensive to live there.

This is not a serious dispute among economists anymore. It remains, however, an increasingly a political one. Dinelli cites Albuquerque’s housing shortage only to argue against one of the few things that can actually reduce it: allowing more homes to be built. The contradiction is hard to miss. He points to Root Policy Research’s estimate that Albuquerque is thousands of units short of meeting existing housing demand, particularly for lower-income households, and then uses that same shortage to argue against legalizing the very housing types that cities have historically used to absorb growth: casitas, duplexes, townhomes, apartments, and small-scale neighborhood retail.

Root is hardly alone. Other studies and institutions, including Pew, have documented the same basic reality in New Mexico: housing production has lagged while costs have risen, leaving more people cost-burdened, more people crowded into fewer options, and more people vulnerable to displacement, homelessness, or forced moves farther from jobs and opportunity. Dinelli wants to acknowledge the symptoms while attacking the treatment.

For Dinelli, housing is expensive, yes, homelessness is visible, yes, young people are struggling, yes, Albuquerque has an affordability problem — but no, we must not change the rules that created it and because this refusal cannot sustain itself on economics alone, it almost always reaches for moral panic, and Dinelli’s op-ed is full of it.

He warns that neighborhood-scale retail, the kind of small corner stores and cafés common in cities around the world and once more common in American neighborhoods too, would become “magnets for crime.” He treats modest infill housing as a form of neighborhood invasion. He frames legalizing more homes as though it were an attack on the city rather than an attempt to make the city more livable, attainable, and socially resilient, but this is where his worldview becomes especially revealing.

What Dinelli fears is not just density. He fears ordinary urban life and his own neighbors (or potential neighbors). He fears the possibility that neighborhoods might once again contain more than detached houses and driveways. He fears that a block could include a duplex, a casita, a corner café, a family with an adult child living nearby, a renter, a retiree downsizing, a teacher who can actually afford to stay in the neighborhood where they work. He fears the idea that neighborhoods might have to become places where more kinds of people are allowed to belong.

That is not a housing argument. It is an argument for social sorting.

Affordable housing vs. affordability

Dinelli also relies on one of the oldest anti-housing sleights of hand in the book: pretending that if a home is not government-subsidized, it has nothing to do with affordability.

This is a semantic dodge.

Yes, Albuquerque needs more publicly subsidized, income-restricted affordable housing. It needs deeply affordable housing, supportive housing, and public investment in people who are most vulnerable. That is true.

But Albuquerque also needs more affordability, more homes of all kinds, at more price points, in more neighborhoods, so that ordinary people are not all forced to compete for the same shrinking pool of legal places to live. This includes people like me, professionals that once entered home ownership but both value different forms of living than Dinelli’s generation and also are being barred access to the home ownership ladder. We won’t qualify for affordable housing, the affordability issue is now chipping at every step on an already-broken ladder, and in turn, cascading harder on the people that need the deeply affordable homes the most.

The distinction about affordability is important to mention because Dinelli uses the ambiguity around the phrase “affordable housing” to pretend that housing abundance has nothing to do with whether people can afford to stay in Albuquerque.

Of course it does.

A city where only detached single-family homes are widely legal, where neighborhood-scale apartments and duplexes have been outlawed for decades, where smaller infill projects are treated as suspect, and where growth is continually pushed outward rather than gently absorbed inward is a city that manufactures scarcity. Scarcity is not progressive. It is not equitable. And it does not become morally serious just because someone wraps it in concern about “character.”

Duplexes, casitas, townhomes, courtyard apartments, and smaller infill homes are not a trick. They are how cities have historically housed teachers, retirees, service workers, young families, students, and people starting out. They are part of the ordinary housing ladder that Albuquerque has spent decades making increasingly illegal or difficult to build.

What is often called “naturally occurring affordable housing” did not appear by magic. It came from allowing neighborhoods to evolve over time, from permitting enough variety that a city could accommodate people at different life stages and income levels. Dinelli’s preferred system does the opposite. It freezes neighborhoods in place, restricts what can be built, and then acts surprised when the homes that remain become more expensive (well, they’re not surprised, at a District 2 event I went to, several participants were quite excited at housing scarcity adding to their equity).

Dinelli also invokes the dreaded G-word, gentrification, and his argument becomes especially revealing: for all the warnings about gentrification, he offers no actual solution to it. His silence on that is intentional, because the best way to reduce displacement pressure is not to force all new housing into a few neighborhoods, but to legalize more housing citywide so growth can be absorbed broadly.

What Dinelli and others often support instead is selective upzoning: concentrating change in corridors or already-changing areas while keeping most of the city off-limits. That is often exactly how gentrification pressures intensify.

In other words, the outcome they warn about is often the outcome their preferred policies produce.

The bodega panic

Perhaps the most interesting line in Dinelli’s piece is his warning that neighborhood-scale retail or “bodegas” would become “magnets for crime.” It is hard to think of a clearer example of how warped Albuquerque’s civic imagination has become.

A small café, or a tiendita, a corner market, or a barber shop. A place to grab coffee, milk, snacks, or a burrito on foot. A place where neighbors might run into one another and where daily life has somewhere to happen outside of a parking lot.

Dinelli sees this and imagines criminality.

That is the worldview of someone so accustomed to single-use zoning and car dependency that the presence of a small shop near homes reads not as convenience or community life, but as danger. In healthy urban & suburban neighborhoods around the world, and in many older American neighborhoods too, small-scale retail is not a threat. It is part of what makes daily life work. It gives people places to walk to, it creates passive surveillance, and foot traffic. It supports neighborhood social life. It reduces the need to drive for every minor errand, every coffee, every carton of milk, every human interaction. It also just makes life more fun!

Albuquerque did not become safer by separating daily life into isolated pods connected only by arterial roads and parking lots. If anything, that pattern has left us lonelier, more car-dependent, and more socially fragmented.

And it is worth noting just how selective this fear is. Albuquerque already tolerates all kinds of land uses that actually degrade neighborhood life from dangerous high-speed roads, vacant lots, oversized parking fields, drive-through corridors, dead frontage, and speculative blight. Yet somehow the real danger, we are told, is a tiny neighborhood market.

That tells you everything you need to know.

Neighborhood character and the long history of exclusion

Dinelli’s defense of “existing neighborhoods” is also part of a much older American tradition. The language changes over time, but the structure remains familiar: established homeowners cast themselves as protectors of neighborhood integrity while treating apartments, duplexes, renters, commerce, and change itself as a threat.

In the United States, that framework has never been neutral.

The phrase “neighborhood character” has a long history as a sanitized stand-in for exclusion, a way of talking about who belongs, who does not, and what kinds of lives are considered acceptable in a given place without having to say the quiet part out loud.

For much of the twentieth century, zoning was used not simply to organize land uses, but to separate classes of people. Multifamily housing, mixed-use blocks, boarding houses, and neighborhood businesses were increasingly cast as nuisances or intrusions not because they were inherently harmful, but because they made it harder to preserve social and economic homogeneity.

That legacy matters here and it’s a legacy the anti-housing cohort in our city carries such a deep shame about that they refuse to acknowledge it, or call its invocation as unfair to them. Townhomes and duplexes are not intrusions. They belong in neighborhoods because they have always belonged in neighborhoods. Casitas belong in neighborhoods. Corner stores belong in neighborhoods. Apartments belong in neighborhoods. What is historically unusual is the degree to which postwar zoning codes made it illegal to build the kinds of homes and businesses that once allowed cities to absorb growth without displacement or crisis.

So when Dinelli frames modest housing reform as a defense against neighborhood destruction, it is worth asking: destruction for whom? Whose comfort is being preserved? Whose access is being denied? If it is an architectural concern, there are examples of multiplexes and townhomes conforming to New Mexican vernacular styles across our state. But, precisely, neighborhood character is not about the style or building type, but the characters who live in and work in those structures. For me, a variety of characters is a good thing. For Dinelli, it creates the feeling of walls closing in.

What he is defending is not some timeless Albuquerque or American tradition. It is a relatively recent and deeply exclusionary version of neighborhood life, one built around the assumption that low-density homeowners should have a kind of permanent veto over the future of the city and that everyone else should either get in line or are criminal agents.

Abonnez-vous maintenant

“Activists opposing reelection” is called democracy

Dinelli also laments that activists are “disparaging city councilors” and “actively opposing their reelection,” as though this were some kind of alarming civic breakdown rather than a basic feature of representative government.

That is, in fact, how democracy works.

Elected officials vote and constituencies respond. Coalitions organize. People decide whether those officials deserve another term. None of this is radical. It is the ordinary functioning of politics in a city where people have realized that land-use decisions shape whether they can afford to live here, whether they can age in place, whether they can start a family, whether they can walk to a coffee shop, and whether Albuquerque remains a place worth building a life in.

When Pete Dinelli ran for mayor, I did not vote for him. That was not extremism. It was citizenship.

And he is hardly the only self-described Democrat in Albuquerque whose reflexive hostility to housing abundance has lost my support. I proudly left the bubble next to Senator Debbie O’Malley’s name empty on my last ballot due to her long-standing NIMBYism. If elected officials choose to defend scarcity, exclusion, and procedural obstruction, they should expect to be challenged for it. That is not harassment. That is accountability. If Pete Dinelli wants my vote the next time he runs for mayor, he has a baseline of what he has to do to earn it.

To me, one of the most important political developments in Albuquerque over the last several years is that a real voting bloc is beginning to emerge around these issues. Renters ,younger homeowners (and older homeowners who have empathy), people locked out of homeownership, transit riders, working families, and people who want to stay in Albuquerque but are tired of being told that every reform is too disruptive, too complicated, too threatening to the comfort of people who already got theirs. When I voted against Dinelli in 2013 for opposing the idea of BRT on Central and a past of moralizing grandstanding and NIMBYism on the City Council, I felt like i was in a niche category. Now, it is not a small niche, but an important constituency.

We are not a fringe, if anything, we are the future constituency of this city. And the sooner elected officials understand that, the better.

The convenient villain: developers, investors, and everyone except the status quo

Dinelli’s piece also leans heavily on a familiar villain: the developer, the investor, the speculator.

This is emotionally satisfying rhetoric, and nothing is sexier than a David and Goliath story, or a clear good guy and bad guy narrative. But, this narrative is also politically evasive.

Albuquerque’s housing shortage is not the result of too much development. It is the result of too little housing being allowed, for too long, in the places where people want and need to live. If you restrict supply, make new housing scarce, outlaw many of the most attainable housing types, and force growth into a narrow set of expensive or politically fragile channels, then yes — capital will behave like capital. Investors will chase scarcity. Developers will pursue whatever projects can still pencil under a restrictive system. Homes will become more expensive assets.

But this is where anti-housing politics becomes so slippery. It wants to denounce the market outcomes created by scarcity while fiercely defending the legal architecture that produces scarcity in the first place.

This line of thinking is not unique to Albuquerque. In many of the same anti-housing spaces Dinelli participates in, I have noticed people increasingly parroting arguments from Broken City, a book by Vancouver urbanist Patrick Condon, which has quickly become a kind of intellectual security blanket for people who want to defend scarcity while sounding above the usual homeowner panic.

The trouble is that Condon’s case is flimsier than its fans would like to admit. Even in Vancouver, the city his argument is implicitly trying to defend, policymakers have increasingly moved toward broader upzoning and missing-middle legalization because the old model plainly failed to keep housing attainable. And Edmonton in neighboring Alberta, which has embraced many of the kinds of reforms Condon and Dinelli warn against, has not spiraled into speculative chaos or gentrification. It has instead become the most affordable large city in Canada, in part because it has made housing easier to build and therefore harder to hoard.

We are seeing versions of this in the United States too. Minneapolis, Sacramento, and Austin have all moved, to different degrees, toward legalizing more housing and loosening exclusionary land-use rules. None has vindicated the apocalyptic warnings of supply skeptics. If anything, they suggest the opposite: when you reduce artificial scarcity, you reduce the premium that scarcity commands. In other words, if you want to weaken speculation, one of the best things you can do is stop making homes so scarce.

Existing homeowners are not outside this system. Many have benefited handsomely from it. Rising home values, constrained supply, and legal barriers to new housing have created enormous private gains for incumbent property owners, often while younger residents, renters, and newcomers are told to accept fewer choices, higher costs, longer commutes, and diminished access to the very neighborhoods their taxes and labor help sustain.

In other words, what Dinelli condemns in “investors” is often just a more visible version of the scarcity economics that already reward people who got there first, including himself.

That does not mean every development is good, or that public policy should be written by real estate interests. It means that if you make housing scarce enough, capital will chase scarcity. The answer is not to preserve the shortage. It is to reduce its power. That requires something Albuquerque’s anti-housing coalition still refuses to say out loud: we need more homes, of more kinds, in more places.

Not just subsidized housing, not just one megaproject here or there and not just in a handful of corridors while the rest of the city remains frozen in amber (sorry, every YIMBY is obligated by law to use the phrase “frozen in amber” at least 3 times per year). We need more variety of all types: casitas, duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, apartments, courtyard buildings, cottage courts, dorms, mixed-use infill, adaptive reuse, and yes, public and nonprofit housing too.

A city with a housing shortage does not solve that shortage by outlawing abundance.

The property tax scare story

Dinelli also repeats one of the most familiar scare tactics in Albuquerque anti-housing politics: that legalizing more homes would automatically trigger property tax spikes across the city. This is at best deeply misleading and at worst deliberate fearmongering.

The idea is politically useful because it plays on a very real anxiety homeowners have about affordability and stability. But the way it gets deployed in these debates is almost always detached from how property assessment and zoning actually work in practice.

If broad zoning reform automatically detonated neighborhood tax bills, Albuquerque would have seen it after the 2017 Integrated Development Ordinance. It didn’t. Las Cruces would have seen it after its reforms. It didn’t. The myth persists because it is effective, not because it is especially credible, I even drove across the state and talked to auditors who flatly called silly.

It also functions to me as a perfect example of how scarcity politics reproduces itself. Homeowners are told to fear that if more housing becomes legal, they themselves will be punished. So they are encouraged to defend a status quo that is already punishing their children, their neighbors, and anyone who has not yet managed to buy their way into security. It’s also punishing themselves, as the grey wave turns many of the anti-housing constituency into folks without choices for downsizing, forces them to drive long after it is safe to do so, and alienates them from their churches, synagogues, and community groups, if not also their families.

The maddening thing about it, of course, is that Albuquerque’s real affordability crisis is already a tax of its own: in rents, in housing prices, in transportation costs, in displacement, in overcrowding, in homelessness, in lost opportunity, and in the quiet but constant message to younger generations that the city is not especially interested in making room for them. Dinelli is okay with us paying that tax — he doesn’t have to.

What this worldview is really defending

The saddest thing about Dinelli’s op-ed is not just that it is wrong, though it is. It is that it reveals how impoverished our civic imagination has become. A corner store becomes a crime risk, a duplex becomes neighborhood destruction, a casita becomes an investor plot, an a little more life on a block becomes an existential threat.

This fear dressed up as stewardship has done real damage to Albuquerque and continues to damage our city, while also harming the most hard-hit of the housing shortage.

The anti-housing coalition wants to normalize the idea that neighborhoods are less places for people to live than assets to be defended. In doing so, It has made ordinary forms of housing feel radical and scary. It has turned the basic work of making room for more people into a culture war. Sadly, It has encouraged a generation of homeowners and former elected officials to mistake their own comfort for a public good. But cities are not ruined by allowing more people to belong to them (people, in fact, are what make cities great places to be).

They are ruined by becoming too expensive, too brittle, too exclusionary, and too afraid to adapt. Albuquerque does not need to keep embalming itself for the comfort of people who already got theirs.

It needs more homes. More legal ways to live. More neighborhood life. More room for the next generation to stay.

And yes, more politics willing to say so out loud and vote out the people that can’t get on board.

In September, I found myself in New York City.

Like many urbanists and transit nerds, I’ve long thought of New York as a rare American example of how liberating city living can be. I wandered the city freely, hopping on trains and buses without thinking much about it. The new tap-to-pay system meant there was no rushing to buy tickets from a machine. You simply walked up, tapped your card, and went.

More importantly, there was never a moment when I worried about being stranded.

Late one night, after a long day of walking, I boarded a Metro-North train back to New Haven, where I was staying during the 2025 YIMBYtown conference. I expected a pleasant late-night walk from the station back to my hotel downtown. But when I opened my transit app out of curiosity, I saw something unexpected: there was still a bus running!

My friend and I had walked tens of thousands of steps across the city that day. Happily, we climbed aboard and were ferried back to the hotel.

What surprised me most was not the convenience—it was the city. New Haven’s metro population is smaller than Albuquerque’s.

In my mind, the late-night bus seemed like a relic of the East Coast: an older urban fabric, dense neighborhoods, regional rail, and a transit system that had simply existed long enough to accumulate these services. When I mentioned it to a local friend, they told me something surprising: The late-night buses were new.

They were the result of several years of study by CTtransit, pushed forward by advocates inside city government and grassroots groups who argued that New Haven’s economy was being held back by the lack of late-night transit.

That conversation stuck with me.

The Data Behind New Haven’s Late-Night Transit

When I returned to New Mexico, I started digging into the studies that led New Haven to expand late-night bus service. The arguments weren’t romantic or nostalgic, they were largely economic.

A regional study found that nearly 30% of New Haven households do not own a car. Even more striking, several neighborhoods had zero-car rates approaching 40–45%. At the same time, the city’s job growth was increasingly concentrated in sectors with non-traditional working hours such as healthcare, hospitality, retail, logistics, and service work. In other words, many workers needed transportation after the traditional commuting hours ended.

Without more robust transit, businesses struggled to recruit workers, workers struggled to reach jobs, and the city struggled to fully participate in its own nighttime economy. Late-night bus service wasn’t framed as a luxury or as a special amenity for late-night bar goers, but as basic economic infrastructure needed to elevate New Haven and the opportunities it could provide to its residents. New Haven is still working to enhance their network, with many routes now running to close to midnight and select services and shuttles running late. Long-term, New Haven is developing BRT which will also include later, or even true late-night, service hours.

Looking for Western Comparisons

New Haven is an old East Coast city, though. Maybe the comparison wasn’t fair. So I looked at a place that feels much closer to Albuquerque: Tucson.

Like Albuquerque, Tucson is a Sunbelt city with postwar sprawl and auto-oriented development. Beginning in the 2010s, Tucson started extending evening transit service on many of its primary bus routes. Today, several major routes run until close to midnight, and the city’s streetcar, connecting downtown with the University of Arizona, runs even later on weekends and during special events.

Is it perfect? Not even close. But it’s enough to allow reasonable mobility for workers with later shifts. The reasoning behind Tucson’s service expansions looked surprisingly familiar. Many riders relied on transit because they did not have cars, employers struggled to recruit workers for evening shifts, and planners recognized that a transit system that shuts down early limits the economic potential of the city.

Why Not Albuquerque?

I asked Andrew De Garmo, a planner at ABQ Ride, about the possibility of late-night transit here. He told me the agency had experimented with late-night service before but did not believe the demand was strong enough to support it.

He mentioned a late-night service that operated on select weekends but struggled to generate ridership.That experience isn’t unreasonable.

But it may not tell the full story.

Albuquerque Once Had A Late-Night Transit

One evening around 2010 or 2011, I was walking near the Bosque when I saw a Rapid Ride bus streak past on Central Avenue.

The sign board read:

“After Dark.”

At the time, I hadn’t realized Albuquerque had a late-night bus service. Rapid Ride, the predecessor to today’s ART, experimented with late-night service during the summer months for several years. It ran only on select nights and only seasonally, and by 2011 the program had ended.

For a brief period afterward, the Route 66 local bus provided late-night runs along Central.

Then the pandemic came. Today, neither service exists.

ART (Albuquerque Rapid Transit), the city’s gold-standard Bus Rapid Transit line, starts its final run at 10:00 PM. That means riders catching the last bus in Nob Hill or Downtown are often boarding around 10:20 PM as the final bus passes through.

The ART Promise That Never Happened

What makes this especially striking is that the original planning documents for Albuquerque Rapid Transit envisioned something very different. During planning in 2015 and 2016, ART was explicitly designed to support late-night service.

Studies conducted during the planning process suggested that extended service, potentially until 1:00 AM, would support Central Avenue’s evening economy and improve job access along the corridor.

That service never materialized.

ART is currently held back by lower-than-planned frequencies and short operating hours, impacted both by a failure to compete and hire transit staff as well as (in my opinion) neglect by City leaders and administrators. Despite that, it has already met many of the promises it sought to accomplish: one of the busiest BRTs in the United States, induced investment & development (over $800M to date!), and safer and more productive streets. ABQ Ride is working to hire staff to restore ART to its 7.5 minute frequency. We also need to fulfill the promise of 1:00 AM service.

Abonnez-vous maintenant

The Central Corridor Is Where Transit Works

The data we do have suggests the ART corridor might actually resemble some of the conditions that justified late-night service in New Haven.

For example:

• 24% of renter households along the Central corridor do not own a car, roughly twice the rate for the rest of Albuquerque.

• Across the city, about 12% of renters are car-free.

• Maps of zero-vehicle households show strong concentrations along Central Avenue, near San Mateo, and in parts of the Southwest Mesa.

  

Central is also unique in Albuquerque.

It links many of the city’s major destinations:

• Downtown

• UNM

• Nob Hill

• the International District

• major medical employers like Presbyterian, Lovelace, and UNMH

• retail and entertainment districts

• and even casino employment

It is the closest thing Albuquerque has to a true urban spine. The Central corridor is also one of the most diverse parts of Albuquerque. Neighborhoods along Central, particularly in the International District, are home to large immigrant communities and some of the city’s highest concentrations of households without cars. Roughly one in four renter households along the ART corridor does not own a vehicle, about twice the rate seen elsewhere in the city.

For residents in these neighborhoods, transit isn’t simply a convenience. It is often the primary connection to jobs, education, healthcare, and everyday services. The ABQ Ride Project Connect study also points out that, similar to New Haven and Tucson, more Burqueños are working shift positions and need reliable transit at non-traditional hours.

These neighborhoods also contain the highest concentrations of people like me, those who may own a car but seldomly use it or who voluntarily go car-free. Among these neighborhoods, Barelas and other Downtown Neighborhoods have large numbers of car-lite and car-free households. The City aims to incentivize transit oriented development along Central and in places like Uptown. This is a goal I wholeheartedly support, and late night transit services help push for that to materialize. Transit oriented development is great, but if you can’t rely on the bus, you are just going to drive. The lack of later service doesn’t just hurt transit-reliant riders, it also limits choice riders and the city’s ability to compete and attract people who want a car-lite or car-free lifestyle.

Why the Rapid After Dark Experiment Failed

If Rapid After Dark failed to build ridership, the design of the service may explain why.

The service ran:

• only two nights per week

• only during the summer

• with little long-term predictability.

Transit works best when it is reliable and consistent. A seasonal service running only a few nights per week is difficult for riders to depend on. It was also marketed primarily as transportation for nightlife rather than for workers, students, or residents along the corridor. That framing likely limited its potential.

Anecdotally, after noticing that Rapid Ride bus pass near the Bosque, I looked into taking it Downtown the next weekend, only to find that that had been its last run of the season. I had only noticed it then and it had already ended service. How can we judge its effectiveness when it never established enough consistency to even be noticed?

Transit as Infrastructure

Part of overcoming the stigma of transit is creating a system that feels safe, clean, and dependable. If we want transit to function as a public utility, it needs to work beyond the traditional 8-to-5 commute. Late-night service isn’t just about revelers leaving bars.

It supports:

• healthcare workers

• hospitality employees

• service workers

• students

• and residents who simply don’t have another way home.

The data suggests that the investment could benefit many groups at once:

• businesses trying to recruit workers

• institutions like UNM and Presbyterian

• residents without cars

• and yes, the occasional reveler who once enjoyed the brief experiment known as Rapid After Dark.

Expanding late-night transit could also help address one of Albuquerque’s persistent economic challenges: connecting workers to opportunity. Many of the city’s largest employers, UNM, UNM Hospital, Presbyterian, hotels, restaurants, and retail businesses, operate well beyond traditional business hours. The neighborhoods closest to these job centers also contain some of Albuquerque’s highest concentrations of transit-dependent households.

Ensuring reliable transportation at night is one way cities improve access to opportunity without requiring everyone to own a car. Albuquerque may not be New York, but the examples of New Haven and Tucson show that late-night transit isn’t limited to megacities.

Sometimes it just requires the decision to try again — and to design the service so people can actually rely on it.

Abonnez-vous maintenant

At the February 18 City Council hearing on proposed changes to Albuquerque’s zoning code, Council President Klarissa Peña ended the proceedings by reflecting on something she felt was being challenged. Neighborhood associations, she said, were once seen as pillars of the community. They had been formed to empower neighborhoods, especially minority neighborhoods, and to protect residents from harmful development. What troubled her, she said, was that younger residents seemed increasingly skeptical of them.

“Neighborhood associations were created because neighborhoods were being overrun by land use issues in our community… the federal government said they needed a place in land use planning. That’s why we have them.”

She also acknowledged something that is important to underline: that wealthier neighborhood associations have accumulated more resources, political influence, and technical expertise, while neighborhoods of color have historically had fewer resources and less access to planners or lawyers. Her conclusion was that younger residents should understand this history before criticizing neighborhood associations.

In one respect, Peña is correct: neighborhood participation in American cities was expanded during the civil rights era and the War on Poverty, when federal programs attempted to give communities a greater voice in planning decisions. However, the modern neighborhood association movement did not primarily emerge as a vehicle for empowerment. In many cases, it emerged as a mechanism for exclusion.

She urged neighborhood leaders and younger Albuquerque residents to learn from each other. To collaborate and to find common ground. The sentiment might have sounded reasonable on its face, but it rested on a version of history that simply isn’t true.

The modern neighborhood association movement in American cities did not emerge primarily as a vehicle for empowerment. In most cases, it emerged as a mechanism for exclusion.

As Richard Rothstein documents in The Color of Law, early neighborhood associations frequently served as the private enforcement arm of racial segregation. In the early twentieth century, these organizations helped coordinate and enforce racially restrictive covenants, agreements among homeowners that properties would not be sold to Black families or other minority groups. Even where explicit racial covenants were not present, associations often mobilized around zoning restrictions designed to achieve the same effect: limiting housing types, controlling who could move into a neighborhood, and preventing changes that might allow more diverse populations to live there. In Albuquerque, it was these very mechanisms that enforced racial segregation.

The language was often framed in terms of “protecting neighborhood character,” but as we know, the effect was segregation.

In that sense, Peña is identifying a real problem but drawing the wrong conclusion from it. Neighborhood institutions have often reproduced inequality rather than correcting it. Over time, the associations with the most time, resources, and political connections became the most influential, while the communities they were meant to empower remained structurally disadvantaged. As documented in the Reimagining Albuquerque series on the history of land use in the city, these dynamics shaped Albuquerque’s planning system as well, where neighborhood-based organizing often emerged alongside zoning rules that restricted housing types and reinforced patterns of segregation. Even well-meaning reforms of the Johnson era that sought to expand neighborhood participation did not resolve these structural problems. In many cases they simply layered new participatory mechanisms onto systems that already advantaged the most organized and well-resourced neighborhoods.

This dynamic did not end when racial covenants were struck down by the courts. Instead, it evolved. As historian Yoni Appelbaum describes in Stuck, neighborhood-based organizing and local procedural tools increasingly became vehicles for blocking new housing and preserving exclusionary patterns. Historic overlays, zoning restrictions, and neighborhood appeals and input processes often function as powerful barriers to mobility and integration, even when they are justified in the language of preservation or stability, and dressed in neutral language that reflects the built form of a place rather than who lives in them. Unfortunately, these mechanisms often exacerbate the very problems they claim to address. By constraining housing supply and preventing neighborhoods from evolving, they intensify displacement pressures elsewhere.

The result is somewhat paradoxical: policies justified in the name of protecting vulnerable communities can end up reinforcing segregation and gentrification instead. At the risk of being too wishy-washy, let’s just say it’s worth assuming the best possible intentions behind that history of neighborhood associations. Many of the neighborhood participation programs created in the civil rights era were motivated by a genuine desire to give communities a stronger voice in decisions that affected them, after all. However, institutions are ultimately judged not by their intentions, but by their outcomes. As systems theorists often note, the purpose of a system is what it does.

And what Albuquerque’s current system does is increasingly difficult to ignore. It constrains housing supply, drives up costs, and pushes families to the margins of the city or out of it entirely. It makes it harder for working-class residents to stay in the communities where they grew up while it discourages young professionals from building their lives here. And as recent reporting by KOB and regional housing studies have shown, the consequences of this system fall disproportionately on Indigenous and Black residents across the metro area, folks that Councilor Peña highlighted in her comments.

That history should be underlined more, especially in Albuquerque, where neighborhood associations enjoy an unusually powerful institutional role through the city’s Neighborhood Association Recognition Ordinance, or NARO.

Albuquerque’s unusual system

Many cities maintain registries of neighborhood associations. Tucson, for example, allows neighborhood associations to register with the city and receive notice of rezonings and planning decisions. Other cities maintain similar programs that help connect neighborhood groups with municipal staff.

But these programs typically remain advisory.

Most cities that i looked into (granted, through google searching) intentionally avoid granting procedural power to neighborhood associations for a simple reason:

• neighborhood associations are self-selected groups

• they are not democratically representative

• participation within them is often uneven

Because of this, cities generally seem to treat them as stakeholders, not governing actors.

Albuquerque is quite different.

Through the NARO, the city does not simply recognize neighborhood associations, it fully institutionalizes them. Recognized associations and coalitions (more below) receive formal legal standing in land-use processes. They receive automatic notification of development proposals. In some cases, they can initiate appeals that delay or derail projects long after professional planning staff and the Environmental Planning Commission have reviewed them.

More unusually, Albuquerque recognizes coalitions of neighborhood associations that span enormous geographic areas. The most prominent example is WSCONA, the Westside Coalition of Neighborhood Associations, which encompasses dozens of associations and effectively claims to represent the entire portion of the city west of the Rio Grande.

This structure turns neighborhood associations into something more than community groups. It turns them into semi-institutional actors within the city’s land-use system.

And after several decades, it is clear that those powers have been abused in such a way that development has been driven away with heavy costs for vulnerable communities, and even professionals trying to make it in the middle class.

When neighborhood power becomes obstruction

Last year, I attended an Environmental Planning Commission (EPC) hearing involving a proposed school near Unser and Ladera on Albuquerque’s west side, hosted on Zoom.

A school with an emphasis on community, giving struggling students a second chance, and with really amazing results to back up their methodology.

I would have assumed that a school would be the sort of community investment that neighborhood groups would welcome. Instead, members of WSCONA showed up to oppose the project. To me, their arguments were revealing.

One speaker claimed the project would create intolerable traffic congestion, though no data was presented to support the claim. Another argued that the school would be unsafe because it was near a 500-year flood zone, while apparently finding no similar danger in the surrounding single-family homes that already exist nearby.

Perhaps most strikingly, none of the speakers opposing the school actually lived in the adjacent neighborhood. The applicants seemed to anticipate this. They arrived with an entire dossier responding to the kinds of objections that have become routine in Albuquerque’s land-use process. It was clear they were not simply presenting to the EPC: they were preparing for a bonafide procedural gauntlet.

I angrily signed up to speak, having jotted notes and data as I listened. When I spoke, I noted that the Mid-Region Council of Governments’ data did not support the traffic claims being made. I pointed out that the project aligned with the city and county comprehensive plans, which explicitly call for placing schools and other amenities on the west side to reduce unnecessary cross-river trips.

I also mentioned that similar cases around the country are increasingly being litigated by organizations like YIMBY Law when projects are blocked through procedural abuse. At that point, an audible gasp came through the Zoom call from one of the neighborhood representatives who had forgotten to mute their microphone.

Watching the hearing unfold, it became clear that this was not simply about one school. One of the same individuals involved in opposing the project had also participated in an appeal challenging a multifamily housing proposal at University and Gold near UNM, adjacent to an ART station, miles away from Taylor Ranch where she lives, miles away from the west side, and far outside the area they claimed to represent.

That kind of activism goes beyond the familiar “Not In My Back Yard” impulse. Urbanists sometimes use a different acronym for it: BANANA, short for Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

WSCONA increasingly fits that description and demonstrates a need to heavily reform this system. Having gone through most of the appeals filed by neighborhood groups over the last 5 years, many of them, if not a plurality, were filed by WSCONA, and touched massive swaths of the city and developments of all kinds. Housing, film studios, schools, car ports, supermarkets. Hundreds of pages each of opposition, hyperbole, and a city staff force to waste time on this expensive, long-winded process.

A system out of balance

Albuquerque’s neighborhood association system was created during a different era of urban governance, one that placed enormous faith in localized participatory processes.

Over time, the system has drifted far from its original purpose. The NARO, along with the Integrated Development Ordinance (IDO), Albuquerque’s Zoning Code, grants neighborhood associations and coalitions a level of procedural influence that is difficult to justify in a modern democratic system. These groups are elected within exceedingly small and non-representational meetings and with divergent procedures one neighborhood association to the next. Their meetings are not broadly representative of the populations they claim to represent. Notably, participation often skews toward older homeowners with the time and resources to attend meetings and navigate planning processes. Many of these dynamics are elegantly documented in Katherine Eintein’s Neighborhood Defenders. Yet, they are given formal standing that allows them to delay or obstruct decisions affecting the entire city.

Other cities have begun to recognize this problem. In Seattle, the city’s neighborhood council system was dramatically restructured after years of criticism that it amplified narrow interests and underrepresented renters, younger residents, and communities of color. Even before those reforms, Seattle’s neighborhood groups held less formal power than Albuquerque’s associations do today.

Here, oversight is minimal and influence is substantial. Neighborhood associations are not required to follow the same transparency standards that public bodies must follow. They are not bound by New Mexico’s Open Meetings Act. They are not required to demonstrate representative membership or participation. Why is it, then, that they can exercise procedural tools that affect citywide policy?

If neighborhood associations wish to wield that level of influence, then they should be required to meet the standards that accompany public authority: public agendas, open meetings, transparent decision-making, and accountability to the broader public.

But the simpler solution is clearer: Albuquerque should move beyond the NARO entirely.

Neighborhood associations should exist as what they truly are: affinity groups representing the people who choose to participate in them. Their perspectives should be welcomed as part of the civic conversation but they should not possess special legal standing in land-use decisions that affect hundreds of thousands of residents.

The city’s planning processes already include extensive opportunities for public input, that under the current planning staff, have become very accessible and are reaching many more people than the neighborhood system ever could. We should be proud that community-based planning procedures are being built into our processes from the start. What Albuquerque does not need is a parallel structure that allows small, self-selected groups to exercise disproportionate influence over citywide policy.

Our city must move forward

Albuquerque faces profound challenges in housing, affordability, and homelessness.

Research from organizations ranging from the Pew Research Center, to UNM, to the Urban Land Institute have documented how procedural barriers and localized veto points contribute to housing shortages in cities across the metro area and New Mexico. Albuquerque’s own regional housing assessment identified neighborhood opposition and procedural delays as key factors limiting housing production.

None of this means neighborhood voices should be ignored but it does mean that Albuquerque must reconsider the structures that determine whose voices carry the most weight.

The NARO was created for a different era of urban politics. In today’s Albuquerque, it has become something else: a mechanism that allows a narrow slice of residents to exert disproportionate influence over the city’s future.

Council President Peña is right about one thing. Younger Albuquerque residents are increasingly skeptical of neighborhood associations but that skepticism does not arise from misunderstanding their history: It arises from watching how they operate today, and how many of us with different opinions are treated by them (in emails forwarded to me by various folks that are members of NAs across the city, I have been called a terrorist, Elon Musk, Mao Zedong, a radical libertarian, a radical socialist, and many other labels in email threads of various Neighborhood Associations across the city, just for being a vocal YIMBY and/or member of Strong Towns ABQ. It’s funny but doesn’t make it seem like they actually want people at the table).

To me, it is clear that the system built to empower neighborhoods has become a system that holds the entire City and the State of New Mexico back.

It is time for Albuquerque to move on.

Abonnez-vous maintenant

At the time of publishing, Yoni Appelbaum, mentioned here, will be in Albuquerque speaking in the Livability Speaker Series, on Wednesday March 11th! Get (free) tickets to hear from amazing him and other amazing writers. Homewise will be providing a drink ticket, snacks, and childcare as well. Get Tickets Here!

She said young people need homes.
She said she hears this from her grandbabies.
She said young people also need to learn from their elders.

I sat there and tried to listen carefully, because I wanted to learn something.

I learned that collaboration can mean asking people to speak faster.
I learned that respect can mean sixty seconds.
I learned that public input becomes easier to manage when it is too short to breathe.

She said the process should be collaborative and respectful.

People stood in line for hours to speak about zoning reform, about casitas, about the possibility of staying in a city that feels harder to stay in every year. Some of them had never spoken publicly before. Some had prepared remarks for weeks.

One minute changes how a voice sounds.
It turns testimony into a summary of a summary.
It turns grief into bullet points.

I learned that “being heard” and “being allowed to speak” are not the same thing.

—

She spoke about elders as keepers of memory.

I thought about the history I had read — about neighborhood associations, about how they were created to enforce covenants to keep others out, about the long quiet work of exclusion that never calls itself exclusion. I thought about books people dismiss before they open them, histories that disappear when they interrupt a good story.

I learned that history is something we invoke when it protects us.
I learned that facts feel less important than belonging.

A blog about Reimagining Albuquerque was mentioned from the dais like a warning, like a rumor that needed correcting. The blog had gotten under her skin. It had questioned structures that many people treat as sacred and… unquestionable.

I learned that critique feels louder when it is written down.

—

A colleague spoke about her mother, about dementia, about trying to build a casita that was legal in name but impossible in practice.

She spoke slowly.
She spoke vulnerably.
She spoke about aging in a city that says it supports aging in place.

Peña said she supported casitas.
Peña voted against the changes that would have made them real.

She did not look at her colleague while she spoke.

I learned that agreement can exist without alignment.
I learned that saying “I support this” can mean voting no.

Behind me, someone said she takes care of people.
A man asked who would take care of her when she could no longer do it herself.

She said that would never happen.

I learned that some of us believe the body is permanent.
I learned that policy is often written for the version of ourselves that never grows older.

—

There was a moment earlier in the evening when a councilor was attacked in language that was racist. Students had come to watch an MLK proclamation pass. Elders who spoke about respect and collaboration did not rush to defend her. They spoke instead about decorum, about procedure, about everyone’s right to speak, and then censored her. She let the students know they did not matter in her vision of Albuquerque.

I learned that respect flows upward in Albuquerque politics, but not always sideways.

Later, I heard references to ethnicity and history delivered in a tone that felt less like solidarity and more like performance. About the discomfort that comes from having to acknowledge our part in histories that threaten our good story.

I learned that identity can be invoked like armor.

I learned the Santa Fe Ring is alive and well on the City Council and the Neighborhood Coalitions.
I learned that silence can sound louder than any microphone.

—

I am a homeowner.
I am a parent.
I have helped start a neighborhood association.

I learned that none of this makes you an elder if you believe in duplexes.

Or shelters.

Or making room for neighbors.

Only “the youth” would have ideas like that.

I learned that participation is not the price of entry — agreement is.

I learned that elders will defend leveling desert near petroglyphs if it protects certain neighborhoods from change. I learned that preservation is flexible when profit is nearby and rigid when housing is.

I learned that building forms sometimes matter more than the people who need homes.

—

She spoke about grandbabies again.

I thought about the people who spoke that night about staying here, about raising families here, about trying to build something modest and being told it was too much.

I learned that some grandbabies are symbols.
I learned that others are statistics.

I learned that elders can say young people matter while voting against the smallest steps that might make room for them.

—

I went to council hoping to learn something from my elders.

I learned that collaboration can mean control.
I learned that respect can be measured in seconds.
I learned that wisdom is often another word for comfort

the kind of comfort that keeps us from asking what we helped create..

And I learned that some people want the city to freeze in time — not just the buildings, but the moment when they are still strong enough not to need anyone else.

It was clear pretty early in the night that this was not going to feel like a collaborative public process or a respectable city council night.

The tone from council felt antagonistic from the start. Council President Peña limited public comment to one minute, well below the three to five minutes most cities allow and even shorter than the two minutes Albuquerque and Las Cruces have traditionally given. One minute changes everything. It turns testimony into something closer to a rushed monologue than a conversation, especially when people have spent months following a complicated zoning process only to be told they have sixty seconds to summarize it to a council that really is tuned out.

At the same time, amendments began appearing on the floor that had not been shared with council staff, the planning department, or the public. Industry professionals, academic voices, and community advocates had no chance to respond because there was nothing to respond to until it was already happening. Watching planners react in real time to language they had never seen felt surreal, especially knowing how much work had already gone into shaping the IDO amendment package into something coherent. For a council that often talks about process, the night felt oddly improvisational.

What struck me most (or pissed me off the most, really) was hearing councilors admit, more than once, that they did not fully understand the policies they were voting on. President Peña later said she hoped for a “more collaborative process next time” because she and her colleagues felt confused. That landed strangely in a room where planners had offered months of briefings, one-on-one meetings, and technical explanations. Councilors had every opportunity to engage with staff, to ask questions, to schedule time with planners like the endlessly patient and deeply knowledgeable Mikaela Renz-Whitmore. Many simply did not. They also had the option to vote to defer to explore these ideas in depth. How are these are our leaders!!!

My friend Althea wrote a poem during the meeting about the way the public process felt squeezed down to almost nothing, and it captured something I kept ruminating on as the night stretched on. The council’s posture toward the planning department, city staff, and the public felt less like partnership and more like contempt. And it was not limited to zoning. Across issue after issue that evening, you could feel a growing discontent in the room, a sense that people were showing up in larger numbers not because they felt heard, but because they felt ignored.

And yet, despite headlines framing this year’s IDO process as a total loss, something else happened that night too: Albuquerque made real advances. Not everything advocates wanted passed, and a lot of work remains if we want to hold our elected leaders accountable, but several changes moved forward that could reshape how housing pencils across the city. It felt worth stepping back from the frustration for a moment to acknowledge that progress, and to talk about why advocates might still feel cautiously optimistic.

Pro-homes advocates outnumbered anti-homes activists by roughly two to one. Institutional leaders showed up alongside younger residents trying to figure out if they can build a life here. It felt like the long-talked-about YIMBY moment had finally arrived in Albuquerque, even if NIMBYism remains deeply rooted, reinforced by a neighborhood ordinance that gives associations and coalitions unusual standing in land use decisions compared to most American cities. Even then, popular framings in the Journal and elsewhere framing it as a homeowner vs renter debate might be weaker than imagined. My friend Erin counted fourteen homeowner opponents and the same number of homeowners speaking in favor of legalizing more homes, a reminder that the coalition showing up was broader than the usual narratives suggest, and that’s nothing to sleep on.

What passed was imperfect and some of the most visible reforms stalled, but several changes that moved forward could really reshape how housing “pencils” across Albuquerque.

Parking minimums lifted along corridors and centers.

This one is probably enormous and impactful, even if it sounds technical.

I keep thinking about a summer trip to Phoenix while watching council debate setbacks and amendments. I rode Valley Metro and wandered through neighborhoods where new housing feels integrated into daily life and even public transit, despite the Valley of the Sun’s infamous urban form. Ugly, abandoned, midcentury shopping plazas are being replaced with dense options that are surprising in a place like Phoenix. I hopped off near Ethiopian restaurants tucked into midrise buildings and dense college campuses, and then walked through Cul de Sac in Tempe, a car-light development built around shade, southwestern design, and small retail. Nothing about it felt utopian once you were there. It felt normal, the result of years of zoning reforms that slowly made these projects viable. And it was possible in 106 degree June heat. If it is possible in the Arizona desert, it’s possible in Albuquerque. And now, projects like Cul de Sac are legal in Albuquerque. Well, at least on our “corridors and centers,” but that’s no small thing!

At a ULI event last year that I participated in, facilitated by Mikaela Renz-Whitmore, participants were asked to run pro-formas (a software used by developers to get an idea on the viability of a project) on random parcels across Albuquerque using existing zoning versus the proposed changes. My group drew a lot half a block off Central, in East Downtown. Under the old rules, the parcel only penciled as luxury detached townhomes, a form of density that is a world better than the empty gravel lot it currently is, but that felt mismatched with a plot within sight of an ART Station. Once parking reforms were layered in, nearly forty-eight units across different housing types suddenly became viable, and at margins that real developers in the room found compelling. That said, under the previous zoning rules, many other groups were finding it hard to get much of anything to pencil.

The point of the exercise was to really show how impactful tweaks to the zoning code can be (also, How can we get Councilors to show up to these events?).

Long term, lifting parking minimums opens opportunities not just along the ART but in areas like Uptown, now also liberated of intense parking mandates, where seas of asphalt could slowly transform into real neighborhoods. It also builds on O-69’s earlier corridor reforms, reinforcing the idea that Albuquerque’s arterials, and especially Central Avenue, can evolve into places where housing and daily life exist side by side rather than separated by parking lots. Citywide, parking minimums were reduced by 20% across the board. It’s a start, but we will definitely be demanding council to lift them everywhere, too.

Cottage courts legalized citywide on larger lots.

Many advocates, myself included, were frustrated by the classist and openly racist arguments against broader missing middle reforms. Duplexes, triplexes, and townhomes did not pass citywide, and that stung. Townhomes are impactful and a family-friendly form of home that really opens up opportunities up and down the housing ladder. But one thing that did pass was a legalization of cottage courts.

The way Albuquerque defines cottage courts effectively allows many of these housing types to exist across the city anyway, just through a different framework. On a typical ten-thousand-square-foot lot, around eight units can now exist where only one stood before. Eight units happens to be a number that pencils well in markets as different as Edmonton and Portland, which gives me hope that these changes will actually translate into real projects rather than theoretical ones. An average lot in Albuquerque could now be home to 4 duplexes or townhome-style homes with eight units total, 8 small cottages, or any combination of homes that fit the contextual requirements of the IDO (not getting into that now). In areas where the parking minimums have been lifted and a 10,000 square foot lot exists (and there are a good few of these!), it’s possible to have more than 8 units if a builder opts out of including parking.

The language also allows for shared kitchens and amenities and so opens doors to housing styles that Albuquerque has largely lost. I kept thinking about housing clients I worked with while helping people access Permanent Supportive Housing vouchers who did not want private kitchens because they feared leaving a stove on or struggled with daily living tasks. Shared spaces were not undignified to them. They were supportive. They allowed independence without isolation, so i was happy to see this language included despite NIMBY rhetoric calling it “undignified.”

I would love to see the ten-thousand-square-foot threshold revisited in the next round of amendments. If two cottages can fit on an oddly shaped lot, why not allow them? But even with that limitation, this is one of the first meaningful expansions of incremental housing into Albuquerque’s citywide zoning map since the IDO was adopted. Well, actually, since zoning itself was adopted in Albuquerque. Incremental housing is finally back on the map citywide, if only on lots of 10,000 square feet or more.

Dormitories and boarding houses return.

This might be the most radical change in the package from an access, homelessness, and affordability perspective.

Research from Pew has shown that SROs (single-room occupancy) and dormitory-style housing could dramatically expand access to shelter, sometimes reaching four times as many people as traditional deeply subsidized housing models. Albuquerque once had YMCA hotels near the Alvarado, and a vestigial dormitory still provides homes on 4th Street in Barelas, and these types of housing were once common across North America before zoning laws pushed them out, often rooted in fears about race, migration, and class. In addition, updates to the code allowing for easier office-to-housing conversions could make this a viable option in Albuquerque in a big way.

During a recent stay in Los Angeles, I spent time in a historic boarding house dating back more than a century. Some rooms rotated through short stays while others housed long-term residents, many of them young, queer, and creative people trying to hold onto a life in the city without access to generational wealth. Down the street, Pod LA leaned further into the concept, offering communal sleeping arrangements and shared living spaces that felt alive rather than precarious.

Critics here sometimes describe shared living arrangements, like as described above with cottage courts, as undignified. My experience was the opposite. These spaces felt supportive, connected, and deeply human. They kept artists in the city, they kept young queer people housed and connected to opportunity, and they let people forgo the expense of car ownership by being one block away from the Little Tokyo Metro Station. Legalizing dormitories in Albuquerque’s multifamily zones is a step toward bringing back a form of housing that was lost not because it failed, but because zoning decided it should not exist led by racist and classist fears. Similar to shared facilities in cottage courts being called undignified by opponents, I found the choice to live in this boarding house liberating, especially for people dealing with really tight tradeoffs and choices. For a young artist wanting to stay in DTLA and work at art studios while getting a GED, it is far more dignified than the alternatives.

Corridor bonuses and form-based improvements.

The IDO has always tried to shape development along arterials toward something kinder, pushing parking behind buildings and encouraging shade and walkability. The new bonuses for height and structured parking build on that foundation, making it easier for projects to pencil while reinforcing design standards that improve the public realm.

This one may not grab headlines, but it strengthens a framework that is already slowly reshaping Central and other main streets. Added height limits also creates more vertical space for use, also helping push buildings toward viability. Coupled with parking reform, I am definitely hoping to see a lot more options for renters in the coming years.

Smaller lots allowed

Allowing smaller lot sizes might sound minor, but it plays a huge role in affordability. Subdivision has helped unlock starter homes in markets like North Carolina, and smaller lots are a core principle in incremental development strategies. In a city as geographically large as Albuquerque, this could help diversify housing options in ways that feel gradual rather than disruptive. Albuquerque still has some contextual requirements that make splitting lots tricky in some areas, but this is a great first step. (tho for real, contextual requirements delenda est)

Other things that passed that deserve a little more love

A few smaller changes moved through in the background that probably will not get headlines but could matter a lot in daily life.

Multi-household composting is now easier to do through neighborhood networks. Community gardens can also now host composting collectively instead of forcing everything into single household systems, which opens the door for models that already exist in other cities. Companies like Little Green Bucket can now operate more clearly as a commercial use in these spaces, which might sound niche but actually builds real infrastructure for climate resilience and local food systems. It is one of those changes where you can imagine how many blocks could slowly build new, better habits around it.

Childcare in R1 zones also passed. Albuquerque and New Mexico overall have a massive gap in childcare access, especially for kids under two years old, which is exactly the age range where families struggle most to find openings. Allowing childcare providers to operate in residential zones recognizes something that has always been true anyway, that care happens inside neighborhoods, not just in commercial corridors. It is a small shift in zoning language that could make an outsized difference for working families trying to stay here or start a small business as caretakers. For the state, which did try to address this on the statewide level but failed in the Roundhouse this session, the state’s two largest municipalities now legalizing neighborhood childcare will do the heavy-lifting in proving to the entire nation that subsidized childcare is a worthwhile investment as our state works to lead the US in this work.

Neither of these changes sparked the same kind of debate as parking or housing typologies, but they show that the IDO process is not only about density or form or neighborhood character but everyday life and making room for even the smallest residents.

The things that did not pass, and the reasons for optimism anyway.

Bodegas, duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, and broader casita reforms stalled. That part was frustrating, especially after hearing councilors say they liked the direction of the package but were not ready to vote yes “this time.”

But the turnout told a different story. Large numbers of speakers came from Districts Four and Eight, areas often framed as firmly anti-homes, and which will be up for election in the next local election cycle. After the meeting, people lingered outside or on online spaces talking about canvassing, donating, and organizing for candidates who embrace housing reform, and some even thought about running themselves. Close recent election margins (*cough* Peña *cough*) suggest these districts may be more politically fluid than many assume, and if Las Cruces and Tucson are an example (and I think they are), change is coming.

NIMBYism remains strong in Albuquerque, reinforced by governance structures that give neighborhood coalitions unusual influence. Yet something shifted last week and the NIMBYs aren’t the only ones in the room anymore. They’re not even the only ones in the neighborhood associations, anymore. The future of the city showed up in larger numbers than the past, and it felt louder than it has in years.

A client came in today.
She’s in high spirits and now on the streets.
We’re getting her documents secured.
She’s working to get away from a partner who beats her.

I went to City Council today.
The neighborhood association is worried a shelter might open.
They don’t want people sleeping outside.
The shelter would hurt their property values and attract pedestrians.

My client came in today.
She couldn’t get into the violence shelter.
There is no space.
They can only prioritize women with young children.
Even then the wait is six months.
She’s going to try the Westside shelter.

There’s a proposal to legalize duplexes.
A councilwoman said it would be disrespectful
to people who already bought a home. They have expectations,
Often for decades.

My client missed the shuttle last night.
Someone robbed her while she slept outside.
We treated her lacerations.

A constituent said she’s worried a new apartment
might bring neighbors who only stay a few years.
It would change the view from Coors.
Council says we should be respectful
of single-family home owners.

My client’s husband found her last night.
We treated her dislocated shoulder
and her swollen face.
She’s in good spirits.

A councilwoman said safe outdoor spaces are undignified.
She wants people inside, where it’s warm.

My client was told it isn’t worth calling the violence shelter.
The waitlist for women with children is too long.
They recommended a new safe outdoor space instead.
It’s safer.
There are ten beds, though, and they’re full.

The City Council heard from the neighborhood association.
They said they were horrified
another safe outdoor space might be allowed.
It was disrespectful to the neighborhood.
The councilor promised no more would be permitted.

My client did not come in this week.
I hope she is okay.

The councilor said she loves duplexes.
She just doesn’t think they should be permissive.
It’s reasonable, she said,
to get permission from all the neighbors
before such a big change is allowed on a block.

My client came back today.
We got her a shower
and a brace for her leg.
She fell into an arroyo ditch while camping.
The infection should subside.

The neighborhood association president said
the sweeping changes young people want
are too fast to understand.
Too complicated.
It’s worth waiting to see what happens.

My client took her brace off today.
Our physical therapist moved to California.
His husband couldn’t find a job here
with his credentials.
Their daughter is starting school soon.
They want to give her opportunity.
He’ll still work in homeless health care
in Los Angeles.

Hopefully we can get my client in at the hospital.

A councilor said it’s not safe
for homeless people to be outside.
She asked why nonprofit providers
aren’t doing more.

We lost another social worker today.
They got an offer at a private practice
for double their salary.
Our city contract doesn’t allow us
to negotiate or match.
We told thirty clients
we would try to find someone else
and hope to keep their cases going
in a few months.

A councilor said people don’t want
a three-story apartment building near them.
What if people parked on the street sometimes?
That would be unfair.

My client was told she couldn’t get a voucher today.
She’ll have to apply again later.
The list is too long.
There’s nowhere to use vouchers anyway.
They wished her luck.

A councilor asked the administration
why half the city’s vouchers expire.
She didn’t believe there weren’t enough apartments.
She saw some on Zillow.

My client’s husband found her again.
We fixed her dislocated shoulder.
She’ll wear a brace for a while.
Her arm was sprained this time.

A neighborhood leader complained
a new affordable housing project
doesn’t respect the scale or character
of the neighborhood.
They demanded better landscaping
and half the size.

One councilor said it was a reasonable concern.
Maybe it could be considered in the future.

My client made real progress this week.
She’s staying on someone’s couch.
They seem optimistic
that things are going to change.

At a public input meeting,
neighbors said they worried
their land values might change too much.
My rent is going up twenty percent.
They said I’d understand
when I worked harder
and bought a single-family home of my own.

My client looks more vibrant today.
Her brace came off again.
We’re getting her documents in order
for a second time.

A councilor asked a police representative
why there are so many homeless people outside
and what we can do about them.

The council voted against zoning reform today.
It would have legalized shelters and duplexes.

My client’s roommate beat her last night
and kicked her out.
We treated her feet for frostbite.

The council passed a bill
increasing voucher funding.
They said they were proud
to have helped solve homelessness.

My client finally got assigned a case manager.
They’ll meet in two months.
It was the earliest opening.

Council wants to ban shopping carts and tents.
They don’t understand
why people don’t use
the resources that are available.

My client’s arm is broken.
Her shoulder is dislocated again.
We’re using a more intensive brace
and treatment plan. He found her again.

A councilor said it makes her sad
to see people outside.
They deserve warm, safe spaces.
She voted against safe outdoor spaces again.

My client’s case management appointment
was cancelled.
The case manager got an offer in Oregon.
They couldn’t afford to stay in Albuquerque.
Their rent kept rising and salaries are too low.

My client got frostbite again.
She tried to get to the Westside shelter.
A dog bit her on the way to the shuttle.
She stayed near the clinic overnight.
We treated the bite, the lacerations,
and gave her a vaccine.

A minister offered to show the council
his safe outdoor space.
He asked that they be widely legalized.
The councilor smiled
as she voted against them again.
It just feels wrong
to let people be outside, she said.

My client is in the hospital.
Her husband found her again.

The neighborhood association president said
they need to be notified
about any changes.
A duplex isn’t bad,
but they should be involved in planning.
You just don’t know
who would live in a duplex.

My boss said it’s never been this bad.
At least the council is talking about reforms
to help get homes built.
It wasn’t this bad
even when the hospitals closed in the eighties.

My client is trying to get a Greyhound ticket
to Tucson.
She found her sister’s phone number.
The charity that provides bus vouchers
is out of money.

The neighborhood association is suing
over the new shelter.
They said they’ve been disrespected.
Their needs aren’t being addressed.

My client’s husband came in today.
He asked if we could help him
pay to collect her ashes.
He said she spoke highly of us.

I took a sick day.

A councilor said the mayor’s obsession
with shelters is awful.
We should be building people homes instead.
She voted against duplexes again.

I put in my two weeks’ notice.
I can’t do this anymore.

Las Cruces has already done the thing we are still afraid to do, even after years of talking around it. They’ve moved past archaic, euclidean zoning and are getting noticed for it.

While Albuquerque once again finds itself in a familiar posture, incremental zoning changes framed as an existential threat, Las Cruces moved past single-family-only zoning. It legalized missing middle housing, allowed small, neighborhood-scale businesses, and began making room for a wider range of people and ways of living. There, too, opponents warned that a new duplex down the street would somehow be the beginning of the end.

It wasn’t.

In Las Cruces, neighborhoods have not vanished or lost their shape. Property taxes didn’t suddenly spike, despite what you might hear on NextDoor or Facebook. Blocks were not overtaken by duplexes filled with faceless strangers, and there was no quiet invasion unfolding in the background. What happened instead was slower and far less dramatic: the city began, imperfectly and unevenly, to make room for a broader mix of homes and households at a moment when New Mexico badly needs places for people to live.

Albuquerque, meanwhile, remains gripped by fear. Fear of change, fear of newcomers, fear of losing control over something that already feels tenuous, and maybe even a fear of our own mortality and grief.. That fear shows up in different forms. Some of it is explicit, some of it is procedural, and some of it is wrapped in the language of caution or concern. But the underlying anxiety is the same: a persistent doubt that a city can become more inclusive without falling apart.

I’ve written about zoning for years, often casually and online, without imagining that I would ever become part of the story myself. Through my involvement with Strong Towns ABQ, though, I’ve found myself in a strange public-facing role, one that has offered an uncomfortably clear view of how housing myths take hold, and how much damage they can do once they spread unchecked. In recent months, that has included not just disinformation, but threatening messages and oddly obsessive social media behavior directed at me and other members of our group.

Some of the claims circulating about Albuquerque’s proposed zoning changes are simply untrue. Others are more revealing than their authors may intend. In my mind, they say less about buildings or even zoning than they do about who we imagine this city is for.

When Fear Detaches from Reality

One claim, in particular, has been repeated often enough to take on the weight of assumed truth among some, particularly among the neighborhood groups in the city: that changing zoning designations in New Mexico will somehow revoke the 3 percent cap on residential property tax assessment increases.

It’s a frightening idea, I’m sure, especially to someone on a fixed income trying to keep up with inflation. And it’s understandable that people would worry about it, especially in a city where housing costs already feel precarious. It doesn’t help that many neighborhood groups receive their information through blogs and platforms that have been amplifying fear and misinformation for years.

Still, I took the claim seriously. Given the stakes, it would have been irresponsible not to. I reached out to the Bernalillo County Assessor’s Office and received long, careful responses indicating they were “working on it.” After more than a month without clarity, I turned instead to Las Cruces, where these zoning changes have already been implemented. Friends there connected with me directly and shared their experiences, what changed and what didn’t, and then even took out their own time to meet with the assessor and deputy assessor in Doña Ana County, the office responsible for property assessments in Las Cruces.

The response from the Doña Ana County Assessor’s office was immediate and unambiguous. Zoning changes are not communicated to assessors in New Mexico, not indirectly, not informally and not as one of several inputs. They simply are not part of the assessment process. The 3 percent cap on residential assessment increases is treated as “sacrosanct.” No assessor touches it, and yes, they really used the word sacrosanct. No zoning change overrides it, and further, they shared that “zoning does not play into how property tax assessments are triangulated.” The reforms adopted in Las Cruces did not affect residential property tax assessments there.

Even in Bernalillo County, where Assessor Damian Lara has understandably been more cautious in public statements (he is currently facing litigation from commercial property owners, I learned as I investigated and reached out to officials throughout the state) this basic reality has been acknowledged. Lara has confirmed to council staff that zoning changes are not communicated to his office, and that the sweeping zoning overhauls Albuquerque adopted in 2017 and 2018 did not affect residential property tax assessments at that time either.

The persistence of this myth has less to do with evidence than with anxiety. Fear, once introduced, travels faster than verification. And once it aligns with broader concerns about affordability, displacement, or loss of control, it becomes difficult to dislodge, even when contradicted by the people responsible for administering the system. For others, though, even with these concerns addressed, are still spreading it intentionally to spur anger, fear, and opposition to needed changes.

What troubles me most is not that people worry about taxes. That concern can be legitimate! What troubles me is how easily misinformation has been allowed to replace inquiry, and how quickly it has been weaponized. In some cases, it has escalated into harassment, intimidation, and even threats. That should alarm us regardless of where we fall on zoning policy. Albuquerque is a big city, but it often feels quite small, and given the tenor of the discussion, I know many in this world have lost a lot of good will toward their neighbors, unnecessarily, too.

“What If the Whole Block Becomes Duplexes?”

Another question surfaces repeatedly, often delivered with a careful neutrality: What if the entire block becomes duplexes? Who would live in them? Don’t we deserve to know?

On its face, this sounds like a planning concern. In practice, it reveals something else.

From an economic standpoint, the scenario doesn’t hold. Even in cities with far higher housing demand, like Portland, Sacramento, and Minneapolis, legalizing missing middle housing has not resulted in wholesale neighborhood transformation. Markets move incrementally. Small projects appear where they make sense: on corner lots, near transit, near schools or amenities, often replacing vacant lots, unsafe abandoned homes, or properties that have been quietly decaying for years. Some of our councilors have openly wondered why Albuquerque suffers from so many rings of abandoned, dilapidated buildings and wondered how strip mall after strip mall sits empty. Well, the answer has a lot to do with single-family zoning.

In any case, the more telling aspect of the question isn’t about market behavior. It’s about subtext. The anxiety is rarely about duplexes themselves, rather, It’s about who might live in them: working-class households, young people, renters, and families who don’t fit neatly into an increasingly narrow idea of “neighborhood compatibility.” Whether intentional or not, it’s a way of imagining neighbors as threats rather than people. I find that deeply sad.

The question also denies what is already happening across Albuquerque. Households are doubling up, adult children are struggling to find space of their own, and families are stretching themselves thin because the housing options available don’t align with their lives. Many people who grew up here, including those of us who want to stay, to build a future, and to feel a sense of belonging, are being pushed toward a false choice: a detached home we can’t afford, or an apartment that offers no path to ownership. Many of us are choosing a third choice: leave New Mexico.

When people insist on needing to know who will live nearby, they are often expressing a desire not for information, but for control. That is not really a zoning question.

The Mirage of “Plenty of Housing”

Another familiar argument goes something like this: “there is no housing shortage, because there are roughly 170,000 parcels slated for single-family homes on the West Mesa.”

Technically, this is true. Practically, it misses the point.

Single-family homes are inherently expensive. They require large parcels, extensive infrastructure, and long commutes. They are the most land-intensive and resource-intensive way to house people, and producing more of them does little to serve the growing share of households whose needs look different. For all the loud detractors of “luxury housing” along Central Avenue, we seem to forget what luxury housing actually looks like. It also ignores what the 2024 Bernalillo County–Albuquerque Regional Housing Assessment made clear: the need for more homes is greatest east of the river and near job centers. People want to live closer to where they work, play, and build their lives. They do not want to live farther away.

More than 42 percent of households today are seeking something that falls between a detached house and a large apartment complex. These households are often, now, smaller households than even just a couple decades ago. They consist of aging residents who want to downsize without leaving their neighborhood, young professionals hoping to build equity, and new families with one or two children who don’t need or want 2,400 square feet and a three-car garage.

We are not building for them. Instead, we continue to reinforce a bifurcated housing market: expensive single-family homes pushed outward, and large apartment complexes clustered along arterials. Everything in between is illegal, discouraged, or treated as an exception. Counting parcels, in this context, is not the same as housing people.

Corridors Help, But They Aren’t Enough

Some point to recent changes along Albuquerque’s transit corridors, such as lifting bans on multifamily housing along Central, as evidence that we already have sufficient zoning capacity. To an extent, that’s true. Corridor reforms matter, and they should be celebrated, but they are not enough on their own.

People don’t choose housing based solely on allowable density. They choose based on livability: noise, safety, proximity to schools and parks, the rhythms of daily life. Someone like me, a young professional thinking about building equity, might want to buy a small condo, a townhouse, or even a duplex with a friend. I might want that option inside a quieter neighborhood, not directly on an arterial, so that future kids can walk to school or bike to the park.

If we don’t offer those options, people leave.

And they are leaving. Anecdotally, most of my friends I graduated with from UNM have left Albuquerque. Even within Strong Towns ABQ, many of us quietly look elsewhere as other cities make these reforms and signal, clearly, that they want people like us and the lives we are trying to build.

Corridor-only density treats missing middle housing as something that must always coexist with traffic and noise, rather than as a natural part of neighborhood life. In a city that has been hesitant to slow cars, narrow lanes, or make arterials safe and less polluted for people outside of vehicles, zoning changes alone do not create neighborhoods people want to live in.

What Edmonton Shows Us

This is where Edmonton becomes instructive. Edmonton, a western, sprawling city not unlike Albuquerque in scale or form, legalized up to eight housing units on residential parcels citywide. Critics predicted disruption. What followed was almost mundane in its predictability. Roughly 80 percent of missing middle housing appeared within 200 meters of major transit corridors. Another 20 percent clustered near activity centers or within bikeable distance of transit.

At a Land Use, Planning, and Zoning Committee (LUPZ) hearing on January 14, my friend Patrick Martin, president of BikeABQ, made an observation that has stayed with me: when we legalize gentle density citywide, we don’t just expand access to transit, we expand the footprint for walking and biking as well. Edmonton bears that out. When modest housing is legal everywhere, people gravitate toward places that support daily life. Density follows infrastructure naturally. The city organizes itself more intelligently than we ever could by drawing harder lines. It also should help alleviate concerns that far-flung neighborhoods will become endless rows of duplexes and townhomes.

Arbitrary Lines and Real Consequences

In Albuquerque, those lines are drawn narrowly and often arbitrarily—one block, maybe two, on either side of an arterial. Step two blocks inward, and the rules change entirely.

A parcel two blocks from Central, San Mateo, or Carlisle can be just as walkable as one directly adjacent to it. Yet under current zoning, it is often limited to a single-family home. The message to small builders is clear: don’t bother.

I’ve heard this directly from builders who would love to build duplexes, townhomes, or fourplexes in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, but find the rules impractical. Even where these housing types are technically allowed, the burden of creating a new, non-scalable “product” is often too high.

This is where citywide changes matter. Not because they dictate outcomes, but because they remove the artificial bottleneck created by those lines on a map. If a lot becomes available a block or two in from what we currently label a “corridor,” it can respond to actual demand. Maybe it becomes a duplex. Maybe it stays a single-family home. Maybe it turns into a couple of townhomes. The point isn’t to prescribe the result—it’s to allow the possibility.

That possibility makes a difference. It acknowledges that cities don’t grow according to clean diagrams or color-coded maps, and that human needs don’t always align neatly with the boundaries we draw. When modest housing types are legal everywhere, growth becomes more organic, more incremental, and more responsive to how people actually live.

Without that flexibility, the outcome is predictable: consolidation. Fewer builders. Fewer housing types. Less resilience. Detractors often say they don’t want large developers to be the only players in town. However, the rules they defend are making that outcome inevitable.

Las Cruces Chose a Different Path

Las Cruces chose differently. In November, Silver City did too.

They legalized missing middle housing. They also allowed neighborhood-scale businesses. They trusted their communities to absorb change incrementally rather than catastrophically.

The Doña Ana County Assessor’s Office has confirmed that these reforms did not affect residential property tax assessments. At the same time, Las Cruces has become more attractive to businesses, more welcoming to families, and more flexible in how it grows. Builders in Albuquerque have told me these changes have given them reason to stay in New Mexico rather than looking to Colorado, Texas, or Arizona, where similar reforms have already opened more opportunity.

No one is pretending Las Cruces transformed overnight. That restraint is precisely the point. These reforms are modest by design and meaningful because of it.

What Change Actually Looks Like

The future people fear rarely resembles the one that arrives. In practice, this looks like a small cluster of townhomes on a corner a few blocks away. It looks like adult children staying nearby instead of leaving the state. It looks like grandparents downsizing without being pushed to the fringe, remaining close to family. It looks like the neighborhood businesses that we claim we prefer finally receiving enough foot and bike traffic to survive.

What we need is a housing chain that is allowed to move. Right now, in New Mexico, it is frozen. Allowing young professionals to move from apartments into ownership options (yes, even so-called “luxury” apartments) frees up homes for people further down the line who need them more. To me, that movement is about belonging.

Albuquerque’s Choice

Albuquerque may not be able to avoid this conversation much longer. State legislators and the governor are increasingly aware of the strain housing scarcity places on our economy, workforce, and tax base. As of time of writing, the Governor, in fact, placed a state-wide zoning reform on her call list for the legislative session.

So the question is simple: does Albuquerque want to lead, or wait to be told?

Las Cruces has already shown that change does not require panic. Silver City has followed. We can continue to cling to fear, disinformation, and a false sense of control, or we can chart a future that welcomes people rather than interrogating them. These cities also proved that municipalities can be expected to respond to this issue and in doing so, given permission for the State to take over if other municipalities fail to act.

Leaving fear behind does not mean abandoning care. If anything, it means taking care seriously, trusting ourselves, and one another, enough to stop treating housing as a zero-sum game.

Other New Mexico cities already have.

We are not growing fast. We are not being overrun by speculative capital. We are not facing the pressures of Austin, Denver, Los Angeles, or Phoenix. And because of that, it is tempting to conclude that we don’t need to change very much and that modest adjustments will suffice, that we can wait until growth forces our hand.

However, even without a population boom, the pressure is already here. Home prices have climbed sharply, rents are up more than 60 percent since 2017, and Albuquerque is short tens of thousands of homes, all while wages have struggled to keep pace. In a city like Albuquerque, slow growth doesn’t insulate us from these pressures, it often makes them harder to unwind. That’s why reform starts to matter sooner, not later, and the logic of not addressing these issues just doesn’t work.

In a recent Journal op-ed, Max Gruner argued that housing is Albuquerque’s most binding economic constraint. He’s right! Housing is not just a social good or a quality-of-life issue; it is the foundation of economic opportunity. Every employer considering Albuquerque asks the same question first: where will our people live?

If we cannot answer that confidently, investment goes elsewhere.

Gruner isn’t breaking new ground here. Economists have been making this case for decades. Edward Glaeser, one of the original voices many early urbanists and YIMBYs will recognize, has repeatedly shown that when housing supply is constrained, cities don’t stop growing. They simply convert potential job and population growth into higher prices instead of broader participation. Opportunity doesn’t disappear; it becomes gated and incredibly hard to access, or it goes elsewhere altogether.

Looked at this way, zoning isn’t just a neutral backdrop. It acts more like an economic filter, shaping who can realistically participate in a city’s opportunities and who can’t. When our cities restrict where and how housing can be built, they are not preserving stability, they are deciding who gets access to opportunity and who does not.

Where I want to build on that argument is how our land-use system answers that question and also where it quietly fails to. Albuquerque is currently debating zoning code amendments that would finally move us beyond R-1 zoning and its exclusionary setbacks (figuratively and literally), legalizing duplexes, townhomes, cottage courts, small corner businesses, and reducing parking mandates, while also making casitas easier for homeowners to construct. Much of the opposition frames this as unnecessary, arguing that Albuquerque already has “enough zoned capacity” along corridors like Central Avenue, Broadway, and Fourth Street (though they also show up to oppose these projects, too!).

But housing isn’t just a math problem. Capacity on paper doesn’t always translate into real options for people trying to live their lives, and capacity alone doesn’t account for the breadth of human needs, experiences, and life stages.

Corridors Were a Start But Not a Complete System

For more than a decade, Albuquerque’s planning framework has relied heavily on a “Centers and Corridors” model. Growth is encouraged along major streets and in designated nodes, while most residential neighborhoods remain largely unchanged.

This approach was not wrong. It helped the city take a first step away from endless outward expansion. It concentrated apartments near transit, jobs, and services which is also a good thing. It reduced pressures on open space and infrastructure. The adoption of the Integrated Development Ordinance in 2017 strengthened this framework by allowing more mixed-use development, improving street design, and modernizing outdated zoning rules. In some places, the fruits of these reforms are already showing in subtle ways that give nerds like me small doses of optimism.

But the limits of this model are now visible and not just in Albuquerque, but across North America.

Albuquerque’s corridors are extraordinarily narrow in zoning terms, often just one or two blocks deep, even as they are physically wide, fast, and hostile streets. Concentrating nearly all housing change in these thin bands has produced a distorted housing pipeline: large, capital-intensive rental apartment buildings dominate, while smaller ownership-oriented homes are excluded almost everywhere else. Restrictions away from these corridors also have a paradoxical effect of dampening even large investment.

Part of the problem is that we often talk about housing as if it were a single thing, or a single “product.” Apartments are essential, and renting should not be stigmatized (especially in neighborhoods historically labeled “single-family”). However, cities also need townhomes, duplexes, courtyard apartments, small condos, and incremental infill, homes that allow people to buy, downsize, age in place, and stay rooted in their communities or to stay in their communities in the first place.

When those forms are banned almost everywhere except a few arterials, scarcity doesn’t really go away, it just shows up in different places or manifests in new ways.

The Toronto Trap

Toronto offers a cautionary example of where corridor-only planning can lead when taken to its extreme.

When Toronto’s population surpassed that of Montréal, the mayor of Montréal, Jean Drapeau, was asked his thoughts on that matter: “”Let Toronto become Milan. Montreal will always be Rome,” was his famous response. Toronto, often typified as a sleepy city despite its growing size, was, like Milan, growing rapidly.

As the city grew into Canada’s financial and economic center, attracting jobs, talent, and global attention, it adopted a planning framework heavily centered on corridors. Dramatic lines of high-rise towers rose along transit routes, while vast interior neighborhoods remained frozen in single-detached zoning.

The skyline is impressive, among the most shockingly breathtaking in the continent, but the housing outcomes are not.

Families have been pushed out, townhomes and small condos are scarce and expensive, price escalation has been relentless. Development has been funneled into ever-taller towers because gentler forms were illegal almost everywhere else. New families are often finding themselves leaving the core of Toronto into the suburbs, and contributing to the city’s infamous congestion, unable to find multi-bedroom homes easily. Toronto physically shows the lack of missing middle in its extreme, as well as the exclusion it can create.

The paradox is also this: when cities ban gentle density everywhere except their busiest streets, they don’t avoid change, they concentrate it into the most disruptive forms. People who say they don’t want towers often help create the conditions that make towers inevitable.

Toronto has begun to respond by legalizing fourplexes citywide and continuing major transit investment. But even planners there increasingly recognize that limited legalization is not enough. Corridors alone cannot absorb the full spectrum of housing demand without distorting outcomes. On that note, we can all learn from Montréal, and its diverse housing stock.

Housing Is How Opportunity Moves

A large body of economic research shows that housing markets are not a side issue to economic performance. They are one of its central mechanisms.

When housing supply is constrained, job growth does not disappear, it turns into higher prices instead of broader participation. Edward Glaeser has shown that restrictive housing markets convert economic dynamism into rising rents and home values, pricing people out or delaying their ability to move to opportunity. Growth still happens but not in a way most people can access.

Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti extend this logic nationally. They estimate that housing constraints in high-productivity regions have materially reduced aggregate U.S. economic output by preventing workers from moving to where they are most productive. In other words, housing shortages don’t just affect where people live, they even affect what the economy can become.

This is not just a problem for booming regions like the Bay Area or other employment-rich areas held back by extreme housing shortages. Research from the National Low Income Housing Coalition shows that worsening housing affordability has statistically significant negative effects on metro GDP growth. Policy analyses from the Bipartisan Policy Center and federal economic reviews tie housing shortages directly to reduced labor mobility and employer recruitment challenges. If anything, slow growth raises the stakes. It leaves less room for mistakes and fewer chances to recover. In a city like Albuquerque, constrained housing does not preserve stability. Instead of widening access, opportunity gets capitalized into higher prices and fewer people actually get to participate at all.

The Missing Ecosystem

Cullum Clark’s research on housing and opportunity helps explain why (and Strong Towns followers will also recognize some of these beats!).

Cities that succeed aren’t just those with demand; they’re the ones that signal seriousness. Through their rules, they tell builders, employers, and residents that participation in the local economy is expected and not treated as an exception to be fought over in endless expensive hearings or appeals. In that sense, housing reform is not just permissive, It is communicative about what we as a city value and want.

What often gets missed in corridor-only planning is that housing isn’t just about where buildings go or the adequacy of “capacity.” In reality, it is also about who can build the buildings in the first place. When zoning only works for large, capital-intensive projects on limited parcels, it filters out smaller builders, local developers, and incremental investment. The system becomes fragile. When financing tightens, as it inevitably does, production stalls.

By contrast, cities that legalize missing-middle housing and mixed-use development across substantial portions of the city create an ecosystem. Different builders operate at different scales. Risk is distributed. Projects can happen even when market conditions are difficult. Neighborhood change is gradual rather than lurching and dependent on the ups and downs of stock markets and economic cycles.

Clark’s makes recommendations that are strikingly mundane, and that is precisely the point:

• allow duplexes and townhomes broadly,

• reduce minimum lot sizes,

• let housing exist in underused commercial areas,

• remove excessive parking mandates,

• and make room for new construction methods like modular and prefab.

Cities that want housing to happen don’t just legalize it in theory. They take the next step and remove the friction that makes it unnecessarily expensive in practice.

Much of this mirrors what Albuquerque is debating right now through the IDO amendments.

Corridors Work Better When Neighborhoods Work

Minneapolis and Portland are often raised in Albuquerque’s debates sometimes as models, sometimes as cautionary tales. In practice, the data tells a more nuanced story.

Yes, most housing in those cities is still built along corridors. That makes sense. But legalized missing-middle housing is being built too — slowly, incrementally, often by smaller builders, often in neighborhoods that benefit from new customers, more eyes on the street, and more everyday activity.

There really isn’t a lot of evidence that these types of changes lead to upheaval or feared changes, but it does lead to optionality and choice. What’s interesting, too, is that this ends up strengthening corridors rather than undermining them. When neighborhoods can absorb some demand, corridors are no longer forced to carry everything. Land prices stabilize. Projects diversify. Transit-oriented development becomes more viable, not less.

Corridors anchor growth. Neighborhood flexibility makes that growth functional. Urban intensity doesn’t appear randomly. In most cities, especially before modern zoning (including Albuquerque), higher activity tended to coalesce along the most connected streets and at important intersections, then taper off into quieter residential fabric. Space Syntax researchers describe this as a kind of “movement economy”: the streets that naturally carry more movement attract shops and services, which attract more movement, which can support more intensity, while the streets just a block, or multiple blocks away, remain calmer and more domestic. In other words, corridors aren’t just planning abstractions; they’re the visible result of a deeper pattern. In Albuquerque, we’ve ended up asking corridors to do all the work, while blocking the gradual taper that usually forms behind them, though we attempt to do so with concepts like “neighborhood edge,” which as we see in Toronto, doesn’t quite create the effect that we desire.

Lifting the ban on missing middle doesn’t weaken corridors. It lets corridors function as corridors anchoring activity while the neighborhood fabric can absorb and taper it, instead of forcing everything onto a thin strip of hostile arterials.

Albuquerque’s Catch-22

Albuquerque is caught in a familiar and damaging loop.

We tell ourselves growth is slow, so major reform isn’t urgent. Then we fail to reform, housing tightens, investment hesitates, and growth remains slow. Young people leave. Employers struggle to recruit. Older residents want to downsize but cannot find options that let them stay in their neighborhoods. Once that pattern sets in, it tends to reinforce itself with slow growth justifying inaction, and inaction helping keep growth slow.

Cullum Clark’s insight is that cities do not attract opportunity by waiting for it. They attract it by demonstrating readiness. Housing reform is one of the clearest ways to do that — signaling that participation is expected and that the city believes in its own future.

Right now, Albuquerque’s zoning sends the opposite message.

It shouldn’t.

What R-1 Really Means

Single-family zoning is often framed as neutral or traditional. It is neither. It is a mid-20th-century exclusionary tool that outlawed the very housing forms Albuquerque once took for granted: casitas, duplexes, courtyard apartments, and the corner businesses that supported them.

Legalizing these forms isn’t especially radical. It’s closer to a course correction. It is a return to growth patterns that are fundamentally human.

Evidence from other cities shows that uptake is slow and selective, especially far from transit and job centers. Most lots never redevelop as fearmongers speculate they will. What changes is not the neighborhood overnight, but the possibility space over time. That possibility matters a lot!

Why This Is Personal (and Structural)

You can see all this play out in the housing market every day.

I’ve recently been privileged to learn from members of Albuquerque’s realtor association, and in meetings with them, I heard repeated concern about how low churn and transaction rates have become and not because people don’t want to move, but because they can’t. Older homeowners want to downsize without leaving their neighborhoods, but there are no homes that fit that need. Younger buyers search, stall, and eventually give up as even modest condos escalate in price faster than their salaries grow. For me, these are narratives we hear a lot as advocates in Strong Towns and in YIMBY groups, so hearing the same stories echoed so bluntly by people who work in the market every day was both validating and discouraging.

What planners debate in public hearings is already visible in the data is also showing in lived experience. A housing market with no movement is not stable. It is stuck. And stuck markets like ours do not generate opportunity.

I would love to buy a small condo or townhome in Albuquerque as would many in my orbit. Many people would. But when those homes are only allowed on a tiny fraction of land, production becomes sporadic and risky. Local builders cannot scale and projects happen once every few years, if at all.

Why invest in a product the city has made structurally scarce?

This is not a lifestyle preference problem. It is a systems problem.

Beyond Corridors

If Albuquerque truly believes in corridors, then we must widen them, not just geographically, but economically and socially (in the zoning, sense. We could stand to lose some lanes of traffic in the physical sense!).

That means legalizing missing-middle housing citywide, allowing small homes away from fast arterials, reducing parking mandates that inflate costs, and creating a housing ecosystem resilient enough to survive market swings. Corridors are good at anchoring growth, but they struggle when they’re asked to carry the entire city on their backs.

Housing reform will not solve every challenge overnight. But it is the clearest signal Albuquerque can send that it intends to escape the Catch-22 — that it is ready not just to manage decline gently, but to build opportunity deliberately.

In the end, housing isn’t only about where we live. It’s about whether a city is willing to plan for a future people can actually stay in.

I have been thinking a lot about Albuquerque’s suburbs lately, strangely enough.

That is partly because I have been reading Diane Alisa’s Love Letter to Suburbia, a book that surprised me with how gentle it is toward places that are usually spoken about with either nostalgia or contempt. Alisa does not treat suburbia as a total mistake. She treats it as an incomplete promise. Something that was meant to support family life, stability, and community, but that has been quietly constrained by rules that no longer reflect how families actually live.

I did not set out to read it as an Albuquerque book. But once I started, it became hard not to, and Alisa’s own evolution of her love of her home of Utah in some ways mirrored my own experiences with my home of New Mexico. It also helps that both of our states are western expanses known for their natural beauty but with urban environments that tend toward the endlessly sprawling.

The timing probably matters, too. We are in the middle of another round of debates over the IDO amendments (the IDO is the zoning code of Albuquerque), and much of the resistance is coming from suburban districts. That makes a certain kind of sense. These councilors represent places built around single family homes, quiet streets, and a presumption of predictability. When people show up angry about duplexes or casitas, what they are really defending is not a building type. It is a feeling: the sense that something stable could be taken away.

What has been harder for me to reconcile is how little that fear seems to line up with what actually happens when these changes pass. When O-69 passed, the reaction from some neighborhood groups was intense. We were told the city was being fundamentally altered, that development would flood in, and that neighborhoods would be overwhelmed and lose whatever made them distinct.

And then the election happened.

Dan Lewis, who sponsored O-69, won reelection comfortably. His district is the far Northwest of the city, about as close as Albuquerque gets to a prototypical suburban district. It is also home to some of the loudest and most organized anti-homes groups in the city, including the Westside Coalition of Neighborhood Associations, known locally as WSCONA [pronounced Wes-Kona], which has continued to organize aggressively against pro-homes proposals this year. He also spearheaded the efforts attached to O-69 to really soften neighborhood association power in land use appeals, making our system far more predictable.

If opposition to housing reform were truly decisive at the ballot box, that race should have been close. It was not. Lewis won, despite loud opposition on these issues.

At the same time, Klarissa Peña, the only incumbent councilor who opposed O-69, was forced into a runoff and won by just 68 votes. Housing was not the only issue in that race. Peña has increasingly been associated with corruption, mismanagement of public dollars, and a visitor center that sits empty and fenced off on the mesa, and that also mattered. But her anti-homes stance clearly helped mobilize people to canvass and donate against her, including many in my orbit, myself included.

I keep turning that contrast over in my head. Not because it proves anything conclusively, but because it complicates the story we keep telling ourselves about political risk. The outrage is loud and It just does not map cleanly onto where most voters actually are.

When I talk with suburban councilors or see comments from neighborhood groups, the same question comes up again and again. What if an entire block becomes duplexes? Who would live in them?

I understand why that image is unsettling, or at least I can try to. It imagines change happening all at once. It imagines a neighborhood flipping overnight into something unfamiliar. It brings up worries about parking, about noise, about not quite recognizing the place you thought you knew. There are other anxieties mixed in too, though they are rarely spoken plainly.

What makes it strange is how disconnected that fear is from how zoning reform actually works and how reform translates into tangible change.

Casitas, even with their many onerous requirements, have been legal in Albuquerque for a few years now. For a long time, almost nothing happened. Only recently has uptake begun to increase, and even now it remains slow and uneven. Most lots still have one home and most blocks still look the same. What has changed is not the appearance of neighborhoods, but the range of choices available when life circumstances shift. Or maybe just one additional choice. If change has been slow, uptake gentle, but choices expanded, why should we stand in the way of allowing this change? The sky has not fallen as was predicted when these changes passed into law.

In other cities that have legalized missing middle housing, the pattern looks similar. Infill happens one project at a time. A duplex here. A small fourplex there. Often, they’re built by local builders and sometimes built by people who already live nearby. In Portland, these changes are spread out but meaningful, making smaller homes accessible to people like me, including in neighborhoods near light rail. Why not here?

Zoning does not force anything to happen. As Mikaela Renz-Whitmore has said in explaining these reforms, zoning mostly determines what is allowed and what is forbidden. It opens doors but It does not push people through them.

Reading Love Letter to Suburbia helps me see why the fear still lingers anyway.

Alisa is deeply critical of how rigid zoning shapes family life, not by accident, but by design. The system assumes households remain static over time. That grandparents will not need to adapt, that adult children will not want to return, or that childcare will be formalized and separated from daily life, and even that kids will grow up without meaningful connection to the people around them. Over time, those assumptions harden into physical distance.

Flexible zoning makes room for those changes without requiring families to leave their neighborhoods behind. It can mean grandparents downsizing nearby while staying close to their grandchildren and not being forced into a 55+ community or nursing facility far from their home neighborhood. It can mean adult children remaining close to parents, maintaining family ties and cultural continuity, and not having to chase jobs in other states or having to find homes in Rio Rancho( or further still). It can mean shared childcare, shorter commutes, and more time together. For Alisa, living close to her mother allows her to work, write, and parent her children along with her partner and parents.

What Alisa is really describing is not nostalgia for some lost past, but the rebuilding of something we used to take for granted: neighborhoods that could absorb change without breaking apart. Her version of the American village is not dense by mandate or frozen in time. It is flexible, incremental, and shaped by the people who already live there.

The pro-homes IDO amendments are not a full realization of that vision. But they are a step in that direction. They loosen the rules just enough to allow ordinary adaptation to happen again, one lot and one family at a time.

Adopting a more flexible zoning code also means having more people around. More neighbors, and with time, more familiarity. That matters for safety in ways that do not show up in our usual talking points. Parents traditionally understood this instinctively. If your neighbors know your child, independence for them feels less risky. Kids can move around, explore, make friends, and grow, with the quiet knowledge that there are familiar adults nearby. In my own childhood, I was lucky to be given a lot of free-range and independence. In New Mexico today, even in smaller towns as where I grew up, children don’t have much leeway, and parents rightfully fear their kids being ran over by speeding traffic.

Alisa goes a step further here, and this is one part I keep circling back to. She spends time on how children actually learn competence, not through constant supervision, but through participation in ordinary life. Small errands, navigating familiar streets, and being trusted with a little responsibility before anyone feels fully ready for it. Even in our current debates, opponents of these reforms often reminisce about being given a few dollars to walk to a corner store to buy eggs for the family and a small candy as recompense. This is an experience we are almost denying our own children and one that we can start to correct through these thoughtful reforms.

Alisa also believes that when neighborhoods are interesting and alive, kids do not need to be entertained all the time. There are things to notice, places to go,, and a sense that the world around them is meant to be engaged with, not just passed through from the back seat of a crossover.

When the places we create stop offering that, something else fills the space. Screens are easy and ubiquitous, and lead our children increasingly into scary echo chambers that simulate a sense of community that they crave. Endless scrolling is not really a moral failure or a parenting one. It feels more like a predictable response to environments that do not ask much of young people and do not give much back. It is hard to build confidence, judgment, or curiosity in places designed mostly for cars, long commutes, and adults moving quickly from one obligation to the next.

At the same time, Albuquerque’s schools are losing enrollment. In our system, funding follows students. In neighborhoods where little new housing is built and housing choices are limited, churn slows. Over time, those places age in place, and aging gives way to stagnation, and stagnation to disinvestment.

Housing policy, school stability, and public safety are not separate conversations. They bleed into one another. That connection has started to show up in places that once felt insulated.

It came up clearly during the recent mayoral debates. Several candidates, particularly those speaking from suburban parts of the city, talked about seeing more visible crime and more people struggling than they ever remember in their neighborhoods. In the context of a campaign, those observations were often aimed at the mayor they were running against. That might be how elections work but the pattern itself feels older than any single administration. What they were describing sounded less like a sudden change in leadership and more like the slow accumulation of housing scarcity and disinvestment finally becoming visible everywhere at once.

Alisa writes about this too. Suburbia depends on the health of the whole city. When the system strains, suburbs feel it. For a long time, Albuquerque has operated on the assumption that these pressures could be managed through containment. Say no here and hope the consequences land somewhere else. In reality, that approach has meant that certain neighborhoods, including the International District, have been asked to absorb far more than their share, through both explicit decisions and long-standing structural patterns. That was never sustainable, and it was never fair.

A housing shortage, especially as it continues to be pushed past the boiling point, does not respect those boundaries. It just can’t.

It affects young professionals trying to buy their first home like me just as It affects seniors on fixed incomes. It affects families doubling up with each other or even being forced to sleep in their car. It affects people one rent increase or medical bill away from losing stability. Over time, it reshapes neighborhoods quietly. Less “churn” and fewer new families has consequences. Schools shrink, commercial corridors thin rather than renew. We see this increasingly in Albuquerque.

Housing reform alone will not solve homelessness or crime. But chronic housing scarcity makes both harder to address. Without enough places for people to land at different stages of life and income, every other response becomes reactive.

This is not abstract for me.

Earlier this year, I stopped considering buying a home. Not because I do not want to settle down, but because the math did not make sense. Even as my salary increased, the cost of modest condos and small homes near Downtown rose faster. Eventually, I decided to keep renting. And as our city has been slow to adopt reform like these or to encourage better development, I’ve also thought of leaving.

In recent conversations with realtors across the metro, I learned this is increasingly common and something they’re hearing more every day. Transactions are down and there is very little churn in our housing market. Younger buyers who do want to buy are looking for smaller homes, shared outdoor space, and walkability. Much of that housing is illegal to build in Albuquerque.

Two of my friends who did recently purchase a home deliberately chose to do so near Nob Hill, and these proposals are exciting to them as they value the concept of co-living. They would love to turn their backyard into several cottages or casitas that could be shared with friends, including an outdoor kitchen that people could socialize at. We aren’t making these options easy, even for people that have the ability, time, and resources to make it happen. How can you when flexibility and choice is largely illegal?

According to these realtors, too, some of these younger buyers are leaving the metro altogether. Realtors are feeling it, hard. When there is no movement, when we prevent choice from being offered, everyone loses.

Large single family homes are becoming mismatched with demand, while younger households delay parenthood or leave because they cannot find something that fits their lives. We make it illegal to convert a single family home into a duplex or triplex, something that could help both address our shortage, create infill, help rebuild community and families, and stimulate our economy. There is demand for that!

Albuquerque feels stuck between eras. Flexible zoning will not fix everything, but without it, I am not sure how we get unstuck.

All of this has made me think differently about how suburban councilors are approaching this moment. The pro-homes IDO amendments do not erase suburbs nor do they force density. They do not require neighborhoods to change overnight (zoning, really, is not a good tool for demanding anything, anyhow).

The amendments would allow small projects. They give families options when life changes and allow us to keep value in our homes, in all the ways that value manifests. They help stabilize schools and slow long-term disinvestment, all while stopping displacement, crime, and helping keep our neighbors from falling into homelessness.

They also seem far less politically risky than many assume.

Dan Lewis’s reelection already showed that. You can legalize homes, and even openly defy the organized groups like WSCONA, and get reelected. The sky does not fall. What changes is that the rules become clearer and families have more room to adapt.

The current IDO amendments feel less like a break from the past than a continuation of that work. A chance to keep moving toward a system that is flexible enough to support everyday life, and predictable enough to earn trust. In Alisa’s terms, that is how villages are rebuilt: slowly, locally, and by design. The city is changing. The electorate is changing. And the families Albuquerque risks losing are paying attention.

Last night, at a District 2 zoning meeting hosted by Councilor Baca, a woman compared the idea of legalizing townhomes to “being raped.” I wish I were exaggerating. The room kept swelling with the kind of fear and misinformation that is familiar to anyone who has ever attended one of these meetings: people insisting zoning changes would raise their property taxes (they won’t) and then, without a blink, insisting more homes would also destroy their property values; people convinced that allowing a duplex on the next block is the first domino in the unraveling of Albuquerque.

And I understand why this environment gets to councilors. If this were the only “public input” they ever heard, I would probably hesitate too. It is loud and emotional and often hostile. It is meant to pin you to the floor. But I keep returning to something simple and increasingly undeniable: this is not the electorate. And every recent election in New Mexico makes that clearer.

Because if you look around the state — and even inside our own city — the people who have championed more homes, more options, and more flexibility have not only survived politically, they’ve thrived. Las Cruces is the most obvious example. The Realize Las Cruces overhaul, which legalized duplexes citywide, allowed fourplexes and small apartments across much of the city, and brought back the possibility of tienditas and neighborhood daycares, was a genuinely transformative reform. It was also controversial. And yet Becky Corran, one of its most prominent supporters, representing a suburban foothill district, won reelection even though her stance on housing was the central line of attack from an opponent vehemently angry about these reforms. Voters didn’t punish her — they rewarded her.

Silver City followed with reforms that in some ways went even further, allowing up to eight homes on a lot and relegalizing neighborhood shops. And what was the response? Mostly curiosity, optimism, and pragmatism. People talked about the possibility of keeping their kids in town, of addressing homelessness, of giving residents actual choices. The local news treated the zoning overhaul as almost secondary to rising sanitation rates. The level of heat and fear that Albuquerque reliably generates around even modest reforms simply didn’t materialize there.

Here at home, the pattern is just as clear. It is impossible to understand the current housing debate dynamics without understanding O-69. For anyone who didn’t follow it, O-69 was a recent zoning reform that finally allowed more homes along our main corridors, especially Central, after years of rules that made even small apartments or mixed-use buildings nearly impossible. It was a breakthrough and one of the most important housing changes the city has ever passed, but it only applied to narrow ribbons of land and it left parking mandates intact, so it could never be the whole solution. Even so, it became the center of a loud backlash from neighborhood coalitions who turned it into a symbol of everything they feared about change and ran candidates against it. And voters responded clearly.

Tammy Fiebelkorn faced a challenge from a NIMBY stalwart running as a write-in with substantial lobbyist support and messaging built explicitly around anger at O-69 and other pro-housing policies. Tammy represents a largely suburban district. She won easily. Dan Lewis, a Republican on the Westside who also supported O-69 and faced vitriolic opposition from the Westside Coalition of Neighborhood Associations, also sailed to reelection. Meanwhile, Klarissa Peña — the only incumbent who voted against O-69 — survived by sixty-eight votes. Her opposition to more homes mobilized people who had never canvassed in their lives. People knocked doors, donated money, volunteered time. It was one of the first local races in years where the “housing voters” were unmistakably present.

Even the mayoral race told the same story. At the Strong Towns ABQ / BikeABQ forum, Tim Keller was the only candidate who openly supported legalizing more homes throughout the entire city. Alex Uballez, who began the race with significant enthusiasm and progressive energy, lost support precisely because he would not commit to the reforms. People who had planned to volunteer for him peeled away. People who had donated reconsidered, including myself. Housing is now one of the issues in local politics that can meaningfully shift allegiance. It is not abstract anymore; people feel it deeply.

Even independent observers saw the same pattern in the mayoral race. Stephanie Nakhleh, in her recent Substack analysis of how Tim Keller should use his third term, noted that during the campaign Keller was the only candidate to raise his hand for citywide duplex legalization and was willing to call out NIMBY resistance as a barrier to solving the housing shortage — a stance that likely cost him votes but didn’t cost him the election. Her piece argues that voters appear to reward leaders who speak plainly about housing reform, underscoring that this issue was not a fringe concern but a central part of what Albuquerque voters cared about in 2025.

And it wasn’t just Keller and Uballez who revealed the shifting politics around housing. The only other councilor besides Klarissa Peña to vote against O-69 was Louie Sanchez, who gave up his council seat for a chance to become mayor — and won six percent of the vote. Six. He didn’t even make the runoff. His entire campaign leaned into the same anti-housing anger he’d voiced on council, the same instinct to shut the door and hope the problem disappears. Voters didn’t buy it. They didn’t reward his obstruction. In a city where the housing shortage is no longer an abstract policy issue but a daily, grinding reality, that message simply didn’t land.

And then there is the narrative, usually repeated by the same people who oppose all of this, that these reforms have had “no public input.” I don’t know how else to say this, but that simply isn’t true. Albuquerque began considering lifting the duplex ban in 2022 during Housing Forward. I gave input. Many of you reading this did too. And if you go all the way back to 2017, the themes in the public comments are consistent: the city needs deeply affordable units, yes, but it also desperately needs general affordability. It needs homes across the entire spectrum but we also need to relegalize the missing middle, those small apartments, converted garages, small-lot homes, cottages, the kinds of things that used to exist naturally before zoning choked them off. The public has been telling the city this for years. What is really being requested now is not more input but for the city to act on the input it already received.

Across the country, cities are arriving at the same conclusion. Tucson passed a suite of reforms remarkably similar to what Albuquerque is now considering, explicitly to keep young people in Tucson, address homelessness, and prevent the quiet erosion of opportunity just several nights ago. And Toronto, after relying for decades on a corridor-focused strategy that Albuquerque has leaned into, finally legalized four homes per lot citywide because the corridor-only model collapsed under its own weight. When you restrict growth to a handful of streets, you guarantee expensive towers, bottlenecks, and displacement as Toronto demonstrates. Corridor planning alone cannot carry the load, it needs to be in a larger, more holistic model. Everywhere you look, cities that adopt abundance as a principle are starting to stabilize rents, retain residents, and create the kinds of environments where builders, especially local builders, can actually survive fluctuating markets.

The stakes aren’t abstract. At the District 2 meeting, after all the shouting, the fear, and the performative outrage, something else happened. Liz, a nurse who cares for unhoused patients, spoke about wanting to see her clients housed and one day wanting a home of her own. She was shouted down by neighborhood leader Loretta Naranjo-Lopez, who insisted these policies “have nothing to do with this.” But they do. They have everything to do with it. Carlos spoke about how his parents bought their home at twenty and how it took him ten years of saving, despite having a good job, to buy his condo. He talked about how the reforms finally feel like a door cracking open for people like him.

And afterwards, people approached us quietly. People who didn’t speak. People who didn’t shout. People who thanked us for what we said and said they hoped the reforms pass. There is a quiet majority in Albuquerque, and they don’t always raise their hands during public comment. But they are paying attention. They are living the consequences of our housing shortage, of their children being priced out of the neighborhoods they were raised in, or having to chase job promotions out of state. And many of them, for the first time, are getting involved.

Strong Towns ABQ has spent the last several months listening, gathering stories, and watching the city wake up to what housing reform actually means for their lives. The hundreds of comments on our open letter have been some of the clearest and most heartfelt expressions of what people want for Albuquerque. They stand in stark contrast to the fear that dominated the meeting this week. If you feel the same way, we invite you to join us, add your name, and help us keep that quieter but much larger momentum alive.

Which brings me back to the question of fear. Councilors are scared of the loudest people in the room, not because those people represent the city’s voters, but because they dominate the atmosphere. But the political risk is not where they think it is. The recent elections make that unmistakable. The committees, the planning processes, the years of housing studies and community feedback all point in the same direction. People want choices. People want affordability. People want neighborhoods where their kids can live near them and where older adults can age in place and where nurses don’t have to watch their patients die outside because there aren’t enough homes inside.

Albuquerque voters are ready. Albuquerque’s future depends on this. And the councilors who choose to lead, instead of yielding to the loudest and most fearful voices, are not stepping into a political void. They are stepping into a mandate that has been building for nearly a decade.

I don’t think councilors need to fear the NIMBYs.
I think they need to fear wasting the moment when Albuquerque finally could have chosen to become the kind of city people can stay in (and come back to) instead of the kind they leave.

I’ve been thinking about leaving Albuquerque. It’s becoming clearer every time I catch myself scrolling listings in other cities or joining a Facebook group for cat-friendly roommate searches in Los Angeles. It’s a private kind of thought, the kind that grows slowly until one day you realize you’ve been carrying it around for months. Or maybe not so private since I tend to share pretty openly.

People sometimes talk about “brain drain” as if it were a vague policy term, but to me it feels like a description of my own life and the lives of my friends. PBS Newshour once said New Mexico was “down in the dumps” because so many young people leave, and New Mexico In Depth asked how we could ever fix a system that seems designed to push talent away rather than hold on to it. Even UNM’s population projections warn that we’re becoming an older, slower-growing state, a place where the demographic future feels suspended rather than unfolding.

When I think back to undergrad at UNM, it didn’t feel like we were all desperate to flee; it felt more like people slowly waking up to the possibilities that existed elsewhere. One of my closest friends returned to Los Angeles for the culture, the density, the creative spark, the dating life. Others drifted to Portland, Seattle, Denver, Chicago, even abroad. Urbanism had something to do with it, though I doubt any of us named it that at the time. It was the feeling of wanting a city that worked at the scale of daily life, a place where you could find strangers who felt familiar, and with new opportunities around the corner.

I read Austin’s piece on Complex Effects recently about how New Mexico once built cities with more intention than we give ourselves credit for, and how we somehow forgot how to do it. He writes about loneliness and how the shape of a place becomes the shape of the days you live inside of, and I felt something shift in me. There’s a loneliness that settles in when you live in a city that pulls people apart without meaning to, and I’ve felt it for a long time. Albuquerque can be warm and generous, but it can also feel sparse in ways that go beyond population density. The queer urbanist cyclists (my own little demographic) feel scattered, if not almost hypothetical.

So the question emerges: if I can’t imagine buying a small condo or townhouse Downtown, or anywhere near it, because the housing simply isn’t there, and if I feel isolated in ways I don’t want to feel forever, why not just keep renting somewhere else for a while? Somewhere less lonely? I’ve found myself browsing studios in Highland Park, Long Beach, Boyle Heights, and Koreatown, all places where you can walk to things without planning the entire day around it, all places where you might stumble into community instead of trying to engineer it artificially. Shiny new metro trains also help with the sale.

At a recent GENM event on the IDO amendments, Max Gruner spoke with a kind of honesty I don’t hear often from public officials. He said that if we don’t build walkability and community and the kinds of homes young people want to live in, they will keep leaving. He didn’t mention that it’s often even harder for queer people, but the implication was there, and it felt strangely comforting to hear someone say out loud what so many of us feel quietly.

What’s harder to hold is the way older homeowners talk about these same reforms. They want young people to stick around, to stay invested, to pay the taxes that will fund the services they depend on. But at the same time they oppose almost anything that would make staying feel worth it. They’ll say we don’t have the density for bodegas and tienditas, and in the next breath they’ll warn that 7-Eleven will surely use these laws to destroy their neighborhood. They insist we already have walkability because their 2,000-square-foot home is technically near an hourly bus and a Wendy’s. It becomes disorienting to know that you’re being asked to hold up a future for people who don’t want to make room for you in the present.

There’s a point where trying to change a culture begins to feel less like community work and more like self-neglect. The city does have bright spots, especially the ART corridor, as well as some scattered infill, and the slow and careful emergence of real urbanism and they’re enough to keep the hope alive. But the pace of change is inconsistent, and the resistance is exhausting, and the years slip by without the kind of progress that people my age quietly need.

Passing the IDO amendments won’t fix everything, but it would move the fundamental structure of Albuquerque in a direction that allows more belonging, more possibility, more life. It would legalize homes that young professionals can actually live in, support small neighborhood businesses that have been zoned out of existence, and create a city where people can choose to stay because staying feels like a gift rather than a sacrifice.

Cities like Seattle, Portland, Chicago, and Denver don’t agonize over whether young people will stay. They simply build the kind of places young people want to stay in. And when they do, people come (Even though it is often too much of a fight in those places, too).

I don’t know yet whether I’ll leave. I don’t necessarily want to. I love Albuquerque enough that I spend my free time trying to understand it, trying to nudge it gently toward a future where people like me don’t feel like outliers. But love doesn’t mean keeping yourself small. And loneliness, left untouched, has a way of making decisions for you.

But loneliness isn’t all bad. It can push you toward the things that matter, toward people who care about the world in the same stubborn way you do. If I hadn’t felt that ache, the sense that Albuquerque could be more than it is, and that I wanted more than what the city offered, I might never have found Strong Towns ABQ. I would not have walked into those first meetings or stayed long enough to see a community forming around shared frustration and shared hope. What began as a kind of civic loneliness became something else entirely: a group of people who also want change, who love this place enough to criticize it from a productive and collaborative space, and who understand that loving a city sometimes means wanting it to grow up a little.

Being part of this group has been unexpectedly grounding. It’s one of the few spaces where I don’t feel like an outlier for wanting walkability, density or better transit, or for believing that Albuquerque deserves more than another half-century of slow decline. And as much as our NIMBY critics insist we’re developer shills or naïve idealists or somehow anti-neighborhood (so silly!), the truth is that this work has created some of the most genuine connections I’ve had here. It’s proof that the desire for a better Albuquerque isn’t limited to planning documents or policy debates — it lives in people who show up after work, who write letters, who stand at microphones, who do all of this unpaid because they love the place where they live and know we all deserve better.

So maybe that’s part of why the decision feels so heavy. It’s not just the question of staying in a city that doesn’t always make room for people like me; it’s the knowledge that even in the loneliness, something meaningful has grown. And maybe that’s what I’m trying to understand now: whether the possibility of transformation, the beginnings of community, and the quiet sense of belonging that comes from doing this work are enough to keep me here, or whether the pull of a different life in a different city will eventually become stronger.

I don’t know yet, but the pull is growing stronger. But I know the answer won’t come from despair. It will come from weighing what this city is, what it isn’t, and the parts of it that are finally starting to feel like home.

Maybe what I really want is for Albuquerque to decide it wants us. Maybe that’s what I’ve been waiting for. In many ways, I am waiting to see what Albuquerque decides on the IDO proposals. Rejection of them would certainly feel like an invitation to consider a permanent move. If the city can’t bring itself to choose a better future, I can already feel how the thought of leaving becomes easier to imagine.

Not easy, but easier.

We don’t usually talk about grief when we talk about land use. We talk about policy, equity, parking ratios, height allowances, historic fabric, and neighborhood character. But underneath so much of Albuquerque’s housing politics, underneath the anger, the nostalgia, the rigidity, and the pseudo-sacred view of procedure, I keep finding something softer and more human. Grief.

Zoning, in its own bureaucratic way, offers the illusion that we can control time. If we hold the rules still, maybe everything else will stay still too. But loss, memory, and change don’t obey setbacks or overlay boundaries. When we try to channel our grief through procedural fights, we end up hurting ourselves and our neighborhoods. The sense of control offered through public input solicitations, meetings, and board hearings is heady. If we can just win this fight, and the next one, a sense of ourselves, our loved ones, and our past lives will continue to live on.

The Grocery Store Aisle

A few weeks ago, I ran into a neighborhood leader at the supermarket. She told me she was worried about potential zoning changes in Barelas. Though a supporter of O-69, an ordinance that essentially adds many entitlements for multi-family development in much of Central Albuquerque, the idea that height allowances might increase to 38 feet with upcoming zoning proposals (allowing three or four stories of homes) worried her.

“It’ll shock ‘legacy residents,’” she said. “Barelas isn’t ready for that. Push the development toward Downtown. That’s where it belongs.”

We were standing next to the sanitary pads and aspirin. People moved past us with carts and kids and backpacks and dogs as we blocked the exit near the clerk stand, and somehow we were debating theoretical shadows cast by hypothetical buildings.

Her fear was real and the instinct to protect their community was real. But the idea that Barelas could be frozen at some idealized height, 38 feet here, 26 feet there (yes, much of Albuquerque is stuck at a tiny 26 feet!!), wasn’t really about height. It was about grief.

Grief over change.
Grief over memories tied to place.
Grief over not being able to control what the city is becoming.

And it reminded me of something I studied in grad school: the powerful role of myth in how communities make sense of themselves.

The Myth of Santa Fe

Santa Fe’s myth is one of the strongest in the country: a curated blend of Pueblo and Spanish imagery that has been appropriated, reinvented, celebrated, commodified, and stabilized into an architectural dogma.

It is a myth that simplifies, comforts, and freezes a particular aesthetic moment and authorizes it as “authentic.”

But myths can evolve, too. They’re not laws of physics.

Taos Pueblo, one of the most extraordinary examples of communal, dense, multifamily housing in North America, fits perfectly within the deeper spirit of the so-called “Santa Fe style” even though the city’s zoning would never allow anything remotely like it today. The myth is more flexible than the code it inspired.

When we talked in the grocery store, we referenced Chris Wilson’s The Myth of Santa Fe, and the excellent talk he gave last year at the Santa Fe Livability Speaker Series. She wasn’t wrong: Santa Fe’s identity was consciously constructed as a curated blend of Pueblo and Spanish imagery that was later stabilized into architectural dogma.

Albuquerque’s historic neighborhoods carry their own myths. Barelas, South Broadway, Martineztown, the North Valley are all layered with agricultural pasts, colonization on multiple levels, migration, disinvestment, and renewal. People talk about them as fixed cultural entities, but, as Joan Didion states far nicer than I can, they’re stories we tell ourselves in order to live. Stories built from memory, inheritance, trauma, pride, and longing.

Like all myths, they help us navigate change and the grief that can come with change. But when the myth hardens into zoning, it becomes brittle.

The Illusion of Control

Local control offers people something emotionally potent: the belief that if they fight hard enough, if they sit through enough meetings, if they object to enough proposals, they can hold onto what they’re losing.

But it’s an illusion. And a comforting one at that.

As Brené Brown writes, the need to control is often an attempt to avoid vulnerability and to avoid confronting uncertainty or pain. In cities, this often manifests as proceduralism: “We just need more process,” “We need more input,” “We need more studies.” It feels like action, safety, and empowers us to feel like we are protecting the neighborhood. The notification we receive in the Neighborhood Association inbox lets us feel like Paul Revere sounding the alert that the planning department is coming. However, it rarely addresses the deeper wound.

In Barelas, the market had already decided the neighborhood was desirable long before O-69 came along. A few years ago, I was looking at houses there on Zillow that were below the city’s median price. Now those same properties, small ones, even, are climbing far above it. In South Broadway, an empty parcel at the intersection of Avenida Cesar Chavez and I-25 is itself selling for $300,000.

As Mikaela Renz-Whitmore said at a recent GENM event: The smallest and most affordable homes in the most desirable areas appreciate the fastest. That’s not a zoning myth. That’s an urban reality.

Fear of displacement in Barelas is valid but the belief that preserving low height limits will stop it is a myth. A powerful myth, yes, but still a myth.

A Neighborhood Reckons with Its Past

There is another kind of grief in Barelas and it is one that people name explicitly.

A long-defunct liquor store and bar near the railyards sits heavy in local memory. Today, it is an empty lot, demolished long ago. For some, even with the structure long gone, it symbolizes domestic violence, substance abuse, and community pain. Recently, the site was approved for redevelopment into a multifamily building and a brewery. The original plan included a full bar, but after conversations with residents, the developer changed course. They listened and compromised even when they had no requirement to do so, but in doing so, they created space for grief.

Despite attempted interloping by other groups, It was a remarkably healthy process. Not because it stopped change, but because it acknowledged loss and allowed new growth in its place.

This is what it looks like when a neighborhood honors its past, rumbles with it, and allows for healing without freezing itself in place.

Memory, Loss, and the Subtle Grief of Change

We attach so much of our emotional lives to place:

The street an ex lived on.
The house where a grandmother used to garden.
The store where your dad took you after school.

When those places change, or disappear, it can feel like losing that memory all over again. I talked about this at YIMBYTown with Josh Gonzales and others from Abundant Housing LA. Josh, like me, has worked in both homeless services and more particularly, holds certifications as and has worked as a social worker. They saw the same phenomenon in Los Angeles: disinvestment in historic Hispanic neighborhoods, sudden reinvestment, panic, grief.

The difference is that in LA, zoning reform has often been targeted at working-class places like Boyle Heights while wealthier areas remain untouched. Albuquerque, to its credit, took a different path. O-69 reformed zoning in wealthy neighborhoods, too, Nob Hill included.

Is it enough? No!
But it spreads the weight of change more fairly. It’s a healthier civic instinct than funneling all growth into the same handful of neighborhoods that have already borne so much.

Still, the myth persists:
“If we can just keep the height at 30 feet, maybe the neighborhood won’t change.”
“If we can fight this variance, maybe the past will stay put.” The danger of the myth, too, is that Barelas potentially embracing this strategy provides cover for wealthier neighborhoods to ask for exemptions, too, perpetuating a cycle we need to shatter. Already, members of the Huning Castle and Downtown Neighborhoods Associations have pointed to this strategy. The myth can provide this false sense of self-preservation while inadvertently providing its own undoing.

All of that aside, planning & zoning politics becomes a coping strategy. A way to avoid the much harder emotional work of grieving.

Letting Go of the Illusion

Grief in cities isn’t a pathology. It’s normal and human and it deserves acknowledgment.

But when grief gets routed into zoning policy, process fights, or height caps, we mistake control for healing.Barelas is changing. Albuquerque is changing. No amount of local input can freeze memory in time.

What we can do is approach change with honesty, curiosity, and humility. We can acknowledge what hurts. We can create space for memory. We can share the burden of growth across the whole city, not just in places with less power and enable the neighborhoods with less power to absorb change. We can build new stories that honor the old ones.

Grief is not something we can zone away. But it’s something we can move through together—if we’re willing to let go of the illusion of control, and make space for something new.

When I talked about this with Josh, we ended up circling around something unexpected: the way different cultures grieve the built environment itself.

We discussed a film from Korea where villagers held funerals for buildings (and whole neighborhoods) before demolition as Seoul became a global economic and cultural center. These rituals acknowledged the memories held in a place and allowed people to say goodbye. In Madagascar, whole villages will sometimes gather to honor communal structures before they’re rebuilt or transformed. These practices aren’t about preserving the buildings. They’re about preserving the emotional dignity of the people connected to them.

It made me realize how starved American civic life is for this kind of ritual. We funnel all those feelings (loss, fear, nostalgia, attachment) into zoning hearings, overlay fights, and procedural turf wars. We weaponize “character” because it’s the closest language we have to talking about grief.

Brené Brown writes about the essential role ritual plays in healthy communities, and she’s right: funerals matter. Not because they stop death, but because they help us metabolize it. They give us a framework to mourn, to remember, and to keep living, and a place to connect with others.

Maybe part of why NIMBYism feels so intense, brittle, and panicked is because people genuinely don’t know where to put their grief. So it gets routed into height caps and setback requirements and public comment marathons and endless Facebook debates. It becomes control masquerading as care.

What if we treated neighborhood change as something worthy of ritual instead of fear? What if part of moving beyond our own NIMBY impulses is learning to name the grief underneath them? What if we built civic practices, not just policies, that help people honor what a place meant to them before it changes?

It is not reasonable to freeze neighborhoods in place nor is it reasonable to make political choices based on fear, anger, or avoidance. But it is reasonable, and profoundly human, to acknowledge that people feel these shifts in their bones.

Maybe the next evolution of urban planning isn’t just form-based codes or parking reform or upzoning the city to lift the ban on multifamily homes like duplexes and courtyard apartments. Maybe it’s developing community rituals for transition: spaces to mourn, to remember, to mark what was, and to open ourselves to what could be.

Change will come no matter what. The question is whether we face it with defensiveness and procedural armor or with grief, ritual, memory, and community.

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