Reimagining Albuquerque

Albuquerque Urbanist Blog With a YIMBY-Bent

Anatomy of NIMBYism in Albuquerque: Part 6

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Reimagining Albuquerque

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35–53 minutes

The Gentrification Distraction
When Justice Language Obstructs Housing Justice in Albuquerque

The emergence of “Left-NIMBYism”

In Albuquerque and across North America, gentrification has become a catch-all term invoked to oppose nearly any effort to build or invest in neighborhoods. It’s a word stretched to mean everything from capitalism and coffee shops to integration, colonization, and simply change itself. And in some circles, particularly among professional-class activists, it has become a rhetorical weapon—used not just to critique injustice, but to block the very projects that might materially improve lives.

In progressive spaces—whether online, in academic circles, among neighborhood advocates, or within activist organizations—debate is increasingly shaped less by what someone says than by who they are. Identity, affiliation, and perceived ideological alignment often serve as informal tests of legitimacy, narrowing who is seen as qualified to speak about housing and development. This dynamic crosses spheres: it surfaces in faculty meetings, neighborhood association forums, and movement spaces alike. What results is a culture of suspicion—where participation requires performative signaling, and where disagreement, even in good faith, is often treated as betrayal.

These tensions are not theoretical. Later in this piece, we’ll explore how they’ve played out in Albuquerque’s Barelas neighborhood and how similar dynamics have shaped the reception of South Bronx advocate Majora Carter, who faced backlash for investing in her own community. In both cases, questions of identity and belonging become tools not just of critique, but of exclusion.

A recurring dynamic within Left-NIMBYism is what some call the “omnicause”:1 the expectation that any housing proposal—or organization behind it—must address every structural injustice in order to be seen as legitimate. This impulse, however well-intended, often derails incremental progress. Projects are attacked not for causing harm, but for failing to solve everything. Instead of building coalitions, this approach fractures them. And instead of expanding housing justice, it delays it.

This friction and failure is noted even in leftist spaces, as Sarah Garnham notes in her Marxist Left Review article “The Failure of Identity Politics,”2 this narrowing of debate is not new. Garnham observes how, in Australia, identity politics often became a mechanism for stifling working-class solidarity and excluding the very communities activists claimed to defend—including Aboriginal Australians themselves. Rather than fostering material change, struggles increasingly revolved around who was deemed “authentic” enough to speak, creating what Garnham calls a “hierarchy of oppression” where the mere expression of lived experience was treated as political authority.

This dynamic is increasingly visible in Albuquerque’s housing debates. Identity, rather than being a starting point for solidarity, has too often become a litmus test for legitimacy—where dissent from certain activist orthodoxies is framed not as debate, but as betrayal. As in Garnham’s critique, this has led to a culture where language meant to empower marginalized voices instead ossifies into a gatekeeping mechanism, silencing diverse perspectives within and outside communities themselves – all while paternalistically viewing identity groups as monolithic.

Displacement is real. The trauma of redlining, racial covenants, urban renewal, and forced removal still reverberates through communities of color in Albuquerque and beyond. Gentrification, as a lived experience, often does feel like violence—especially when people are priced out of the neighborhoods that shaped them. This piece doesn’t deny that pain. It asks: what policies will actually prevent it?

A recurring tension in contemporary housing discourse is the divergence between justice-oriented rhetoric and the material outcomes of policy opposition. Many of the voices expressing concern about gentrification and displacement are individuals who themselves benefit from housing stability, professional security, and institutional affiliation—whether in nonprofit organizations, academia, or the design and planning professions. These actors often approach land use through the lens of justice, yet may resist projects that would enable others to access the same forms of stability and opportunity they have benefited from.

As journalist Jerusalem Demsas has observed, “The real villains in the tale of gentrification are not 20-something new entrants to mixed-income neighborhoods, but NIMBY homeowners in the wealthiest ones”3—individuals whose structural advantage allows them to shape development patterns with minimal public scrutiny. This is not a critique of personal sincerity, but of a broader dynamic: when language originally intended to challenge exclusion is deployed in ways that preserve it. The distinction between intention and impact is essential. While many of these advocates operate from a place of deep care, the policies they oppose—often modest efforts to increase housing access—are precisely those most likely to reduce displacement pressure and promote inclusion.

In this way, “Left-NIMBYism” echoes many of the themes already traced in this series. Like more traditional forms of neighborhood resistance, it blends proceduralism with rhetorical idealism—delaying or defeating proposals not through overt exclusion, but through appeals to process, principle, or perfection. And as in earlier examples, the result is often the same: good intentions yielding poor outcomes, and policies that entrench scarcity, deepen inequality, and concentrate growth in the very neighborhoods most vulnerable to disruption. The following section explores how these dynamics unfold in practice—and how language, however well-intended, can become a mechanism of exclusion.

The New Rhetoric of Exclusion

In neighborhoods like Barelas, history offers painful lessons: promises broken, communities displaced, and outside interests profiting while local needs were ignored. Martineztown, too, has faced decades of disinvestment and poorly planned interventions. These experiences fuel skepticism, and rightly so. But if history teaches anything, it’s that trying to freeze a neighborhood in time is not a shield—it’s a trap. True protection lies not in rejecting change outright, but in organizing to shape it: to demand investment that serves the community, not bypasses it; to build housing that strengthens roots rather than uproots them; and to insist that new neighbors, businesses, and homes are part of a shared future, not a forced erasure. Here, neighborhood leaders have embraced the future, embraced investment, and have decided to take on challenges head on. However, this decision is not without controversy, particularly from left-leaning or affiliated groups.

The neighborhood of Barelas has become one of the most contested terrains in Albuquerque’s housing debates—a place where concerns about gentrification, displacement, and community control converge in deeply visible ways. Here, activist groups like Protect and Preserve Barelas and the People’s Housing Project—the latter aligned with the Party for Socialism and Liberation—have led high-profile campaigns against development, including a controversial project led by development group Palindrome, where diverse views of neighborhood members have been placed under the spotlight. These groups frame their opposition in the language of anti-capitalism and racial justice, describing developers as “slumlords” and “colonizers,” and calling for “democratic representation” of the neighborhood. But as we’ll explore, these appeals to justice, however earnest, often end up reinforcing exclusion rather than resisting it.

This exclusionary dynamic doesn’t just emerge from outside advocates imposing expectations onto communities. It also arises internally, when members of marginalized neighborhoods are pressured to conform to rigid visions of what ‘authentic’ resistance must look like—and are vilified when they deviate.

Yet gentrification in Barelas is not a new concern, nor is it an unexamined one. For years, residents, historians, and journalists have debated not only what gentrification means in the context of this historically New Mexican neighborhood—but whether it’s actually occurring. A 2020 Downtown Albuquerque News article,4 for instance, explored divergent views within Barelas itself, with some residents warning of cultural displacement and others questioning whether the neighborhood’s slow rate of investment even qualified as gentrification at all.

Importantly, many of these voices also grapple with what kind of development might be welcomed—raising questions not just about opposition, but about how to shape growth in a way that sustains culture, community, and affordability. In his elegantly written Master’s Thesis, In Defense of Aztlan,5 Javier Benavidez both explores the history, culture, and tensions of the neighborhood and seeks out solutions to these concerns in other cities, exploring zoning and planning mechanisms others have tried to prevent gentrification. In contrast to the purely oppositional postures we’ll encounter later, some community members and groups in Barelas have called for deeper engagement, locally grounded investment, and policies that proactively prevent displacement. The debates here are not just about stopping change—but about guiding it. However, not all contemporary activism in Barelas embraces this nuanced approach. Alongside these thoughtful efforts to guide growth, a more rigid strain of opposition has emerged—one that rejects nearly all new development, regardless of its form or intent.

This new strain of anti-housing activism—seen most clearly in Barelas but echoed across the country—does not rely on traditional NIMBY talking points like traffic, parking, density, or aesthetics, though it does employ these concerns as well. Instead, it draws from the language of equity, decolonization, affordability, and anti-racism as its primary frame. In Albuquerque, groups like the People’s Housing Project demand outcomes that are currently not achievable under New Mexico law (or, the laws of any peer nation), such as public ownership of private land and universal rent control. As DeSaulniers, a leader of the People’s Housing Project put it, ‘We’re not going to demand any less than we deserve,’6 even when compromise might bring tangible benefits to low-income renters. Going further, they reject any project that entails even a dollar of profit—even if the project is deeply affordable. The result is a position that rejects progress in pursuit of an ideal that does not yet exist, and perhaps, isn’t democratically desired.

These values matter. But in practice, the results often mirror older forms of resistance:

  • New housing is blocked.
  • Poorer and historically disinvested neighborhoods absorb the brunt of change.
  • Wealthier, exclusionary neighborhoods remain insulated.
  • Homelessness and housing insecurity rise.
  • Rent climbs.
  • And displacement accelerates—often in the very neighborhoods this discourse seeks to protect.

The Palindrome redevelopment in Barelas offers a clear example: a project reshaped by extensive neighborhood input, with many residents seeing it as a rare chance to address gentrification concerns through proactive design, affordability, and reinvestment; tackling fears head-on. Their concerns were not dismissed; they were integrated into a revised plan that includes affordable units, tailored commercial uses, and reflects the neighborhood’s character.7 Yet opposition persisted, grounded not in this local feedback, but in broader critiques of capitalism and development. The result was a familiar one: local input was overshadowed by a more abstract narrative, and a project designed to bring investment and vitality to a historic community was recast as a threat.8

This pattern is not unique. In various cases, development proposals in working-class or Indigenous neighborhoods have been framed as colonial impositions, even when they reflect, or are shaped by, community needs. In these moments, diverse resident perspectives are sometimes flattened into a single storyline, and theoretical frameworks take precedence over lived experience. The question becomes not what a neighborhood wants, but whether its desires conform to the expectations of outside advocates.

At the same time, similar scrutiny is rarely applied to Albuquerque’s most exclusionary neighborhoods. There are few organized campaigns demanding housing justice in the Northeast Heights, Ventana Ranch, or suburbs like Rio Rancho—areas where zoning remains deeply exclusionary and housing scarcity most entrenched. Instead, opposition concentrates in communities that already face disinvestment. The outcome is a lopsided map of participation and resistance: one in which advocacy for justice inadvertently reinforces the very patterns it seeks to dismantle.

Consider the debate surrounding the proposed Downtown Soccer Stadium. Protesters opposed the project with slogans like “Housing before a stadium!”—a call rooted in urgent and legitimate concerns about displacement and public investment priorities.9 Yet when actual housing proposals emerge—such as the redevelopment of the Palindrome site in Barelas—similar voices often speak out against them as well. This pattern raises a difficult question: when both investment and reinvestment are resisted, what future is being imagined?

Frequently, the objection is framed in terms of affordability. Critics argue that projects like Palindrome’s aren’t “affordable enough”—as if each new development must, on its own, resolve the systemic roots of the housing crisis. But this framing overlooks two important realities. First, many developers engaged in urban infill projects do partner with mission-driven nonprofits or public agencies to deliver deeply affordable housing alongside market-rate units, including Palindrome. And second, affordability is a structural outcome, not a property of individual buildings. This, also, ignores that the Barelas project is planned to include many affordable units. However, when cities expand the supply of housing across a range of price points, pressure on the existing stock eases. This process—commonly referred to as filtering—has long played a critical role in how cities maintain housing access over time.10 11 To the chagrin of activist groups like People’s Housing Project, these facts were recognized by neighborhood leaders in Barelas.

Opposition to housing based on the claim that it is not “affordable enough” often overlooks how affordability is actually achieved: through abundance, not austerity. As housing scholar Gregg Colburn notes in Homelessness Is a Housing Problem,12 regions with more flexible housing markets and higher vacancy rates tend to have lower rates of homelessness, underscoring the importance of overall housing supply in addressing affordability challenges. Similarly, Jerusalem Demsas, stating that the body of evidence that new construction, including of “luxury” units does not cause displacement but actually reduces it,13 14 15 highlights work by economist Kate Pennington showing that in San Francisco, proximity to new housing construction correlates with lower rent growth and displacement, not higher.16 This further undermines the myth that new development drives people out. Insisting that every unit must be a social housing unit in order to be rooted in justice risks overlooking a more fundamental truth: inclusive cities require layered solutions. In this way, the pursuit of perfection can become an obstacle to progress.

Some housing opponents may believe that no capital should be involved in housing at all, envisioning a system closer to state-led models of public provision. This view, also enshrined in the motives of the People’s Housing Project, who state that no profit should be allowed on the sale of land and that the state should provision housing, is a legitimate ideological position, and one that raises important questions about how housing is financed and distributed. But it also introduces a difficult tension: many of the same activists who champion harm reduction in fields like public health or criminal justice often adopt a far less pragmatic stance when it comes to housing and land use. In those other arenas, compromise and incremental improvements are seen as necessary tools for survival. Why, then, is housing policy held to a different standard?

When efforts to expand housing access are dismissed because they do not fully meet a radical ideal, we risk treating lives as leverage. Delay becomes strategy, and purity is prioritized over relief. But in a housing crisis, delay carries its own form of harm. As the philosopher Paulo Freire warned, critical thought untethered from material practice can lead to paralysis. In such moments, even well-intentioned idealism can produce outcomes that are difficult to distinguish from indifference.

This tension becomes particularly acute when we consider that many of the residents most vulnerable to displacement—the very individuals these movements aim to protect—often support new housing, investment, and infrastructure. They want their children to be able to stay nearby. They want stable rents, access to amenities, and the ability to adapt their homes or neighborhoods in ways that suit evolving needs. When outside voices override those preferences in the name of abstract political alignment, the result is not solidarity—it is paternalism.

Praxis and the Rejection of Material Change

As Freire warned, too many self-proclaimed radicals “fossilize their purported political project into an obscure discursive criticality”—always deferring action, always critiquing, never building.17 In the context of housing, this observation feels particularly salient. Housing development, for all its imperfections, offers a tangible opportunity to enact solidarity: to make space for others, to fight climate change through urban density, and to address structural exclusion through material inclusion.

Yet time and again, opportunities to do so are met with suspicion. Rather than engaging with what is possible, many turn away in search of the rhetorically perfect. Inaction is framed as caution. Delay is described as principle. But in a city facing a housing crisis, these postures cease to be neutral. As rents rise and displacement accelerates, the absence of action begins to cause harm. The refusal to engage with the constraints and compromises of the real world becomes, itself, a driver of inequality.

This is where traditional homeowner NIMBYism and more activist-inflected anti-housing politics converge. One relies on aesthetics, process, and preservation; the other on abstract ideals and revolutionary vocabulary. But both are animated by a shared discomfort with change—particularly when that change might redistribute opportunity or alter the balance of who gets to belong.

We’ve seen these dynamics echoed throughout this series: in the environmentalist appeals used to block density in the name of green space (Part 3); in the procedural smokescreens that demand perfect affordability while obstructing any housing at all (Part 4); and in the selective activism that targets projects in low-income areas while preserving the exclusionary status quo in wealthier ones (Part 5). What unites these threads is not a shared political position, but a shared resistance to materially confronting the scarcity at the heart of Albuquerque’s housing crisis.

To reject development on principle—without offering viable alternatives—does not insulate us from complicity. It simply shifts the burden onto those least able to carry it.

Ironically, one area where critics and reformers ought to find common ground is in the call to build wealth and opportunity within historically marginalized communities. Yet, as we’ve seen throughout this series, this goal is often undermined by the very frameworks invoked to support it. Critics frequently reject outside capital—even when projects like the Palindrome redevelopment are shaped through extensive community input—claiming such investment is inherently extractive. But when local or internal actors attempt to invest and build, they too are cast as threats. As we will explore in the case study of Majora Carter, efforts to create prosperity from within—whether through small businesses, housing, or cultural investment—are often met with accusations of betrayal or “selling out.”

We see echoes of this same pattern in Albuquerque. Homewise, a locally based nonprofit developer, offers pathways to homeownership for underserved communities while investing deeply in Downtown neighborhoods. Despite this mission—and its New Mexico roots—it is not uncommon for the organization to be labeled a gentrifier or even a colonial force.18 Like affordability, the concept of “community wealth-building” becomes a rhetorical smokescreen: praised in theory, but obstructed in practice.

As Freire warned, too many movements in our city are falling into that “obscure discursive criticality”—a reflexive critique that shuts down rather than opens up. In Albuquerque, that criticality has calcified into a posture that makes no room for compromise, internal investment, or shared progress. It demands justice, but often denies the means to pursue it.

When Empowerment Becomes Exclusion: The Legacy of Jacobs and the Localist Trap

The contradictions of “Left-NIMBYism” are not new—they are the logical endpoint of a revolution that began with good intentions. To understand how today’s calls for justice have curdled into tools of exclusion, we have to return to one of the most celebrated figures in urbanism: Jane Jacobs. Her 1961 masterpiece The Death and Life of Great American Cities championed mixed-use neighborhoods, walkability, and the rich complexity of urban life at a time when planners sought to raze and rationalize American cities. Jacobs helped defeat Robert Moses and halt destructive urban renewal in Manhattan’s West Village, replacing top-down schemes with a belief in grassroots resistance and neighborhood control.

But as Yoni Appelbaum argues in Stuck, Jacobs’ gospel of local empowerment, once urgently needed, has since calcified into a vetoocracy—one that enables small groups of affluent, well-connected residents to block development even when it serves the broader public good.19 Jacobs herself celebrated the “unslumming” of her neighborhood as its population dropped from 6,500 to 2,500, praising what we might now recognize as gentrification. And though she fought to preserve diversity, she failed to foresee how empowering community gatekeepers would ultimately embolden exclusion.

Appelbaum notes that the legal architecture of participatory planning, once a tool for communities to resist bureaucratic harm, now works best for those with time, education, and access to decision-makers. In cities like Los Angeles and Albuquerque, well-organized neighborhoods have succeeded in downzoning or obstructing development, while communities without those same tools have seen change imposed upon them. The result: construction is funneled toward the least empowered areas, while wealthier enclaves remain untouched.

“Participatory planning, in practice,” Appelbaum writes, “narrows the range of interests and voices who can participate in planning.”

The same dynamics play out in public input meetings and appeals hearings. Homeowners make up 46% of local voters—but 73% of the voices in housing debates. And the people most likely to benefit from new homes—the displaced, the cost-burdened, the newcomers—are absent entirely.

This is how a justice movement rooted in local control has, paradoxically, become a machine for exclusion. Appelbaum’s analysis affirms what Albuquerque is now experiencing: a planning culture that elevates “process” over outcomes and grants the loudest, most privileged voices the power to block change under the guise of equity or caution.

These dynamics are not abstract—they’re playing out here in Albuquerque.

One group, the previously mentioned People’s Housing Project, affiliated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, has a long history of opposing housing in Barelas—particularly the Palindrome redevelopment. In their literature, they’ve labeled the developers “slumlords,” “profiteers,” and “gentrifiers,” despite the project’s extensive community engagement and planned inclusion of affordable units. Their calls for “democratic representation of Barelas” are echoed by Protect and Preserve Barelas, an activist group with a prominent Instagram and TikTok presence. Both groups were central to the “Housing First, No Stadium” campaign—an effort that rightly raised concerns about displacement and priorities, but now opposes the very housing projects that might help prevent that displacement.

While demanding Barelas be “represented,” these groups have publicly attacked neighborhood residents who supported the project—echoing the kind of authenticity-policing we will explore later, echoes moralistic framing and views on power that belong to a national left-nimby view of housing development. This framing of power—and who gets to wield it—was made prominent in In Defense of Housing, where scholars David Madden and Peter Marcuse argue that housing is not just a commodity, but “a field of conflict” shaped by political forces. They contend that the “balance of power between tenants and landlords, or between real estate owners and communities, cannot be determined in a neutral, apolitical way.” This idea has deeply informed the language and posture of contemporary housing activism, particularly on the academic left, where skepticism toward private development often translates into categorical opposition—even when projects are shaped by public input or contain affordable housing components.

In this way, the language of community representation becomes a paradox—used not to amplify the voices of neighbors, but to suppress dissent within them. And a historically mixed-use, working-class neighborhood is reframed as fragile and fixed, rather than adaptable, resilient, and full of agency. The result is a justice movement that increasingly mirrors the exclusion it claims to resist.

Journalist Ned Resnikoff points out20 that this framing has calcified into a stance that ignores mounting evidence. In blue states like California, many progressive nonprofits have opposed zoning reform on the premise that market-rate housing fuels displacement—despite a growing body of research showing that dense, infill development actually reduces local rents. Even more troubling, these groups often find themselves in tacit coalition with realtor associations and exclusionary homeowners, reinforcing the very structures they claim to resist. “There seems to be little self-reflection,” Resnikoff writes, “over the fact that they often find themselves in coalition with lobbying groups like the realtors and wealthy homeowners in exclusive neighborhoods.”

Resnikoff further draws on political scientist Jessica Trounstine’s Segregation by Design,21 which shows how zoning has historically served as a tool for the hoarding of public resources—particularly schools and infrastructure. While formal segregation has been dismantled, exclusionary zoning continues to divide regions along racial and class lines, preserving inequalities under the guise of planning. In this light, the refusal by some leftist activists to embrace pro-housing reforms—particularly those that legalize density in affluent areas—amounts to a failure to reckon with the political economy of scarcity.

These contradictions point to a deeper issue—one that both Yoni Appelbaum and Jerusalem Demsas have examined in their respective work. For Appelbaum, the failures of localism are not incidental; they are structural and self-reinforcing. The very systems meant to foster inclusion have become tools for obstruction. He argues that instead of building ever more intricate webs of public input and veto points, urban reformers should have focused on revitalizing electoral democracy at the local level—ensuring that planning decisions were made by accountable, representative institutions, not ad hoc committees of the loudest voices. Citing Japan, he goes further, arguing for planning to be codified at the state and national level and focused largely on a uniform set of building codes. Finally, though he is glad to see that zoning, planning, and the litigious systems that support them are now more and more placed into question, he states that moving toward a better system will also require tackling building codes, and other obstructionist tools like historical district overlays – which in Albuquerque, often come in the form of “Historic Protection Overlay Zones” and “Character Protection Overlays.” Notably, several historic neighborhoods in Albuquerque have sought the protection of these overlays to prevent gentrification. Appelbaum rejects this, exploring how these overlays are often used to intentionally accelerate gentrification and exclude lower-income residents. Ironically, we seek out the tools that are themselves obstacles to our goals.

Demsas continues on this critique. In a forum at the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago,22 she explores the common urge in both traditional neighborhood politics and activist circles to pursue more inclusive input processes—to bring ever more people to the table. But paradoxically, she notes, the more inclusive these efforts try to be, the fewer people they actually reach. The complexity, time, and ideological codes involved end up filtering out the very people who are most affected by housing scarcity: renters, workers, immigrants, and the young.

That’s why Demsas argues that land-use decisions need to move up the chain—out of city council chambers and neighborhood hearings and back to state legislatures, where regional outcomes can be addressed more holistically. Housing, she reminds us, is not just a local issue—it’s a regional and national economy with far-reaching consequences. And because it’s a political economy problem, state-level governments are better positioned to make policy trade-offs, integrate across geographies, and override parochial opposition—especially in wealthy, exclusionary neighborhoods. This is how we fight gentrification not with slogans, but with systemic reform that expands housing access and economic mobility.

In response to claims that participatory democracy in neighborhood hearings is empowering to marginalized groups, Demsas is blunt: this framework is flawed. Participatory democracy, she argues, should happen at the ballot box, not in a zoning board meeting at 7:00 p.m.—a space that systematically filters out working people, renters, immigrants, the disabled, and the unhoused.

She points out that housing law is already fundamentally unequal: a single-family home can often be constructed “by-right,” with little oversight. But a mixed-use building or apartment complex—like the Palindrome redevelopment in Barelas—requires public hearings, exceptions, and extensive discretionary review. This is not democratic equality. It’s a double standard.

There are two minorities at play here, Demsas says: one, renters—who are disproportionately younger, lower-income, and people of color—and two, wealthy single-family homeowners, whose housing types face far less scrutiny. The only minority consistently empowered in these systems is the one with the time, legal tools, and political connections to navigate or obstruct the process.

These public input rituals, far from being inclusive, often function as what she calls “illegitimate processes”—structures that reproduce exclusion while disguising themselves as democracy. They offer a stage for obstruction, not a seat at the table. And they routinely fail to bring in those who are truly unheard by the system. The result is a theater of inclusion that protects privilege and punishes difference.

Justice at the Edges: Degrowth, Industry, and Indigenous Lands

One arena where these contradictions are increasingly visible is in the debate over Albuquerque’s future growth. In progressive and justice-oriented circles, opposition to development on the city’s western edge is often framed as a stand for environmental protection or Indigenous sovereignty—especially when that development encroaches on culturally or ecologically sensitive lands near Pueblo territories, the foothills, or the Petroglyph Monument. These concerns are real. Growth in the Southwest has long occurred through dispossession, and Indigenous communities have every right to raise alarms about incursions onto culturally significant spaces.

But these valid concerns are often invoked in ways that sidestep a more uncomfortable truth: the need for inclusive, sustainable growth within the urban core. When objections to building on the West Mesa are paired with opposition to infill in neighborhoods close to the core, the result is a kind of degrowth politics that rejects both sprawl and urban reinvestment—leaving Albuquerque stuck between expansion and stagnation.

This is where the stakes of O-24-69 become especially clear. By legalizing more housing along transit corridors, near job centers, and within already-developed neighborhoods, the ordinance offers a rare alternative to outward expansion. It doesn’t solve all problems. But it begins to loosen the development vise that has pushed Albuquerque to expand into marginal lands—whether they’re the mesas, wildland-urban interfaces, or culturally sensitive areas near Indigenous communities. And yet, opposition to O-24-69 has come not just from wealthy homeowners, but from justice-oriented activists who view even moderate density as capitulation to capitalist development. The paradox is striking: a bill that seeks to relieve pressure at the urban edge is attacked by those who also claim to oppose sprawl.

This tension is not limited to housing. Albuquerque also lacks a regionally contextualized industrial plan, resulting in a fragmented approach to job-creating land uses. Historically, industry in Bernalillo County was concentrated along the rail line and in the South Valley—places where pollution and environmental degradation disproportionately affected low-income, often Hispanic communities (including Barelas). In recent years, there has been a push to site new industrial and logistics facilities on the West Mesa, in part because prevailing winds mean less air pollution will drift into existing population centers, in addition to the need to site employment west of the river to prevent future cross-rio traffic congestion.

But this shift brings new complications. Portions of the West Mesa border, or directly impact, culturally sensitive areas for Indigenous communities, particularly Pueblo lands and the Petroglyph National Monument. What appears to be environmental justice for one historically marginalized group becomes, in a different light, another instance of displacement or cultural erasure for another. Meanwhile, these industrial zones—whether on the margins or near the core—are rarely served by transit, sidewalks, or housing, reinforcing patterns of economic exclusion for those who depend on public infrastructure.

Just as Albuquerque has begun to grapple with the ‘missing middle’ in housing, we must confront the absence of a ‘missing middle’ in industrial planning—one that acknowledges both environmental realities and equitable access to economic opportunity. This is where a regionally informed, justice-oriented industrial land use strategy becomes essential. Placing light manufacturing and logistics hubs closer to existing rail infrastructure and within the urban fabric—not just on the periphery—could reduce vehicle miles traveled, improve air quality, and enhance access to opportunity. As urbanist Nolan Gray has noted, much of today’s industry is less polluting than public perception suggests.23 If properly regulated for externalities, many uses can and should coexist within mixed-use urban environments. But without this kind of shared vision, we fall into the familiar binaries: develop or preserve, grow or protect—false choices that limit our ability to pursue inclusive solutions.

And without a clear plan, justice frameworks themselves can be pitted against one another—communities advocating against pollution are placed in opposition to communities advocating for housing; those fighting for Indigenous sovereignty are forced into conflict with advocates for economic mobility. The result is that no one wins—and the patterns of sprawl, scarcity, and disinvestment continue. This is not solidarity. It is fragmentation.

To move beyond this, Albuquerque will need something more ambitious than a rezoning bill or a bike lane map. It will need an ethic of shared stewardship: one that brings together Indigenous leaders, environmentalists, industrial planners, transit advocates, and housing reformers to design a growth strategy that reflects the region’s ecological, cultural, and economic realities. Given the tensions at play here, Appelbaum and Demsas may be correct in underlining the importance of moving these decisions to higher levels of government that are better resourced to collect important input, engage tribal governments, and have the ability to plan across jurisdictional boundaries for the common good.

This is what makes the story of Majora Carter so resonant—not just nationally, but here in Albuquerque. Her experience highlights what happens when communities are given a false choice between stagnation and erasure, and what it means to pursue an inclusive vision of prosperity from within. She highlights what happens when the pursuit of community control is confused with resistance to change—and what it means to build inclusive prosperity without waiting for permission.

Case Study: Majora Carter and the South Bronx

We’ve seen the politics of authenticity unfold with particular intensity in Barelas, where some activist groups have claimed to speak for the neighborhood—while publicly denigrating residents who support redevelopment efforts like the Palindrome project. Calls for “democratic representation of Barelas” have been paired with attacks on longtime neighbors, accusing them of selling out or betraying the community. In one post, retail space in the project was condemned as a violation of the neighborhood’s “residential character”—a claim that ignores Barelas’s deep history of mixed-use buildings, corner stores, and neighborhood commerce. In these moments, justice rhetoric stops amplifying community voices and instead narrows them—treating dissent as illegitimate and flattening a diverse neighborhood into a singular narrative.

Majora Carter has spent years investing in her own community in the South Bronx of New York—launching local businesses, building mixed-use housing, and advocating for wealth-building in low-status neighborhoods. Yet despite being a lifelong resident, Carter has repeatedly been labeled a gentrifier or a sellout. Her offense? Refusing to accept that the only legitimate identity in a struggling neighborhood is one of struggle. For Carter, poverty is not authenticity—it’s a trap.

Majora Carter—an environmentalist, developer, and lifelong resident—has long advocated for reinvestment in Black and brown communities. Her mantra, and her book, titled: “Reclaiming Your Community: You don’t have to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one,”24 challenges the false binary between displacement and disinvestment. Carter has launched local businesses, developed affordable and mixed-use housing, and created opportunities for community wealth-building. And yet, despite being from the very neighborhood she works to improve, she has repeatedly been labeled a gentrifier or a sell-out—accused of bringing in the wrong kind of coffee shop, or of working too closely with developers. When national coffee shops did not want to move into her neighborhood, she opened her own which serves as a community center as well. Answering to critics that claim this is a move centered on outside communities, she replies bluntly: “Coffee is the Blackest beverage on earth.”25

Carter’s story is more than a personality clash—it is a cautionary tale. Her critics rely on a fixed idea of what justice should look like, while ignoring the lived experiences of the people most affected by the policies they block. This dynamic echoes what we’ve seen here in Albuquerque, where projects like the Palindrome redevelopment in Barelas, shaped through extensive neighborhood input, are still framed by activists as outside impositions. The community’s own agency is erased to preserve a simplified narrative: developers versus “the people,” even when the people supported the project, or the people quite literally own it.

Carter has also spoken candidly about the nonprofit and activist ecosystems that benefit from preserving problems rather than solving them. In her view, many groups “thrive on the pathology” of disempowered communities while failing to support actual wealth-building or systemic reform. Her critique raises an uncomfortable question for Albuquerque’s activist left: Is the goal to empower communities to shape and benefit from development, or to preserve a rhetorical position that resists all change? And when local residents are silenced or dismissed for supporting investment, who exactly is being centered?

In reflecting on these experiences, Carter has pointed to a deeper issue: the way both outside activists and community-based anti-gentrification advocates often tether authenticity to poverty. “In my experience,” she writes, “poverty is also linked with authenticity in low-status communities. Those who don’t fit a profile of desperation, whether an aspiring local entrepreneur or a homeowner, are not considered representative of the community and thus not planned for in any meaningful way.” This mindset not only flattens the diversity of community desires—it also fuels brain drain. When only struggle is considered legitimate, opportunity becomes suspect. Those who want to stay, grow, invest, or improve are treated as threats, not neighbors.

This logic is not unique to the South Bronx. In Albuquerque, too, we see the same dynamics: an insistence that neighborhoods remain fixed in time, and that any departure from aesthetic or economic hardship constitutes erasure. In this framework, a coffee shop isn’t a community amenity, it’s a symbol of betrayal. A small business owner who wants to serve a changing neighborhood isn’t part of the future, they’re a gentrifier. This traps communities in a self-reinforcing cycle of decline: one where new amenities are treated as harbingers of displacement, and prosperity itself is treated with suspicion. As Veronica Davis observes in “Inclusive Transportation,” underserved communities often welcome investment—they simply want agency in shaping it. Like Appelbaum and Demsas, Davis also underscores that public input systems often exclude, rather than empower, those most affected.26

None of this is to say that every housing project is good, or that every concern about development is unfounded. But blocking new homes and businesses, especially in neighborhoods that want them and need them, doesn’t stop displacement—it often accelerates it. The solution isn’t to halt change. It’s to manage it with fairness, transparency, and inclusion. Displacement doesn’t happen just because new people move in. It happens when too few homes exist for everyone. When new housing is only allowed in low-income neighborhoods, that scarcity fuels speculation, displaces longtime renters, and forces newcomers to compete with residents who have nowhere else to go. But when housing is legal citywide, that pressure is absorbed more evenly. Newcomers can live in a variety of places—not just in the neighborhoods with the least power to say no.

O-24-69 and the Fight to End Segregation in Zoning

The recent passage of O-24-69 marked a major step forward in Albuquerque’s efforts to create a more inclusive city. For the first time in decades, the city took bold action to legalize more housing—especially multiplexes and apartments—along transit corridors and near major job centers. The ordinance didn’t just tweak around the edges; it fundamentally expanded the rights of property owners and renters to live, grow, and invest in more parts of the city.

This deserves real praise. O-24-69 represents one of the most ambitious liberalizations of zoning laws in Albuquerque’s modern history, and it opens a crucial pathway toward a more just and prosperous future.

Still, the work is far from complete.

Even after its passage, more than 60% of Albuquerque’s land area remains zoned exclusively for single-family homes. Vast swaths of the city—especially in wealthier, higher-resource areas—are still functionally off-limits to new neighbors, diverse housing types, and economic integration. This isn’t because individual residents are malicious, or because local leaders oppose inclusion. In many cases, they genuinely support affordable housing and opportunity. But the structure of zoning itself—rooted in an older history of exclusion—continues to produce segregated outcomes, even when intentions have changed.

Unless we expand the reach of reforms like O-24-69 citywide, we risk repeating old patterns: concentrating growth and change in working-class neighborhoods, while wealthier enclaves remain insulated. The burden of adaptation will continue to fall on the communities least equipped to resist external pressures. And the promise of an integrated, equitable Albuquerque will remain out of reach.

If we are serious about overcoming the specters of redlining, segregation, and opportunity hoarding, we cannot stop here. We must fight to expand the benefits of O-24-69—to legalize more homes across the entire city, to dismantle barriers that separate neighbors from one another, and to build a future where every part of Albuquerque has a role in welcoming the next generation.

Justice requires not just symbolic victories, but material change. And that change must be citywide. Like Carter, we must reject the false binaries that frame any change as betrayal and any investment as displacement. The real choice facing Albuquerque is not between preservation and erasure—it is between clinging to a system that quietly perpetuates inequality, or embracing a future that makes room for all.

If we are serious about fighting displacement, ending segregation, and expanding opportunity, protests must turn toward the real barriers: the exclusionary zoning that still dominates the Northeast Heights, Taylor Ranch, Rio Rancho, and beyond. It is not enough to resist change only where it feels uncomfortable; true solidarity demands that we open all neighborhoods to growth and density, not just the historically marginalized ones. As Demsas notes, it is in fact these communities that are fueling gentrification.

Justice requires more than rhetoric. It requires action—action that dismantles the structures of exclusion wherever they exist, not just where it is easiest to protest.

The National Mirror: From Berkeley to Minneapolis

The tensions between symbolism and material change are not unique to Albuquerque. They are playing out across North America—and few places illustrate this more vividly than Berkeley, California.

In Berkeley, activists famously sued to block the construction of desperately needed student housing on the site of People’s Park, arguing that students would create too much “noise pollution” and disrupt the surrounding neighborhood. Despite the fact that the University of California’s plan included 1,100 units of student housing and more than 100 units reserved for low-income and formerly unhoused residents—along with preserving 60% of the land as open space—opposition framed the project as a betrayal of the park’s legacy.

For a time, these lawsuits succeeded. Local courts blocked the project. But the dissonance between rhetoric and reality had grown too stark. Eventually, the California legislature and Supreme Court intervened, affirming that universities do not need to conduct noise studies or identify alternative sites when building urgently needed housing.

Journalist Dashka Slater, reflecting on her own time as a student activist at UC Berkeley, captured the deeper lesson. As she writes, People’s Park became a symbol whose meaning had long detached from material reality: a place valorized as an icon of freedom even as it decayed into a site of violence, addiction, and desperation. While students and unhoused people lacked real shelter, activists clung to the memory of a utopian past. “Too often,” Slater observes, “we waste our time arguing about the symbols themselves, rather than working for the ideals they’re supposed to represent.”27

The story of People’s Park is a parable of what happens when movements mistake symbolism for strategy. Instead of confronting present realities—scarce housing, rising homelessness, unmet basic needs—the defense of a symbol took precedence. Activists who once fought for community empowerment ended up obstructing the very housing their city desperately needed.

Now compare this to Minneapolis. In 2019, Minneapolis became the first major U.S. city to eliminate single-family zoning citywide. It didn’t happen easily. There was fierce opposition. But the city chose abundance over fear. Since then, Minneapolis has seen an increase in housing supply, more economic integration, and slower rent growth—all without the mass displacement that opponents predicted.

The contrast is striking. In Berkeley, scarcity was preserved to protect a symbol. In Minneapolis, abundance was embraced to build a future.

This is the choice facing cities like Albuquerque. We can cling to outdated narratives, policing authenticity and fighting over symbolic terrain, or we can do the difficult, necessary work of creating more homes, more opportunity, and more justice for all. Let’s work toward a city that embraces the actual work of making meaningful systemic change.

Scarcity as a Weapon

Berkeley shows how symbolic battles can leave real needs unmet. Minneapolis shows how embracing material change can deliver real results. The lesson is clear: when we let fear, nostalgia, or ideological rigidity govern land use, we don’t protect communities—we deepen their vulnerability. Nowhere is this clearer than in how scarcity itself has been weaponized across American cities. Scarcity isn’t neutral. It’s a weapon that protects privilege and punishes need. When investment and new housing are blocked in affluent areas, pressure simply redirects elsewhere, turning lower-income neighborhoods into battlegrounds. This is how gentrification happens: not because cities invest too much, but because they invest too narrowly.

Worse, many of the activists shaping leftist housing discourse—especially in academic, nonprofit, and professional circles—are themselves insulated from the consequences of scarcity. They live in precisely the kinds of exclusionary neighborhoods they defend against change: places with large lots, strict zoning, and little housing diversity. From these privileged positions, they deploy the language of authenticity and identity as rhetorical weapons, imposing rigid visions of community onto neighborhoods they do not inhabit. In doing so, they transform concepts like “representation” and “resistance” into tools of gatekeeping—policing who is allowed to speak, who is allowed to belong, and whose interests are deemed legitimate. The communities most affected by housing scarcity are not just ignored—they are conscripted into symbolic battles that leave their real needs unmet.

This is why housing abundance, especially in historically exclusive areas, is so critical. When all neighborhoods are allowed to grow, change doesn’t pile up in just a few. It spreads out. That softens the market pressure that drives speculation, renovictions, and displacement.

Decades of federal mobility programs—from HUD’s Moving to Opportunity to more recent local initiatives28—have shown that when people gain access to mixed-income neighborhoods with stable housing, they experience better physical and mental health, education and opportunity for young children, and income outcomes for those young children. Adults feel safer and healthier. In this way, economic integration and housing abundance don’t harm community—they make it possible. They open doors, rather than closing them behind the lucky few who got there first.

And it’s not just about preserving who’s already here, it’s also about making space for those who want to come back or join the community. Families thrive when grown children can afford to live near their parents. Cultural continuity is possible when a neighborhood’s own elders, artists, and caregivers can stay rooted without watching the next generation be pushed out. Housing abundance supports this—not by destroying community, but by making it possible.

Groups like the People’s Housing Project here in Albuquerque, or California’s “Our Neighborhood Voices,” position themselves as anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and pro-affordability. But their actions frequently have the opposite effect. They make housing scarcer. They make neighborhoods more unequal. And they ensure that our cities remain places where housing is a privilege, not a right.

Thinkers like Ezra Klein, Yoni Appelbaum, and Jerusalem Demsas offer a way out of this trap. They remind us that the path to true equity is not through exclusion, obstruction, or rhetorical purity—it’s through abundance. Build housing. Build it everywhere. Build it not as a threat to community, but as an act of solidarity with those denied access for too long. The answer to gentrification isn’t to stop change; it’s to spread it. It’s to make sure every neighborhood, not just the most vulnerable ones, welcomes growth, investment, and new neighbors. That’s how we turn the promise of justice into reality—not by guarding symbols, but by opening doors.

What We Actually Need

We need more good neighborhoods, not fewer. We need to legalize homes everywhere and not just on the margins. We need to recognize that community is made by people, not by locking down place. And we need to stop allowing vague, emotionally charged language like “gentrification” to derail the work of building a more inclusive city. True equity means allowing all neighborhoods to evolve, not concentrating change only in historically disinvested areas. When zoning laws restrict new development in wealthier neighborhoods but allow it in poorer ones, they guarantee that displacement pressure and speculation will land where resistance is weakest. That’s not justice—it’s structural harm disguised as activism.

Gentrification, as popularly understood, focuses too narrowly on aesthetics, newcomers, or vibe. It ignores the structural policies that make housing scarce, mobility impossible, and opportunity out of reach. It distracts from the systems that subsidize sprawl and insulate affluent neighborhoods from any obligation to share in the growth and success of the city while perpetuating racism and lack of opportunity.

The contradictions of so-called “Left-NIMBYism” are increasingly being exposed—not only by the growth of the YIMBY movement, but by thinkers like Jerusalem Demsas and Ezra Klein, who have helped reframe housing policy as central to justice, opportunity, and climate resilience. This shift offers a real opening: to move beyond rhetorical alignment and toward solutions that materially improve lives.

Building an inclusive city requires difficult conversations, honest self-reflection, and a willingness to let go of strategies that feel righteous but fail in practice. We can honor the past without being held hostage by it. “Sometimes,” Demsas writes, “the truly powerful don’t have to show up at all.” That’s the danger of our current discourse: while activists bicker over who’s a gentrifier or colonist, entrenched interests continue shaping policy—and keeping cities exclusive. The future belongs to those willing to make room: not just in their rhetoric, but in their neighborhoods. True solidarity is not about standing still. It’s about opening doors. It’s about building—together.

  1. https://thefulcrum.us/civic-engagement-education/political-protest ↩︎
  2. https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/the-failure-of-identity-politics-a-marxist-analysis/ ↩︎
  3. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/gentrification-nimby-homeowners-affordable-housing/661288/ ↩︎
  4. Downtown Albuquerque News, April 7th, 2020, The specter of gentrification haunts Downtown politics. But is it actually happening? ↩︎
  5. Benavidez, Javier. “Defending the Heart of Aztlan.” (2012). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/arch_sp/4 ↩︎
  6. Downtown Albuquerque News, March 15th, 2023, “As activist group arrives in Barelas, an argument over affordable housing veers far from the usual script” ↩︎
  7. https://www.krqe.com/news/albuquerque-metro/plans-for-a-new-development-in-barelas-leaves-neighborhood-divided/ ↩︎
  8. Downtown Albuquerque News, March 15th, 2023, “As activist group arrives in Barelas, an argument over affordable housing veers far from the usual script” ↩︎
  9. https://sourcenm.com/2021/10/14/residents-say-new-soccer-stadium-will-raise-rents-and-expand-policing-in-albuquerque/ ↩︎
  10. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/733977?journalCode=jpema ↩︎
  11. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tsur-Somerville-2/publication/239823323_Dynamics_of_the_Affordable_Housing_Stock_Microdata_Analysis_of_Filtering/links/53ea282c0cf2fb1b9b6766e3/Dynamics-of-the-Affordable-Housing-Stock-Microdata-Analysis-of-Filtering.pdf ↩︎
  12. “Homelessness Is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns” by Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern. Published by the University of California Press 2022 ↩︎
  13. “City-wide effects of new housing supply: Evidence from moving chains” by Bratu, Harjunen, Saarimaa, 2021 https://ideas.repec.org/p/fer/wpaper/146.html ↩︎
  14. “Local Effects of Large New Apartment Buildings in Low-Income Areas” By Asquith, Mast, Reed 2023 https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/105/2/359/100977/Local-Effects-of-Large-New-Apartment-Buildings-in ↩︎
  15. “The effect of new market-rate housing construction on the low-income housing market” by Evan Mast, 2023 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094119021000656 ↩︎
  16. “Does Building New Housing Cause Displacement?: The Supply and Demand Effects of Construction in San Francisco” by Kate Pennington, August 9, 2021 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/863aej6vjizrdko3qncj6/Pennington_JMP.pdf?rlkey=to1j44gfq8084ocx7t527nw39&e=1&dl=0 ↩︎
  17. “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” Paulo Freire, 1967 ↩︎
  18. https://www.instagram.com/theresidentsofbarelas/ ↩︎
  19. “Stuck: how the privileged and the propertied broke the engine of american opportunity” Yoni Appelbaum, 2025 ↩︎
  20. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/yimby-abundance-power-housing/ ↩︎
  21. “Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities” by Jessica Trounstine, 2018 ↩︎
  22. https://youtu.be/YgoDgAVp1l4?si=BneB836onZXJu3MA ↩︎
  23. “Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It” by Nolan Gray, 2022 ↩︎
  24. “Reclaiming Your Community: You Don’t Have to Move out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One” by Majora Carter, 2022 ↩︎
  25. https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/how-the-nonprofit-sector-fails-low-income-communities ↩︎
  26. “Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities” by Veronica O. Davis, 2023 ↩︎
  27. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/berkeley-peoples-park-university-california-supreme-court/ ↩︎
  28. https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/evaluating-impact-moving-opportunity-united-states ↩︎

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