Reimagining Albuquerque

When procedural power meets fear-based rhetoric, progress dies in a neighborhood meeting.

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There’s a rhythm to how things stall in Albuquerque. A resolution is introduced. Somewhere, in a tidy ranch-style home in Taylor Ranch or a private Zoom room, a handful of people—always deeply certain they’re speaking for a silent majority—sound the alarm. Meetings are called. Talking points circulate, draft letters are workshopped, reworded, passed around. Eventually, the plan, whether it be a homeless shelter, an amendment to the zoning code legalizing duplexes, or a new public amenity, either dies or emerges so softened that it’s barely worth passing.

That’s what the “tyrant’s veto” looks like here. Not a shouting match, not a protest. Just a small, practiced group wielding a well-worn playbook. Exhausting public officials, threatening lawsuits, and crying wolf about the impending doom of their single-family neighborhood that they chose in 1978 and which must be defended at all costs. R.I.P. to the idealism of the young urban planner, now choosing his words carefully lest he accidentally utter the words “apartment building.”

As word spreads about a one-time resolution—R-25-167—that would allow property owners to opt in to zoning conversions for additional housing, one can already hear the wailing echo through the usual rooms. In the Westside Coalition of Neighborhood Associations, the ICC (the Inter-Coalition Council—not The Hague, just another NIMBY group with a fancy name), the North Valley Coalition, the District 4 Coalition, and the other country-club meeting rooms of the landed and equity-rich, there is surely outrage brewing. These are not co-opted actors, they’ll insist—unlike the renters, activists, or small-time developers trying to make housing happen on margins they can barely afford. No, these homeowners are the pure ones. Guardians of character. Pillars of resistance. Unmoved, somehow, by their own holdings or historical windfalls.

They’ll tell you it’s not about fear. That it’s about process. About protecting what works. But the playbook is always the same. They say it works. But if a system is what it does, then this one leaves people unsheltered, prices out the next generation, and tells itself it’s preserving something. If that’s what they call working, maybe it’s time we stopped listening.

They will attack the data. They will say the housing shortage isn’t real or isn’t recent. Say nothing built will ever be “affordable” enough, and that unless housing comes with a guaranteed subsidy and a halo, it shouldn’t come at all. And if a proposal is deeply affordable, they will say that it ruins the “character,”—that old, racist trope taken out like a trump card to protect them from the horror of new neighbors. Neighbors who might be a different color, speak a different language, or get to work on a bus.

They will Insist that the city fix homelessness first, then oppose any housing that might relieve the pressure on rents. They will point to past reforms that didn’t change everything overnight as proof that nothing works, while ignoring that their lawsuits, appeals, and crocodile tears have stood in the way of those reforms. If changing our policies has resulted in nothing, why the loud caterwauling?

When the moral panic loses steam, then will come the shift to process. Ask where the diagrams are. Ask why there isn’t an impact report on planning staff workload. Say the neighborhood wasn’t consulted. Say the appeals process isn’t robust enough. Claim to speak for the majority, while ensuring that the actual majority never sees the proposal long enough to support it.

This is the soft tyranny of Albuquerque’s anti-housing establishment. It isn’t organized around a political party or a grand vision. It’s organized around the preservation of comfort—zoned into place decades ago and defended through a kind of procedural trench warfare. These coalitions, these associations, these self-anointed defenders of community don’t need to win the debate. They only need to slow it down. Drag it into subcommittees. Drown it in public comment. Threaten Councilors with angry inboxes and political payback.

Resolution R-25-167 is not some radical overhaul. It offers no mandate. It doesn’t end single-family zoning, doesn’t upzone entire neighborhoods, doesn’t require anyone to build anything. It simply lets individual property owners—those who want to—apply for a zoning conversion to build more housing. It’s a narrow, voluntary experiment with a firm sunset. But even that is too much for the guardians of stasis.

This is a city where adding a duplex next to a bus stop requires three meetings, multiple presentations to the neighborhood board, and an environmental report, but opposing it requires nothing more than showing up angry and nostalgic. The effect is paralysis. Not for everyone—just for the people trying to rent, to age in place, to come home, or give their child access to a nice school.

The tyrant’s veto isn’t wielded by the poor or the transient. It’s wielded by the comfortable, the housed, and the practiced. They’ve built networks, mailing lists, and associations designed to appear as civic life, but function mostly as mechanisms to keep new people out. Many of them believe sincerely that they are doing what’s best. But sincerity does not equal justice. And process, for its own sake, is not democracy—it’s delay.

We could improve R-25-167. Let’s start by making it permanent and automatic. If we’re serious about easing Albuquerque’s housing crisis, we shouldn’t treat flexibility as a pilot—we should treat it as policy. Every property owner should be able to participate in the slow, natural evolution of their neighborhood. That’s what cities are supposed to do: grow, shift, respond. It is what they have done for thousands of years, and what Albuquerque had done until 1953. But good-faith efforts won’t come from those intent on killing the measure outright. They’ll come from people who understand that housing is not a threat. That neighbors are not contaminants. That the city doesn’t end at their driveway.

The path forward is clearer than we like to admit. Appeal reform. Planning codes that don’t require hand-to-hand combat. Zoning that makes room for the people we keep saying we want to welcome. Neighborhoods shaped by more than just fear and memory.

The tyrant’s veto thrives in the quiet. It thrives in procedural opacity and in the assumption that only a few will show up. The tyrant here is no roaring lion. It’s a snapping turtle: burrowed in, slow-moving, shielded by age and ordinance, but quick to strike when its comfort is disturbed. This tyrant’s veto has shaped this city in countless unseen ways, and it will continue to do so unless we name it, confront it, and choose something better.

There’s nothing radical about allowing someone to build a small apartment in a city that needs tens of thousands of homes. What’s radical is the effort to stop it.

But we can’t stop at zoning. We need to reform the Neighborhood Association Recognition Ordinance, which grants outsized procedural power to the loudest, richest few. We should end the formal recognition of coalitions that operate without democratic structure or public transparency and serve only landed interests. We should remove automatic standing and notification privileges from associations that claim to represent entire neighborhoods, but rarely speak for more than a 6 people meeting in a dusty community space at a westside library.

And if our NIMBY neighbors continue to use lawsuits and appeals as weapons, we should encourage our friends in the development and housing justice communities to do the same. Legal tools shouldn’t only be used to stop change—they can also be used to enforce equity, challenge exclusion, and defend the right to build.

In California, new coalitions of attorneys—motivated not by property values but by justice and opportunity—have begun suing cities that block housing and cave to NIMBYism. They’ve taken aim at the local procedures, delay tactics, and bad-faith interpretations that have long kept growth out. The result? More housing is getting built. And the NIMBYs? They have to think twice before launching appeals, knowing that they, too, must face the monster they have created.

This is what defanging the tyrant’s veto looks like. It doesn’t mean silencing people. It means removing the structural bias that favors fear over fairness, delay over design, privilege over possibility. It means building a planning system that plans—for people, not just parcels. It means democracy happens at the ballot box, not in 17 public meetings held over 9 months with results published a year later; a system built to placate NIMBYism and freeze cities in paralytic fear.

The tyranny of the process ends when we stop treating it like destiny.

In Texas, the legislature has gone a different route. It moved to strip standing from neighborhood associations that wield local control like a cudgel. The reform had a name: the movement to end the Tyrant’s Veto. It’s a brilliant frame, and one we would do well to borrow. Here in New Mexico, we should name our own system for what it is—and dismantle it. The Neighborhood Association Recognition Ordinance, the coalition structure, the appeals process that rewards obstruction—they’re all part of the same machinery.

And let’s not pretend this is just about process. Zoning, as it exists today, is an exclusionary system built atop decades of racial and economic stratification. In New Mexico, it has deprived Indigenous, Black, and Hispanic communities of generational wealth. It has frozen entire neighborhoods in amber while redirecting investment elsewhere. It has helped create one of the worst homelessness crises in the country—not through lack of compassion, but through policies dressed up as “protection.” The result is stagnation, displacement, despair.

The blame, and the blood, lies at the feet of those who defend this status quo. The neighborhood coalitions, the proceduralists, the preservationists who fight for sameness while the city fractures, and the city leaders who fear the NIMBY more than they fear lost opportunity, rising homelessness, or a generation looking elsewhere..

We are not powerless. We are not voiceless. And we are not alone. Every valley shall be exalted, and every hill made low.

Let’s build a city worthy of the people it has excluded.