Reimagining Albuquerque

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The City of Albuquerque is currently in the midst of its biannual zoning code (IDO) update process, with Planning hosting a series of public input meetings ahead of a hearing before the Environmental Planning Commission (EPC)¹. So far, three sessions have drawn both pro-housing advocates and vocal opponents, revealing sharp divides over what kind of city Albuquerque should become. This piece examines those debates, drawing from public comments available on the planning department website, and explores how envy, shame, and guilt help underpin NIMBY resistance in Albuquerque.

For many who oppose changes to Albuquerque’s zoning code, the implicit promise of single-family zoning is exclusivity: an imagined buffer against unwanted neighbors. But unlike the ultra-wealthy, who can wall themselves off in Aspen or Lake Tahoe, this desire in Albuquerque is rooted less in wealth than in envy: a middle-class yearning to approximate the protections and privileges of elite spaces within an urban context.

In Aspen or Lake Tahoe*, wealth buys effortless exclusivity through affluent, filtered neighbors and insulation from others. But in Albuquerque and nationwide, the politics of zoning has become a way for the middle class to simulate that same exclusivity without the wealth to secure it. By clinging to single-family zoning and invoking “neighborhood character,” NIMBY homeowners recreate the appearance of stability and control found in places they envy, while living in a growing city whose demographics and housing needs defy the small-town fantasy.

“Zoning is also supposed to protect property values… these changes very much put them at risk.” – Peggy N. (IDO Chat)

This fixation on “character” is less about architecture or setbacks than it is about who belongs and who doesn’t. We’ll explore this more in the next section, but at its core, it’s about using the language of stability to resist change and difference.

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that morality often emerges from what he called “resentment”²—a way of recoding envy and weakness into moral virtue. Rather than aspiring upward, those who feel threatened define themselves against “the other” and call it righteousness. You can hear this in how Albuquerque’s neighborhood defenders speak.

“Character” and the Illusion of Small-Town Exclusivity

When residents invoke “character,” it is often less about architecture than about social boundaries. “Character” functions as a form of neighborhood gatekeeping: it’s shorthand for a status quo in which homeowners retain veto power over who their neighbors can be. In this sense, it’s not an aesthetic principle but a social filter.

They speak of choosing neighborhoods for their “small-town feel,” but what they are really defending is a controlled environment, where demographic change feels distant and unfamiliar faces remain few. As one longtime opponent put it in a public meeting:

“Zoning is also supposed to protect property values… these changes very much put them at risk.” – Peggy N

Another participant was even more explicit:

“I see these changes to eliminate zoning which is the only protection for residents… to preserve historical neighborhoods zoned R-1.” – iPhone (7)

Here, “protection” becomes the operative word: zoning is seen not as a tool for good design but as a shield against renters, density, and difference. It enforces an imagined social order, a kind of suburban stasis threatened by the mere existence of duplexes or casitas. This is precisely what Nietzsche described as slave morality: the transformation of powerlessness and envy into moralized virtue. Rather than aspiring upward or saying yes to the possibility of new neighbors, this worldview reframes negation as righteousness, cloaking opposition in the language of “protecting neighborhoods” and “preserving character.”

Historically, this is how “character” has been wielded in zoning fights across the U.S. Early 20th-century court cases like Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty (1926) upheld zoning as a means of preserving “residential character,” a phrase that implicitly encoded race and class boundaries. Later, “character” was deployed to fight apartment bans, to block civil rights–era fair housing mandates, and to justify historic preservation overlays that froze out new, denser housing forms under the guise of “compatibility.”

We can see echoes of this in today’s language. During recent IDO meetings, one opponent warned:

“Stop gentrifying our neighborhoods!” – iPhone (7)

On its surface, this sounds like a plea for justice but in context, it was aimed at proposals to allow cottage courts and casitas: housing types historically associated with modest incomes. Here, “gentrification” is less about displacement by wealthier outsiders than about the perceived encroachment of others, be them renters, younger people, or simply those deemed “different,” into spaces homeowners want to keep fixed.

This is how envy operates in denial. Rather than admit discomfort with sharing space in a growing, diversifying city, residents reframe that discomfort as moral virtue: “we are defending character,” “we are fighting gentrification.” Nietzsche’s insight was that such postures define themselves entirely by what they oppose. Instead of affirming what they want their neighborhoods to be, they retreat into a negation: not apartments, not renters, not change.

The irony is that the “character” they claim to defend is itself an illusion. These are not villages frozen outside of time; they are often mid-century subdivisions inside New Mexico’s largest city, or Downtown neighborhoods in desperate need of more housing capacity. What’s really being defended is a middle-class approximation of exclusivity. It is an attempt to simulate the insulation of Aspen or Lake Tahoe without the wealth to purchase it. And that fiction only holds so long as duplexes, apartments, and the renters who live in them are kept out.

View Corridors and the Fiction of Wealth

Take the fight over Coors Boulevard’s “view protections,” which restrict building heights to preserve mountain vistas for drivers (yes, really: it is written into city policy to preserve mountain views specifically for drivers).

“Coors Blvd. has always been a view corridor with beautiful views of the Bosque and the Mountains… Need to preserve those views.” – René H. 

On its face, it sounds benign. Who doesn’t love a mountain view? But in practice, this fixation functions less as scenic preservation and more as what we might call a “faux Aspen” aesthetic: a zoning mandate that mimics the trappings of wealth without its substance. In wealthy enclaves like Aspen or Lake Tahoe, unobstructed vistas are part of what enormous price tags buy: a luxury rooted in scarcity and exclusivity.

In Albuquerque, view protections serve as a symbolic stand-in for that same exclusivity, transforming a middle-class arterial road into a simulacrum of affluence. They allow homeowners to claim a slice of aesthetic privilege (“we have views”) even as they live in a fundamentally urban, mixed-income city where the median home price has become out of reach to the majority of residents at median incomes.

One particularly illustrative moment came during the July 31st IDO meeting, when Taylor Ranch Neighborhood Association representative René Horvath elaborated:

Timestamp 39:35: “I just want to clarify why we need parking along Coors, and yeah, you’re right, we have a view corridor in place… it’s been one of the greatest assets that we have on the westside, and people really love these views. So the big thing is to keep the building heights low and set them back away from the road because if they sit right in the front, next to the road, they block the views more than when they sit back away from the road. That’s how you design to preserve the roads. Also, our businesses need spaces, so the surrounding communities can take a short drive and get to the businesses in there.” – René H.

Here, we see two intertwined priorities: protecting car-oriented “viewing” experiences and preserving parking to sustain auto-dependent retail. This is not about public access to natural beauty or building scenic overlooks; it’s about preserving a lifestyle calibrated to driving past open vistas and shopping in setback strip malls.

As one pro-housing participant pointedly asked:

“We are protecting the view of the mountains for a road?” – Michele G.

Another chimed in:

“We would be better off with a scenic overlook. Eyes on the road for drivers!” – Bryan D.

The irony is sharp: while scenic preservation elsewhere often involves removing roads to restore landscapes or protecting views from shared, public spaces open to all, Albuquerque’s version involves preserving the road itself: ensuring that future drivers can experience fleeting, windshield-framed vistas between errands.

This is where envy comes in. For middle-class homeowners, these “small luxuries” become markers of class distinction, proxies for an imagined exclusivity. The ability to live in a neighborhood with “views” allows one to feel adjacent to the aesthetics of wealth, even if the material conditions differ drastically from Aspen. It’s not just about seeing mountains but about signaling taste, stability, and a curated relationship to the landscape that feels refined and insulated.

And like Nietzsche’s slave morality, this fixation redefines limitation as virtue. Where the ultra-wealthy simply purchase seclusion, middle-class homeowners moralize their simulacrum: restricting building heights and opposing density becomes “protecting views,” which in turn becomes proof of being “good stewards” of place. Meanwhile, as one chat commenter noted, it places design priorities in tension with basic housing needs:

“We are protecting the view of the mountains while people are priced out of living here? That’s absurd.” – Michele G.

Ultimately, view corridors act as a release valve for envy, allowing residents to claim a piece of the aesthetic wealth of exclusivity without actually redistributing real wealth or power. And by anchoring this identity in zoning, they attempt to freeze parts of Albuquerque in amber, elevating symbolic class markers over the city’s most pressing challenges: affordability, housing scarcity, and urban vitality.

Developers as “The Other”

Much of this resentment centers around an imagined villain: the developer.

“Giving tax breaks and zoning freedom to developers will never and has never guaranteed affordable housing.” – Bernadette H.

“Stop the upzoning… solidarity planning!” – Peggy N.

In this narrative, “developers” are stripped of any nuance. They are not local builders creating duplexes or contractors working on small projects. They are framed as monolithic, rapacious, and alien—invaders whose motives are greed and whose presence signals exploitation. Even pro-housing residents who support gentle density get recast as accomplices:

“Only about 1.5% of the ABQ population knows about R-167. Who has $2M in their pocket to do this development? Corporate market value rentals… bought and paid for.” – Peggy N. (IDO Chat)

This rhetoric mirrors what Nietzsche described as slave morality: a worldview built on inversion, where strength (here, development capacity) becomes synonymous with evil, and weakness is recast as moral virtue.

Rather than aspiring to match the capacity to build, or seeking to reform it productively, opposition becomes righteous precisely because it resists power. As Nietzsche put it, “Among them we find plenty of vengeance-seekers disguised as judges, with the word justice continually in their mouths like poisonous spittle.”

By positioning themselves against a constructed “other,” NIMBY homeowners find moral self-affirmation. They don’t have to confront the contradictions of living in New Mexico’s largest city while clinging to small-town land use expectations. They don’t have to reckon with how single-family zoning fuels scarcity and exclusion. Instead, they define themselves by what they oppose: developers, city planners, pro-housing advocates—all of whom are collapsed into a single antagonist.

This binary even extends to fellow residents. Pro-housing voices in IDO meetings, ordinary Burqueños calling for cottage courts or transit-oriented development, are dismissed as “bought,” “co-opted,” or derided as “gentrifiers.” In one exchange, a comment warning against “gentrifying our neighborhoods” was leveled not at speculative investment or luxury construction, but at reforms aimed at allowing casitas and duplexes—precisely the kinds of lower-cost housing options that historically prevent displacement.

This is resentment’s sleight of hand: it recasts envy and fear into moral outrage, transforming anyone who challenges the status quo into an enemy. In Nietzschean terms, it’s a classic “no-saying” posture: identity defined entirely through negation. This binary performs an important psychological function. It absolves the individual homeowner from introspection. If housing costs rise, it is not because of restrictive zoning or collective resistance to density, it is because “greedy developers” hoard land. If scarcity persists, it is not because homeowners fought to block duplexes or casitas, it is because “the city” conspires with outsiders.

In this sense, “developer” is less a person than a cipher: an abstract projection that absorbs all anxieties about change, density, and urban life. It allows resentment to feel righteous.

Nietzsche contrasted this with what he called master morality, a “yes-saying” ethos that affirms strength, vitality, and creation. Pro-housing voices in Albuquerque implicitly take this stance not because they are powerful, but because their politics affirm rather than negate. Their “resentment,” if it exists, is tethered to justice:

“Affording to live in a city is hard and so we should do MORE not LESS… Doing nothing only serves the status quo (it’s not poor people).” – Mark B.

Here, the target is not an imagined “other,” but scarcity itself. Where NIMBY resentment freezes Albuquerque in place by vilifying developers, YIMBY affirmation says yes. Yes to neighbors, yes to building, and yes to reimagining the city in ways that make room for more people.

Not all resentment is equal. In Albuquerque’s zoning debates, we can see two distinct forms emerge: one defensive, rooted in fear and protectionism, and the other affirmative, driven by anger at exclusion and scarcity.

Consider this exchange from recent IDO meetings:

“We need parking for our businesses… You will make a lot of people mad if we lose these views.” – René H.

Here resentment clings to what already exists. It is rooted in preservation: preserving parking, preserving views, preserving a status quo imagined as fragile and under siege. It seeks to hold the city still, to protect its “character” against encroachment, even as that stasis fuels scarcity and rising costs. It also values the values of those who may be mad at losing a view over that of the need to house people living outside.

Contrast that with another perspective voiced in the same forums:

“Making transit better will reduce the need for multiple vehicles for families… And making the city easier to navigate for folks without a car.” – Michele G.

This resentment looks outward rather than inward. It is angry not at density or neighbors but at exclusion, at systems that force car dependence and price people out of opportunity. It demands change to expand possibility rather than to barricade against it.

For many NIMBY homeowners, defensive resentment is about preserving a fictional wealth. They may not live in Aspen or Santa Fe, but single-family zoning and view protections simulate some of the markers of exclusivity found in those places: wide setbacks, open vistas, homogenous neighbors. Their resentment surfaces when reforms threaten these symbols, even if those reforms would make housing more affordable or transit more functional.

We see this in quotes about parking and views as well as property values as previously cited by René and Peggy. Here, resentment masquerades as stewardship. It is defensive precisely because it imagines loss, not just of parking or mountain views, but of a delicate social order in which scarcity and separation secure comfort.

By contrast, affirmative resentment channels dissatisfaction into demands for inclusion and reform. It sees housing scarcity, stagnant wages, and car-centric planning as barriers to opportunity. This resentment is not about freezing Albuquerque in a static condition but about breaking through structural inertia.

“Single-family sprawl is COSTING Albuquerque.” – Michele G.

“Cottage developments help build a tighter community… the shape allows for more ‘bumping into,’ which increases safety.” – Brandi T.

These comments voice frustration not at imagined villains but at real constraints. They express what Nietzsche might call a “yes-saying” impulse: a desire to affirm new possibilities rather than cling to old protections.

These two resentments function differently in the civic sphere. Defensive resentment is centripetal—it pulls inward, reinforces boundaries, and casts outsiders (developers, renters, pro-housing advocates) as threats. It’s psychologically soothing, offering moral affirmation (“we are defending neighborhoods”) without requiring introspection.

Affirmative resentment, by contrast, is centrifugal—it pushes outward, demanding new investments, broader housing options, and shared public goods. It channels anger at scarcity into collective reform rather than private protection.

The conflict between these modes is evident in the chat logs. When one commenter lamented:

“Stop the upzoning and take a look at solidarity planning, solidarity economics.” – Peggy N.

Another quickly countered:

“Why can’t we be the model city?” – Michele G.

One looks back, longing for control. The other looks forward, asking what Albuquerque could become if it embraced growth, density, and inclusion.

The Denial of Envy

Perhaps the clearest tell in Albuquerque’s zoning debates is how quickly residents bristle at comparisons to other cities.

“We are not California.” – Peggy N. (responding to a commenter, Jordon M. to allow casitas more easily)

This mantra functions as envy’s denial mechanism. Rather than grapple with how Albuquerque lags behind its peers in housing supply or how lessons from elsewhere might help us avoid deeper crises, opponents recode this discomfort into moral superiority: “We’re not like them—and that’s good.”

Envy often hides beneath layers of shame and guilt. Admitting envy means admitting inferiority, and envy’s malicious edge (its wish to see the envied “brought down”) conflicts with social norms of fairness and decency. So instead, envy is denied and then disguised as outrage.

In Albuquerque, this denial is particularly potent because it shields residents from confronting the consequences of their own political victories. The same zoning protections touted as “preserving character” have helped create massive housing scarcity and visible homelessness. To acknowledge this link would mean reckoning with the shame of defending a system whose outcomes are increasingly indefensible. Instead, resentment is recoded as morality: “We’re not like California” becomes a way of shifting blame elsewhere, disowning the crisis while affirming virtue.

This also reflects what Nietzsche described as ressentiment: rather than say yes to growth or reform, this worldview defines itself by negation. Its adherents become righteous precisely because they resist, finding affirmation in their opposition rather than in anything generative or creative.

This denial is not just about policy but about what it means to live in a city. Cities exist because of proximity: proximity to services, to jobs, to education, to each other. Density is not an aberration of urban life; it is its defining feature. Yet in Albuquerque’s zoning debates, density is cast as something alien, something “imported” from elsewhere, as if urbanity itself were an intrusion into a city of half a million.

In reality, many of those most opposed to density might be happier in suburban, semi-rural, or exurban towns like Rio Rancho, Los Lunas, or even Socorro or Silver City; In places where development is sparse, views are uninterrupted, and exclusivity is inherent. But rather than relocate to environments aligned with their preferences, they remain in Albuquerque and fight to make the city into something it cannot and should not be: a metropolis frozen in a suburban mold.

This is the paradox: those who decry urban change are not really rejecting urbanism: they are denying it, reshaping the city to fit their desire for exclusivity while still benefiting from the very things cities provide: major hospitals, universities, jobs, cultural life, and infrastructure subsidized by density they oppose. It is, in essence, the desire to live in a city while legislating it into a small town.

Envy’s denial smooths over this contradiction. It allows residents to see themselves as defenders of virtue, standing against “California-ization” or “developer greed,” rather than as participants in a system that walls off opportunity and forces others onto the street. The shame of exclusion is buried beneath the language of protection. The guilt of hoarding space becomes the morality of “preserving character.”

In this sense, Albuquerque’s NIMBY politics are not just a battle over zoning but a form of envy sublimated into law. A desire to hold on to a fictional proximity to wealth, to mountain views and quiet streets, while disavowing the urban condition that makes living in Albuquerque possible in the first place.

Yes to Albuquerque

Nietzsche warned that resentment is a sickness of the spirit: a turning inward that rots joy and possibility. It breeds smallness, suspicion, and negation—a constant “no” disguised as virtue. Its cure, he argued, is affirmation: saying yes to life, to oneself, to possibility.

In Albuquerque, that affirmation looks like saying yes to neighbors, yes to housing diversity, yes to the reality that we are not a village or a subdivision but affirming that we are a city, and we should grow like one.

“Cottage developments help build a tighter community, as neighbors share an outdoor space… Love this!” – Brandi T. (IDO Chat)

“Making transit better will reduce the need for multiple vehicles for families… And making the city easier to navigate for folks without a car.” – Michele G.

These aren’t just pro-housing talking points but a rejection of envy’s fiction in favor of abundance. Where NIMBYism hoards, be it protecting “views,” “character,” and empty lots as though they were scarce treasures, YIMBY optimism offers openness. It is an invitation to share a city rather than to guard it, to build homes rather than to wall them off, to see density not as an encroachment but as an opportunity.

NIMBYism is a politics of no. It is rooted in envy’s denial mechanism, cloaked in nostalgia for a “small town” that never truly existed here. It imagines Albuquerque as something static and exclusionary: a place where growth is suspect, neighbors are threats, and every new building is an intrusion.

YIMBYism, by contrast, is a politics of yes. It sees the city as an engine of possibility: a place where density supports transit, where mixed-income neighborhoods become ladders of opportunity, and where housing abundance is not just pragmatic but humane. It asks Albuquerque to embrace what cities do best: bring people together and to trust that inclusion is not a loss, but a gain.

Breaking the Loop

We can build a city where security comes from community, not isolation; where identity is rooted in what we create together, not in what we keep out.

To break the destructive envy-resentment loop, we must abandon the fiction that Albuquerque’s best future lies in stasis. It does not. It lies in movement, growth, and shared horizons broader than a view corridor on Coors.

Nietzsche might have called it the will to affirm. We might just call it the courage to live in a city. Or, if you prefer something simpler:

If envy shrinks us inward, Albuquerque’s future depends on saying yes: to neighbors, to density, to shared horizons broader than a view corridor on Coors.

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*It should be noted that in towns and regions like Aspen and Lake Tahoe, abuse of zoning laws and strict land use have aggravated issues of affordability, equity, and access to a great degree.

1. https://abq-zone.com/ido-updates-2025 ↩︎
2. Nietzsche, F. (1998). On the genealogy of morality (M. Clark & A. J. Swensen, Trans.). Hackett Publishing.
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