Reimagining Albuquerque

In April, NPR published a striking statistic: the United States is short about seven million homes. Years of restrictive zoning, parking mandates, and procedural delay have tied a noose around our ability to grow. We’ve made it illegal to build the kinds of neighborhoods that once defined American life—walkable, mixed, and attainable for working families.

Albuquerque is no exception. According to the city’s own housing assessment, we need 55,000 new homes by 2045 just to meet expected demand. We are also confronting an acute crisis of homelessness that falls hardest on people of color and the working class. Our codes have been slow to respond, but a rare opportunity is at hand: the Environmental Planning Commission (EPC) will soon hear a package of updates to the Integrated Development Ordinance (IDO) that could help change the trajectory of our city.

A Chance to Right the Course

These proposed reforms include measures to legalize small, neighborhood-serving stores, bodegas that restore walkability and reduce car dependence, along with modest increases in building height that can relieve the pressure of scarcity. They aren’t radical; they’re pragmatic steps toward a city that works again. They make home construction part of a holistic and systematic reconfiguration that leads to even greater resilience for individuals. Homes close to work and the ability to sell a car or go car-free can increase a person’s spending potential massively. That means more dollars in local businesses rather than in car payments going to banks and corporations far away.

Local organizers at Strong Towns ABQ have published a clear summary of what’s at stake. Taken together, these changes could mark one of the most significant steps forward since the IDO was first adopted, beginning to unwind decades of exclusion baked into our zoning system. The adoption of the IDO was the first large step toward healing. O-24-69 was another great leap forward toward deconstructing systems of oppression in Albuquerque. Now we have a chance to start thinking more holistically.

Beyond “Neighborhood Character”

Predictably, some opponents invoke familiar buzzwords like “context,” “neighborhood character,” “compatibility.” But these phrases, however genteel, often serve as shields for the same old exclusion: a belief that existing homeowners should wield veto power over the future, that the comfort of the privileged matters more than shelter for the vulnerable. These are not neutral concepts; they are the grammar of segregation, updated for the 21st century.

When the EPC deliberates, it will not merely be voting on technical code language. It will be deciding whether Albuquerque remains a city that protects scarcity or one that chooses abundance—whether we cling to nostalgia for color schemes and picket fences or embrace the reality that our children and grandchildren need places to live.

The Familiar Arguments and Why They Fall Apart

Opponents of reform will again wrap themselves in the language of moderation. They’ll say they “support growth along corridors” and “just want to protect Areas of Consistency.” But these phrases conceal a different agenda. In the Menaul Boulevard redesignation debate earlier this year, the same voices claiming to favor corridor growth fought bitterly against it. Their concern wasn’t planning consistency but preserving exclusion. “Areas of Consistency,” a term embedded in the IDO, sounds harmless enough until you ask the obvious question: consistent with what? The answer is uncomfortable: consistent with decades of zoning that enforced racial and class segregation.

They will raise alarms about parking, despite the fact that even Albuquerque’s densest neighborhoods have block after block of unused street space. They’ll frame scarcity as virtue, insisting that every new home is a threat to “character,” and every empty parking space a public right. They’ll imply, as they so often do, that only property owners deserve a say in how our city grows. This is fundamentally an illiberal echo of an older, uglier idea that citizenship and ownership are the same thing and that only landowners should get to vote.

And when all else fails, they’ll claim that allowing duplexes or cottage courts won’t affect affordability, ignoring what’s already been proven in cities like Minneapolis, Austin, and Portland, where legalizing these homes helped flatten rent growth and expand choice. It’s not theory: it’s evidence. The anti-housing crowd isn’t defending planning; they’re defending privilege.

We cannot let fear dictate policy. We must power over it.

The False Choice of “Affordability vs. Reform”

Another familiar argument will come from those who say that zoning changes cause displacement or fail to produce “capital-A” Affordable Housing. It’s a claim rooted in both real pain and real misunderstanding. Albuquerque’s (and the nation’s) history shows that selective reform, where some neighborhoods are opened to change while others are protected, has long been a tool of segregation, not inclusion.

Under the old zoning regime that the IDO replaced, growth and investment were funneled almost exclusively into lower-income and majority-minority neighborhoods, while wealthier, whiter areas were shielded by layers of “character protection” and bespoke plans. This was not justice. It was targeted deregulation used as containment policy.

A holistic zoning code that allows organic, incremental growth everywhere is the antidote. When all neighborhoods share in the responsibility, and the opportunity, of adding homes, the pressure that drives displacement dissipates. That is precisely why the IDO was a step toward deconstructing segregation. It’s important to understand that the same zoning code that restricts housing in general also strangles the production of affordable and social housing. When land is scarce and entitlements are unpredictable, even mission-driven developers can’t build and cities, too, are strangled if they don’t exempt themselves from the code. Affordable housing finance depends on tight deadlines, tax credits, and grant cycles that collapse under the weight of long rezoning processes and NIMBY appeals.

The framework of “Centers and Corridors” was an improvement over the old, arbitrary patchwork, but it still carries the NIMBY compromise: it says growth belongs “over there,” not “here.” To move beyond displacement politics, Albuquerque must move beyond containment planning. True affordability is achieved not by rationing development to certain corridors, but by legalizing small, steady, human-scale growth across the entire city.

The Work Ahead

These reforms are a strong step forward, but they still fall short of what our city truly needs. The reforms also still reify the concepts of sector planning and corridor planning. We should aspire to a zoning map where the minimum residential zone is MX-L, a mixed-use district that allows multifamily housing by default. We should eliminate arbitrary height limits except those required by the FAA. And we should design our code to enable housing and businesses, not ration them.

The Planning Commission has a moral responsibility to act boldly and to recognize that every delayed reform means more families priced out, more young people leaving, and more lives lost to homelessness. Passing these amendments is not just good planning; it is an act of justice.

The choice before the Commission and the City Council is simple: continue placating NIMBY fears, or build a city where everyone has a chance to belong, thrive, and call Albuquerque home.

The Limits of “Public Input”

Too often, when the Environmental Planning Commission makes poor recommendations to City Council, it does so by appealing to the refrain that “the public was against this.” It’s an understandable instinct that represents a social view of democracy that treats every speaker as a datapoint of legitimacy. But this view is also profoundly short-sighted.

The EPC meeting where these reforms will be heard, scheduled at 8:40 a.m. on a Tuesday, will inevitably capture only a narrow segment of the “public.” As Katherine Einstein documents in Neighborhood Defenders, the people who tend to attend and dominate planning and zoning hearings are older, wealthier, and whiter than the communities they claim to represent. It excludes shift workers, from those driving our ART buses along Central to those manning the counter at KFC, these voices are rarely represented. This imbalance distorts our sense of what the city truly wants or needs. As Yoni Appelbaum shows in Stuck this is intentional and by design: entrench the status quo of whiteness and privilege.

Public input is valuable, but we must remember how it functions. Input works best when it helps identify problems and directs policymakers to experts who can craft effective solutions and when it seeks out that input within the community. This can look like canvassing by city contractors or staff, events all throughout the city at various times, presentations and tabling at public events, and virtual seminars. It works worst when we solicit it at every stage of a process, mandate testimony in a closed space, and gatekeep who gets to speak, as we currently do with zoning and planning, treating personal preference as public policy.

Commissioners must remember: their role is not to tally opinions, but to weigh outcomes. Do we want a city where people die outside because we failed to build enough homes? Do we want a city that tells young people to leave if they want opportunity and good schools? Do we want to push physicians, teachers, and workers to the coasts because Albuquerque refuses to grow and welcome them?

Zoning is not neutral. It is moral infrastructure. Every delay, every veto, every parking space protected at the expense of a home is a choice about who belongs here.

This package of IDO amendments is not perfect but it moves us toward a city that welcomes rather than excludes, that builds rather than blocks, that plans for life rather than nostalgia.