Reimagining Albuquerque

How market-rate “monstrosities” became one of Albuquerque’s best tools for housing people

If you stand along Fourth Street in the early evening, the new apartments look almost shy. A few floors of windows, a balcony with a folding chair, a houseplant trying its hardest to stay alive. Nothing dramatic. Just small signs of life on a corridor that spent years as dust, asphalt, used-car dealerships, and wishful thinking.

But in the North Valley, not everyone sees this as life returning.
Some call it the Beast. The dreaded Manhattanization of Albuquerque.

Back in 2019, the marquee outside St. Therese Catholic Church pleaded “CITY OF ABQ, please help Brewtown.” Reverend Vincent Paul Chávez warned that new apartments were “monstrosities” and “beasts” and that one in particular had “forever dwarfed our Beauty.” He imagined microbreweries and terraced patios overlooking the Sandias instead of, as he wrote, “low-construction-cost apartments.” Whether the Reverend meant it as such, he suggested an imagined future with very particular guests in mind and some very deliberate absences.¹

Meanwhile, one of the newest so-called “Beasts,” Poblana Place, is now being purchased by Bernalillo County with nearly $18 million in state funds. A market-rate “monstrosity” turned future workforce housing, transitional housing, and supportive services. Soon it will house seniors, displaced youth, and people who are struggling to make ends meet.

You have to wonder if the good reverend ever speaks with them.
Or if Senator O’Malley, so often the patron saint of old sector plans, has ever sat with the people who will soon call the Poblana home, or only with neighborhood association members who spend their evenings debating adobe color palettes over IPAs.

What We Dream of and Who We Dream For

There is something almost charming about the microbrewery dream. The carefully aged faux-dobe, the curated views of the mountains, the tidy patio umbrellas that always match. These are harmless fantasies until they become the political lens through which all housing is judged.

But here is the quieter truth the microbrewery dream never accounts for: the North Valley is emptying out. Families have been aging in place, young people have been priced out, and enrollment at neighborhood schools has dropped so low that Los Duranes Elementary is closing its doors to reopen as an early childcare center.² It isn’t a mystery. These are alarm bells ringing that neighborhood leaders, (rightfully) dismayed at losing the elementary school, should start taking more seriously. When you don’t build enough housing, especially the smaller homes and apartments that younger families can actually afford AND want, the neighborhood simply grows older and then it grows empty.

Which raises an awkward question: Who, exactly, did the reverend think would keep his hypothetical microbrewery afloat?

A rooftop patio facing the Sandias is a lovely idea, truly. But fantasies of a bustling corridor require something the North Valley no longer has enough of: people. Not just the long-established residents who guard the past, but new residents who can carry a neighborhood into the future including workers, families, young professionals, people starting out, and people starting over.

A place that refuses to welcome new neighbors cannot sustain the very amenities its defenders claim to cherish. A microbrewery needs a clientele, a café needs foot traffic and small businesses need the hum of a neighborhood with enough people to support them. That isn’t going to come from a depopulating, aging demographic that has been shrinking for decades.

The new apartments on Fourth Street aren’t threats to the corridor’s future; they’re simply its next chapter and maybe the only one that keeps the street alive. Without new residents, there is no future for these imagined gathering places at all.

Meanwhile, city and county leaders have been speaking in an entirely different vocabulary.

“We need help now because these are tough times,” Mayor Tim Keller said when announcing an $80 million investment in housing and homelessness. His goal is clear: at least one thousand people housed by next summer. Bernalillo County Commissioner Barbara Baca added, “When we invest in housing, we are investing in a safer neighborhood, better educational outcomes and a stronger economy for all.”³

While some dream of the perfect beer flight with a perfect view, the city and county are dreaming of shelter, stability, and survival, and, helpfully enough for our shared IPA dreams, building the economy that can actually support the young people and workers that can support these businesses.

The O’Malley Era & The World It Created

Debbie O’Malley’s influence still hangs over the North Valley like low winter fog. Former county commissioner, former city councilor, now state senator—her politics were shaped through the old patchwork of Sector Plans and outdated environmentalist language of the 70s that dictated heights, facades, setbacks, and what kind of person a neighborhood hoped to attract and which ones it hoped to keep out.

Those plans were precise, restrictive, and beloved by the crowd that saw themselves as guardians of neighborhood “character.” They also helped usher Albuquerque into the very crises we now face: scarcity, homelessness, environmental strain, and a slow bleed of opportunity out of our urban core.

The IDO replaced that system with something modern, predictable, and fair. O’Malley fought it for years. But without the IDO, Poblana Place and its cousins along Fourth Street would perhaps not exist and hundreds of people would not soon have a roof over their heads.

It is no accident that Bernalillo County’s and Albuquerque’s boldest housing decisions have happened after O’Malley moved on.

Philadelphia’s Strategy in the High Desert

While Albuquerque debates whether an apartment’s stucco should tilt more brown or more beige (A debate we’ve been having for well over 40 years), Philadelphia has been rewriting the playbook.

Its Housing Authority has been buying newly built, market-rate apartment buildings and converting them straight into affordable and mixed-income housing. No multi-year timelines. No $500,000-per-unit development costs. No endless procedural gauntlet.

PHA CEO Kelvin Jeremiah said it clearly: “It is far less expensive for PHA to purchase and rehabilitate existing properties than it is to build new housing.”⁴ Bernalillo County has adopted the same idea. The Poblana is the clearest example, serving not as a “monster,” but a lifeline. A ready-made building that can house people now, not after another three rounds of hearings, and after years of cobbling together local, state, and federal grants to build Affordable Housing from the ground-up.

Under capable leadership, a market-rate building can shift tiers overnight. Whether that makes it a beast or a refuge depends entirely on whether you see housing as a threat or a tool.

Filtering & The Flexibility We Need

Filtering is one of those terms that sounds technical until you see it up close: buildings age, finishes wear, units become cheaper, rents come down. What starts as “luxury” becomes “attainable,” and what becomes “attainable” becomes “naturally affordable.”

This is how almost every affordable unit in Albuquerque and the wider United States came to exist. Many opponents don’t want to hear that. They want new buildings to arrive already cheap, ignoring the reality that “affordable housing” is now so expensive and bureaucratic to develop that even well-funded cities can barely produce a fraction of what’s needed.

Market-rate housing is flexible when we let it be.
It ages into affordability when it is not scarce.
And if public agencies buy it, like Philadelphia and now BernCo are doing, it becomes affordable immediately.

There’s nothing radical about this. It’s just common sense we’ve been slow to accept and quick to forget and we can only make it happen when it is easy to build — when we are not afraid of renters or young and working families.

Fourth Street, Returned to Itself

On Fourth Street tonight, the new apartments glow quietly. A hallway light clicks on. Someone carries groceries. A teenager waits for a bus to hangout Downtown. A joint is lit on a balcony. Life is happening and though it may not be the curated, perfect kind dreamed up in neighborhood association meetings, it is the real kind.

The apartments are not beasts. Some of these complaints echo an old, racialized trope in American housing politics: the idea that apartment dwellers are somehow lesser, or parasitic, to quote the Supreme Court Case which legalized Euclidian Zoning. It’s an ugly story, and it’s been told for a long time. Contrary to the idea that renters are lesser, we say that these apartments, instead, represent beginnings. They are the future Poblana residents, the teachers, the seniors, the young people trying to make it work in a city they hope will work for them and a street that offers more opportunity than a reasonably priced used-car dealership can offer.

And if you look closely, you can see what the old sector-plan world never allowed: a corridor slowly returning to life.

Whether the reverend or the senator ever notice is another question entirely.

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1. Op-Ed, Albuquerque Journal, August 19th, 2019 ↩︎
2. Albuquerque Journal, February 21st, 2024, APS board greenlights plan to repurpose Duranes Elementary School ↩︎
3. Albuquerque Journal, August 27th, 2025, Albuquerque, Bernalillo County to receive more than $80 million to expand housing and homelessness projects ↩︎
4. Philly Voice, March 28th, 2025, Philadelphia Housing Authority ‘aggressively’ buying apartments to boost affordable housing inventory ↩︎