Reimagining Albuquerque

Proposals to amend the City of Albuquerque’s Zoning Code have arrived at City Council.

For a city that has spent years debating how little it should allow, the current package of Integrated Development Ordinance amendments is almost refreshing.

The proposals before City Council are modest by national standards. They would legalize more townhouses, duplexes, and small cottage-style homes. They would make it easier to build incremental housing in places that already have streets, utilities, and services. They would loosen some of the rigid rules that have long limited what can be built, even when demand clearly exists.

None of this amounts to a dramatic reshaping of Albuquerque’s skyline. These are not high-rise mandates or sweeping rezonings. They are small shifts in the underlying rules of the built environment, the kind many cities have increasingly adopted, including our neighbors in Tucson and Las Cruces, with Phoenix also passing large reforms.

And yet, as these amendments move forward, a familiar pattern has returned.

Every few years, when the Integrated Development Ordinance comes up for update, the public conversation takes on the same anxious tone. Change is framed as threat. Intent is questioned. Worst-case scenarios circulate faster than the proposals themselves.

It has become something like amendment season. A recurring moment in Albuquerque’s civic life, less defined by the substance of any one package than by the reactions that reliably follow.

This year is no exception. As City Council considers a new package of IDO amendments, the debate has once again become unmoored from what is actually being proposed. Claims circulate quickly, often detached from the scope of the changes or the guardrails already built into the planning system. The result is a conversation that feels urgent, but not always grounded.

The IDO is meant to be amended. That is not an accident or a sign of instability. It is how zoning codes function over time, responding to observed gaps, legal requirements, and lessons learned from implementation. The current amendments continue that pattern. They are incremental, citywide adjustments, not a wholesale rewrite of Albuquerque’s land use rules.

What they offer is flexibility. More housing types allowed in more places. Fewer hard prohibitions that limit what can be built regardless of context. A framework that better reflects how cities actually grow, through small projects, gradual change, and many individual decisions rather than sweeping transformations.

None of this guarantees that every neighborhood will change, or how quickly. Allowing something in a zoning code does not require it to happen. Markets remain constrained by financing, construction costs, labor, and demand. What changes is that when growth does occur, it has more paths available to it, and fewer artificial bottlenecks.

Much of the anxiety surrounding zoning reform comes from older models of planning. For decades, cities relied heavily on targeted rezonings, concentrating new development capacity in a handful of corridors or districts while leaving most neighborhoods untouched. Those signals were clear, and demand followed them. Pressure intensified in predictable places.

Citywide reform represents a shift away from that approach. Instead of funneling growth into a few locations, it spreads modest additional capacity across the city. The aim is not to accelerate redevelopment in any one area, but to reduce the pressure created by scarcity everywhere. This is not a radical idea. It reflects a growing consensus among planners and housing researchers, and it is increasingly visible in the experience of peer cities that have adopted similar reforms.

Amendment season, however, has a way of flattening these distinctions. Complex policy debates are reduced to slogans. The question of whether change is being managed thoughtfully gets replaced with whether change should be allowed at all.

In that environment, the loudest voices have often set the tone, even if they did not represent the full range of public opinion. But that pattern may be beginning to shift.

At the first Land Use, Planning and Zoning Committee hearing on the current amendments, support showed up in a way that felt different. Grassroots groups like Generation Elevate New Mexico and Strong Towns Albuquerque spoke alongside members of the local development and building community, including representatives from NAIOP and the area homebuilders, as well as businesses and faith leaders. Individual residents also testified on issues ranging from transit access and bikability to disability access and inclusive design.

The contrast was notable. Much of the support was measured and forward-looking, focused on how incremental changes could improve access and opportunity across the city. At the same time, some opposition remained loud, angry, and rooted in fear of loss rather than in the details of the proposals themselves.

Public process still plays a role here. Hearings and comment periods tend to reward those with the time, familiarity, and confidence to navigate them. But moments like this suggest that the conversation is widening, and that a broader cross-section of Albuquerque is beginning to engage more visibly with questions of land use and growth.

In response to this pattern, this page has launched a public petition supporting the current IDO amendments before City Council. Its purpose is simple: to document support that is otherwise easy to overlook, and to signal that the conversation is broader than it may appear from a handful of meetings or social media threads. The petition is not an endpoint. It is one more form of participation in a process that often privileges fear over clarity.

The petition can be found here:
https://c.org/9ZbZpZVSBJ

None of this is to suggest that zoning reform is a cure-all. Albuquerque’s housing challenges are the result of decades of decisions, economic shifts, and institutional constraints. No single amendment package can resolve them. But the way the city talks about these changes matters. When debates are dominated by alarm, it becomes harder to assess trade-offs honestly, harder to improve proposals through good-faith critique, and harder to move forward at all.

Amendment season does not have to follow the same script every time. Albuquerque can choose to treat these moments as opportunities for learning rather than rehearsals of old arguments. That requires slowing down, reading what is actually proposed, and recognizing the difference between allowing change and losing control.

The city is already changing. The only real question is whether that change will be shaped deliberately, through informed policy and broad engagement, or by default, through scarcity and inertia. Amendment season offers a chance to decide.

Join Reimagining Albuquerque in voicing support for these changes.