Keller's 'ambitious' subsidized housing goal unlikely to be met by 2025
Sep. 30—A commitment made by Mayor Tim Keller as part of his Housing Forward initiative is likely to fall short.
In October 2022 Keller set a goal for the city to subsidize 5,000 housing units by 2025, calling it "extremely ambitious." With three months left until 2025, that sentiment proved to be accurate.
"Well, I mean, I wish that we would have said 2027," Keller told the Journal.
"We are a little short, based on our timeline, and our timeline was probably a little aggressive, but we're at 2,000 for sure right now. And we do have another 300 units in the pipeline," Keller said. "We've made a ton of progress. ... It just takes a little longer than we thought to subsidize 5,000 units of new housing."
Keller blamed the state Legislature and City Council for the city falling short on its goal.
"We did not get the funding we thought we would," Keller said. "Primarily last legislative session; we asked for $50 million and we got $6.4 (million)."
Locally, the Keller administration proposed four zoning changes. Two of the proposals got through City Council, one of which allows casitas or detached units to be built, and another eliminating building height limits.
However the Council shot down a zoning change that would have allowed for duplexes to be built and another a measure that reduced parking in mixed-use zone districts.
"When we made that pledge, that was predicated on us getting four out of four things that we wanted," Keller said.
When fielding questions on another topic, a spokesperson for the city's Health, Housing and Homelessness department declined to give a number of affordable housing units the city added since 2022 but said since 2018 that 1,200 affordable housing units have been added and 200 new units were financed over the last year, calling it a record number.
"Despite major investments from the city, totaling more than $94.4 million dollars, funding to address the housing gap is significantly short of what is needed," Connor Woods, spokesperson for the Health, Housing and Homelessness department wrote in an email. "Moving forward we are dedicated to securing funding to continue the momentum to build the housing Albuquerque needs."
Woods added that "about 15,500 new housing units are needed for people making less than 30% of the Area Median Income."
At an event hosted by by the New Mexico chapter of NAIOP, a commercial real estate development association, last Tuesday, Keller estimated the number of homeless in Albuquerque to be 5,000.
While Housing Forward may not meet its 2025 goal of housing units added, Keller is still looking to increase the supply and meet the ambitious goal he set almost 24 months ago — eventually.
"I think really what I'm hopeful about, and what is the most important thing, is how much funding we can get this session," Keller said. "We're doing a joint ask with the county for $100 million. That's what we need, and the city can't do these kinds of things; we can't finance these by ourselves."
