Water and Housing

Water and Affordable Housing
             
Marsha and I knew well that Santa Fe, New Mexico was situated in the high desert region.  The dry, 300+ days/year sunny climate, and the landscape these conditions create were among the many reasons why we relocated out here in May of 2017.   We also realized that “The City Different” would have a higher cost of living for certain things than “Ye Most Auncient Towne” of Wethersfield, Connecticut from which we moved.  We did not realize however that the problems caused by these circumstances played such a prominent part in Santa Fe’s history.
             
Water, and affordable housing are two of the major recurring issues for Santa Fe City, for Santa Fe County, and for Rancho Viejo de Santa Fe where Marsha and I now live.  There is not enough of either.  The former situation is climatological, geographic, and historical.  The latter is manmade and more modern.
The Mother Ditch
             
According to the New Mexico Art Museum, ”New Mexico has the longest continuously traceable history of human water use in the United States.”  Organized attempts to manage water occurred as early as 800 AD with the collection systems for run-off that were engineered and built by the Ancestral Pueblo people of the Four Corners region (the southwestern corner of Colorado, southeastern corner of Utah, northeastern corner of Arizona, and northwestern corner of New Mexico).  Six hundred years later, and concurrent with the development of agriculture, their Pueblo descendants created a complete system of gravity-fed irrigation ditches along the major rivers and tributaries within the state and managed them from a central authority.
             
The Spanish who arrived in the early 1600s came from a county with similar water issues and similar solutions.  And, like the Pueblo Indians, they too created a system of canals and channels, and a structure of mandatory community responsibility for their usage and maintenance – the acequia system.   There were two types.  The “acequia madre” (“mother ditch”) was regarded as public property and managed by the municipal government.  Community ditches were organized and strictly overseen by an elected official known as the mayordomo.  The word acequia refers to both the physical system, and to the collective community of people that utilize it and keep it running.
             
This is the way Dr. Tom Chavez, former Executive Director of the National Hispanic Culture and Director of the Palace of the Governors, offers this general explanation of how acequias and Spanish Land Grants work. 
             
A roughly rectangular shaped plot of land is granted to a person or a community by the Spanish Government.  The land is then divided into ten equal sections, numbered uno through nueve (one – nine) with one segment allocated for common use.  The members of the collective draw numbers and are assigned their lots accordingly.  Acequias are created along each long side of the rectangle leaving enough land on the outside of the ditches for housing to be built.  These are the “acequia madres”.  Each section draws from the “mother ditch” to water their crops.  Residences are constructed on the dry side of the acequia because the other land is considered too precious to be used for housing.
             
Santa Fe’s “Acequia Madre” is the largest (3 miles) and oldest (1680) irrigation canal in the city, and family farms and orchards grew in clusters along this watercourse.  The channel is still used for irrigation and is maintained by Acequia Madre de Santa Fe Community Acequia Association.
              
(Jumping ahead briefly to the affordable housing issue – according to santaferealestatedowntown.com, the area around Santa Fe’s “mother ditch” ironically, is now one of the priciest parts of The City Different. “That’s Santa Fe, where mud homes on dirt roads are prime real estate.”)
             
In 1848, after the United States’ victory in the Mexican-American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo recognized the legitimacy of all property previously held according to the “amalgam of Spanish and Indian (water) law and custom.”  Unfortunately the American water laws and customs with which the Spanish and Indian ones were to be blended had been developed east of the Mississippi River where the water supply was plentiful.  This curious mixture of the communal tradition with the American belief in the sanctity of private property formed the basis on which the often-bitter fights about water use in New Mexico, such as the “Tularosa Ditch War” would be waged. http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/trail_dust/trail-dust-new-mexico-s-limited-water-sparked-tularosa-ditch/article_ec1f48af-b724-5da2-9c42-7a6e866c9833.html
             
This cultural clash fell particularly hard on the position of Mayordomo.   As the New Mexican Art Museum tells it, “To people raised on the rhetoric of independence and individualism, this overseer of an irrigation system represented the worst aspects of a social system in which a few rich land owners lorded over an ignorant, dark-skinned peasantry. In 1895, the New Mexico territorial legislature dealt the traditional role of the mayordomo a deathblow by transferring his powers to ditch commissioners – a nod in the direction of science and efficiency. By the turn of the [20th] century, the entire acequia system would come under attack.”
           
The passage of the National Reclamation Act in 1902 was a major turning point in the development of the western United States.  That law created a federal agency with the power “to survey, fund, and construct irrigation, water-storage, flood-control, and soil-conservation projects in the western United States” and to “reclaim” arid lands that were presumed useless without the development of water resources – all supposedly for the benefit of small landowners.
            
 In 1905 New Mexico responded to the Reclamation Act by passing several laws to ensure that New Mexico would fit all criteria necessary to meet contemporary standards and gain the much-needed federal dollars – among them the first comprehensive water code declaring “all natural waters” within the territory’s boundaries to be public property with universal access granted for beneficial use.   
             
Currently Santa Fe's drinking water supplies come from four main sources: surface water from the Santa Fe and Rio Grande Rivers which is stored in the municipal reservoirs; groundwater from the Tesuque Formation aquifer; and from the Buckman well field 10 miles west of the city near the Rio Grande and others within the city limits.
             
But the initial sources of most of that liquid are the winter snowcap in the mountains, and the rains of the July and August monsoon season – both of which have (so to speak) fallen short for the past several years.   (Public Radio station KUNM, a news source not given to hyperbole, describes this year’s natural precipitation volume as “dismal”.)
             
Water is measured by the acre-foot – defined as the volume of water necessary to cover one acre of surface area to a depth of one foot – 43,560 cubic feet, or 325,851 U.S. gallons.  According to a 2015 study by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, based upon current population projections, which show the capital city and northern Santa Fe County growing from 115,000 to 170,000, by 2055, supply “would come up about 5,155 acre-feet of water per year short – ‘the amount of water that provides for more than 20,000 people.’”   And when climate change scenarios were factored in “shortfalls between 6,342 acre-feet to 9,323 acre-feet per year were projected.”
             
Less available H2O and more people do not make for a good supply-demand equation.  One solution is to purchase more water from other sources.  A potentially less expensive and more efficient approach being considered by the City of Santa Fe is to recycle, treat, and reuse wastewater  – aka “from the toilet to the tap” – as is done currently in Las Vegas, Nevada and soon in El Paso, Texas.

Additional note:  At the present time, “The annual ritual of cleaning acequias, typically before the start of spring, remains alive in communities big and small, from Chama to Alcade and Galina to Sombrillo,” reports the March 12, 2018 Santa Fe New Mexican.  “But the practice has evolved and adapted as times have changed, from a lack of interest in farming to the purchase of agricultural lands by newcomers who don’t participate in the yearly cleanup, ’One of the most common challenges that one hears today is that acequias have difficulty finding peones, or laborers’, said Paula Garcia Executive Director of the New Mexico Acequia Association.”   By tradition, members of the acequia (the “parciantes”) are supposed to provide the peones – but many new members are disinterested in participating either directly or indirectly in collective activities such as the “sacando la acequia”, literally “taking out the acequia”. As a result the community aspect of the acequia is being lost, even as the customs are still being carried on.


Gentrifying Dogpatch
             
Coincidentally, at the same time that population driven water usage increased, so did housing prices – the latter as a result of the gentrification of Santa Fe, i.e. the renovation and improvement of houses and districts so that they conform to upper or middle-class tastes.
             
As mentioned above, the area along Acequia Madre is now part of the Upper Canyon Road/Eastside section of Santa Fe.   Historically an area of farmhouses, fields and orchards – this section of town started changing in the early 1900s with the arrival and growth of the Santa Fe Art Colony, and the repurposing of some of the buildings into studios and homes for these painters and sculptors.      
             
Then, according to canyonroadarts.com, “Canyon Road’s gradual shift from a residential and farm road to a commercial district began in the late 1940s as a variety of businesses opened along its lower half-mile.  However, in the post-war era, none of those businesses was an art gallery.  Several were neighborhood-oriented services such as restaurants, bars, grocery stores, barber shop, dry-cleaner, pet supplies, photo studio, and even an Arthur Murray dance studio.  Perhaps aligning with the existing art community, many other new entrepreneurs were craftspeople who probably sold their products directly from their home studios as well as to other retailers.  Weavers, furniture makers, wood carvers, leatherworkers, potters, silversmiths, and jewelers crafted their wares in the old houses, barns and sheds along Canyon Road.           
             
“Sadly for residents, most of the neighborhood-oriented businesses had disappeared by the early 1980s as real estate prices soared.  Many of the old Canyon Road farmhouses were restored and enlarged or replaced, and vacant lots that formerly had been fields or orchards saw new residential construction as the Road became a fashionable place to live.  A surprising number of very fine homes on Canyon Road lie just out of view behind adobe walls or tucked into the very deep lots behind the galleries.”
             
Apodaca Hill is just north of the top of Upper Canyon Road, and Marsha and I rented an Airbnb there during our summer 2017 house-hunt.  Along with Acequia Madre Street, Canyon Road, and other neighboring roadways it is a part of what is now called the Historic East Side – but once was known as “Dogpatch (the title of Al Capp's tongue-in-cheek comic strip, Li'l Abner, based on an invented town in the Appalachian backwoods.) 
             
Former residents remember this barrio as a place, according to the Santa Fe Reporter, “where the acequias still provided water to the local apple orchards, entire families lived on the same property for generations and tax bases were humbler.”  The article continues, “In the late '90s, many locals had to put historic east-side properties up for sale that had been kept in families for generations due to exorbitant tax hikes. A resident's tax bill could go up 50 or 100 percent back then and sometimes more, according to Santa Fe County Tax Assessor Gus Martinez. For that reason, the legislature instituted the 3 percent cap rule in 2001 so that locals wouldn't be faced with the prospect of ‘selling out.’  But still "those buying and selling set the market…. And once you sell, you can never go back." "
             
Apodaca Hill is what I would describe as, a not-yet-totally gentrified neighborhood.  The residence in which we stayed is a two-section building on a hillside – each part a fully equipped house complete with stone patios and an out door hot tub.  Clearly not a Dogpatch domicile.  Down the street are two, modern stucco homes whose style acknowledges the architectural history of the area, laid out with a large paved-stone common driveway.    Directly across the street are four separate considerably smaller adobe homes (one in foreclosure), occupying in total about the same amount of land as the two-casita compound.   Houses currently for sale on the Apodaca Hill include a 2,670-foot home with a Zillow estimate of $1,287,465; and a “fixer-upper” 4-bed, 3-bath abode on 1/3 of an acre with a pastoral character and “once lush gardens” for $624,000.
             
Overall, the gentrification of Santa Fe has probably overall been good for the city by providing a larger tax base, and turning the town into a more attractive tourist destination – at least from the perspective of this Anglo newcomer.  About sixteen percent of the residences are second, or even third, homes, which in some ways puts less of a drain on city resources.  But, also as a result, there is not enough affordable housing to supply the families displaced by gentrification, residents who want to stay and work in the city, and to attract newcomers.

 “no water – only windmills”
             
One of the sources of more affordable housing was to be the HOA communities in Rancho Viejo.   But first it had its own water issue to deal with.
             
Larry Meyer (one of the original owners of Rancho Viejo along with his wife Adeline, Leland Thompson, William (Bill) Kennedy and Fred Chambers) wrote in his memoir, “First of all, there was no water on the property – only several windmills – so if we were going to develop, we had to find some water…. [then]…. in 1993 or 1994 – the county decided that they would put in a water system of their own for the whole county, beginning with the rancho Viejo area, but they didn’t have any cash.  So they came to Rancho Viejo first, and they found 11 or 12 property owners around the ranch who needed water.”
             
The county already had 500 acre-feet of water rights that they were letting the city of Santa Fe use – and now they were willing to sell some of that water to Rancho and Viejo and it neighbors. 
             
RV and some of the neighbors agreed to purchase the water – but not enough of it to make the deal work.   So Rancho Viejo LP agreed to acquire another 100 acre-feet bringing its total to 163 acre-feet and, according to Larry Meyer, saved the county water system by putting up 51% of the total money that was needed.
             
As the Santa Fe New Mexican reported on July 30, 2000, “In fact Rancho Viejo paid $2.1 million in 1995 to become the system’s first customer.  There are no wells on the property.”  The county continues to purchase water from the city to supply this demand.
             
By August 2001 – after the completion of its first community, “The Village” and prior to the development of its other HOAs, “Windmill Ridge” and “La Entrada” – Rancho Viejo’s contract with the county called for 168 acre-feet of water, which “could support the development of about 672 houses.  The company needs to find other sources for the more than 11,000 houses it intends to build [over the next forty years]”, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported.  And “symbolic of the growth-guiding challenges to our county government, Rancho Viejo suggested a joint venture ‘injecting treated sewer water into the ground, raising the water table’”.   State Engineer Tom Turney declined this “toilet to tap” offer, which the City of Santa Fe, from whom RV purchases its water, is now considering as an answer to its projected overall water shortfall.
             
Then in October 2015 the Rancho Viejo Effluent Reuse Homework Group
Final Report tells us:
             
“Univest-Rancho Viejo (URV) currently has water rights for 649.05288 acre-feet of water, which at .15 acre-feet of water per household will serve 4,330 homes. The source of water is the Buckman Direct Diversion that supplies water from the Rio Grande…URV will continue to acquire water rights in the future as part of an overall water management strategy.
             
“Fifty percent of the water used at Rancho Viejo comes back into the system as treated effluent, which belongs to URV. [The Ranchland Utility Company performs the wastewater treatment and distribution of the treated effluent].  This provides an additional 325 acre-feet of water that is available for aquifer recharge and non-potable uses including irrigation. Some of this water is already being used for irrigation by the existing neighborhoods in Rancho Viejo and by URV during construction of new homes. URV also contemplates developing a system to recharge treated effluent into the Tesuque Aquifer. In 2006 and 2007, Rancho Viejo, in cooperation with Governor Richardson’s water innovation fund, drilled an injection well and three observation wells to test the potential of ground water recharge and found that the well and the Tesuque Aquifer are capable of accepting 240 acre-feet of water per year with no adverse effects on the performance of the well or aquifer.
             
“The Santa Fe County standard for residential water use is .25 acre-feet per year. Rancho Viejo operates at .15 acre-feet and has a long history of water conservation as part of the College District.”

 However a 2011 paper by the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF), whose mission is “to support the preservation, improvement and enhancement of the environment” reports that Rancho Viejo “ will recharge the Tesuque aquifer with a possible 78.2 million gallons of each year (enough to supply 872 typical households) through groundwater injection with no adverse effects on the aquifer…Rancho Viejo demonstrated sufficient groundwater recharge potential to qualify for a
$500,000 state grant of test injection into the Tesuque Formations of the region.”
             
Some water usage in housing communities is for landscaping.  The Rancho Viejo Landscape Vision Home Owner’s Manual from the early days of The Village told the new homeowner, “water usage in Santa Fe continues to be a daily challenge.  As part of the Rancho Viejo vision statement developed in 1996, it was agreed that innovative techniques and technologies would be explored and developed to create sustainable systems” such as “maintaining the character of the land and preserving native plants, selecting plants that are consistent with the native vegetation”; harvesting the rainwater from the street; using RV’s onsite water treatment facility with its Biolac Water and
Wastewater Management system to recycle effluent thus eliminating the use of potable water to irrigate common areas; and providing well-planned and a well maintained irrigation system that use 60% less water than conventional ones.
             
Using these approaches the Design Workshop website reported that Rancho Viejo, “Reduced irrigation water consumption by 50%. As a result, the community received an additional 184 lots of development rights from the City of Santa Fe at a 20% increase in density beyond current water rights, allowing an additional $3 million in development.”
             
And the above referenced 2011 LAF report states that Rancho Viejo’s gray water irrigation system “reduces potable water use by 12.4 million gallons as of 2010 (enough to supply262 typical single-family households per year) by irrigating with treated effluent (grey water) and by using native plants, for a 81% water savings over the typical allocated county water use. This saves an average of $1,962,500 per year in annual water costs as of 2010.”
             
In addition to not being a drain on Santa Fe’s water resources, RV also committed to add to the pool of affordable housing.
             
“Rancho Viejo offers homes in a variety of price ranges and is required to devote 15 percent of the homes allowed within the master plan to affordable housing” according to the Community College District Plan to which RV is a signatory.  Currently, in 2018, Rancho Viejo has three HOA communities: The Village, Windmill Ridge and La Entrada.  The Village, where Marsha and I live, was the first to be built.  And – based solely on our assessment of the house prices judging by outward appearance and location  – our street, Brilliant Sky Drive, seems to roughly satisfy that proportional requirement.
             
And according, to the 8/27/2000 Santa Fe New Mexican there definitely were other affordably priced houses in The Village at that time; “A half dozen people spent Friday night outside the sales office of the Village at Rancho Viejo so they could get a crack at eight new homes for sale at below-average prices.”
             
(The article also went on to describe Rancho Viejo as “a sprawling ranch…that, if fully developed, could hold as many people as Santa Fe does today [61,109].”)
             
“Sleeping bags, pillows, lawn chairs and thermoses of coffee were left on the office’s desk at midmorning while the campers toured the model homes.”
             
These “plaza homes” were selling for $125,000 to $156,000 – well below the median Santa Fe price – and several people “put money down” before the day was over.       
           
 By September 2002 however, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican, Santa Fe County Commissioner Jack Sullivan was complaining that the HOA developers “haven’t kept up with their affordable housing agreements” and expressed concern that, in order to satisfy their commitment they would have to build “one large section of affordable housing at once” – rather than having them “integrated throughout the development to provide diverse neighborhoods” as is called for by the District Plan.
             
In 2008 RV opened its third HOA community built along Ranch Viejo Boulevard, one of the entryways to The Village, and appropriately named La Entrada. 
             
As reported by bizjournals.com, "What you'll find at La Entrada is a reflection of new design, new thinking, and new energy in this community," said Sales Manager Patrick Thomas. "It combines the best elements of traditional Santa Fe living with a new focus on creating a family-centered community."
             
There are 18 home floor plans ranging from 850 to 2,700 square feet. New homes will sell from $175,000 to $499,000.  "The big news for potential homeowners is that many of these new homes are within financial reach of families working in the area, and could give new hope to those seeking to purchase a home in Santa Fe," said Isaac Pino, President of SunCor New Mexico, the developer.
             
So?
             
A 2011 Forbes Magazine article on “Why Affordable Housing Matters” concluded that, “Most people, particularly as they enter their 30s, aspire to a middle-class lifestyle – and being able to afford a house constitutes a large part of that.  So what does this tell us about future growth? Clearly affordability matters. Areas that combine strong income and job growth, along with affordable housing, are poised to do best.” 
             
But, here in Santa Fe, none of that can happen without enough water.

           


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