Las Soleras Homes Get Go-Ahead

City Council gives conditional approval that hinges on a school, a gate, a park and a tax credit

Hundreds of market-rate homes to be built in Las Soleras could be accompanied by an affordable housing development, if a plan that city councilors approved at midnight comes to fruition.

Santa Fe's City Council voted to grant conditional approval to the 300 homes proposed on part of a 550-acre triangular chunk of land at the southern edge of the city, between Cerrillos Road and I-25, that in 2008 was the cause of a big legal battle with the county, resulting in an agreement about the boundaries of the city for the next 20 years.

The proposed Pulte at Las Soleras development, which aims to build homes priced in the high $200,000 and low $300,000 range, half of which will be targeted at buyers 55 and older, will be the second of five housing developments in the area. To fit the proposal with the area's master plan required rezoning; realigning roads; reconfiguring open space, trails and parks; and relocating electricity transmission lines.

The split in City Council came in part over the deviations from that master plan. Councilors Carmichael Dominguez, Joseph Maestas and Ron Trujillo opposed some of the required measures of the proposal, including rezoning to build half as many homes as the plan allowed.

"We've seen what the fate of other, higher density projects have been in the recent past. I'm not sure where we build high-density housing if we don't build it here, quite frankly," Matt O'Reilly, the City of Santa Fe's asset development director, told the council.

Recent months have seen several late-night council meetings in which high-density housing developments were opposed by their would-be neighbors as out of character for the area and either killed on the spot or stalled in ongoing negotiations. Pulte's proposal was supported by the Nava Adé Neighborhood Association after the developer worked with the association to resolve concerns over traffic congestion, quality of life and the location of park space in the development. Local advocates for the homeless also spoke in support of the affordable housing component of the project as meeting a need, particularly for those making well below area median income.

Trujillo, who had worked on the master plan in the area, pointed out that the rezoning and development as proposed "means 1,087 families won't get a house in this subdivision."

Since the master plan was developed in 2008, the Great Recession happened, said Josh Skarsgard, a land use attorney working with the developers.

"One thousand is a response to the market. If you don't take this, we're not coming back with a 2,000-unit plan. We come back with nothing," Skarsgard said.

Santa Fe needs new homes at prices young families can pay and affordable rentals, another component of the proposal, though that piece is far from a sure bet, and this is one of few options for meeting that need, the developer claimed.

Four concerns had emerged in the course of several hours of questions from councilors on Pulte's proposal; in addition to the density, councilors questioned whether the proposal was allowing for active park space—places where children could play soccer, for example, not just open space with uneven walking trails through it; a space for a school in that neighborhood so children didn't enroll in already crowded Southside schools; and a gate for the age-restricted portion of the community that some saw as un-neighborly and un-Santa Fe-like. The conditional approval included clauses ensuring 20 acres of parks, a 10-acre site for a school and the removal of the gate.

City Council also made their approval of the project, which requested an alternative approach to meeting the requirement for affordable housing, conditional on seeing that the low-income housing project is awarded its tax credit before the second phase of building is undertaken by Pulte, or in roughly a year and a half.

The city's rules about affordable housing call on developers to scatter affordably priced homes throughout a subdivision. Pulte Homes asked to instead donate six lots to Habitat for Humanity to construct homes on and set aside a 4-acre parcel for a 60- to 72-unit low-income housing project. The segregation of that development doesn't fit with the city's inclusionary development guidelines but is necessary to qualify for the federal tax credit required to support the project. That the tax credit will come through and the affordable apartments built is not guaranteed, and the first questions to come from councilors centered on what the developer might do to better ensure that Las Soleras includes affordable homes or apartments (or compensates the city in some other way).

The Housing Trust would oversee the application for a low-income housing tax credit project for the site, and Sharron Welsh, executive director of the Housing Trust, says there's a real need for another affordable rental complex in Santa Fe.

Existing affordable housing rentals in Santa Fe are almost always 100 percent occupied—the only time they're not, Welsh told SFR earlier this week, is in the brief interim between when someone moves out and someone from the waiting list moves in. For one development of 60 units, the waiting list has 160 people on it. The New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness Task Force has also come out in favor of the affordable rental development, 15 units of which would be dedicated to families who have been homeless.

And now the question of what happens to that part of the project hinges on the US Department of Housing and Urban Development; it will be one of at least four projects requesting a 9 percent tax credit for low-income housing in the next application period. Welsh said whether each of those is awarded the tax credit is not a subjective competition but is based on the points earned, or individual merits, of each project on a scale crafted by the federal government. All four projects could get the required tax credits if they meet the criteria. Last year, none in New Mexico north of I-40 did.

Some residents of Nava Adé expressed lingering concerns with the relocation of the park, which would be moved farther away from Monte del Sol Charter School, and the storm water runoff plan.

"The demonization of a park is kind of unique," said Steve Burns Chavez, a Nava Adé resident and landscape architect. He contended that the survey question posed to residents described the park as a potential source for traffic and crime, and that swayed the results, which showed overwhelming support for moving the park.

"Most real estate agents would tell you if you live near a park, it adds value to your home. The idea that it's going to increase crime, that it's going to be bad for quality of life…is a novel idea," Burns Chavez told the council.

All of the drainage for the development will be funneled into open space, he later told SFR, and if that one channel were ever to plug up, it could lead to massive flooding.

"What disconcerts me about the discussion we've heard today is that it just seems incredibly short-sighted, that no one is thinking about the youth of Santa Fe," Robert Jessen, principal of the Monte Del Sol, told the council, pointing to the lack of sustainable building or living practices in the design and the lower density neighborhood continuing a car-dependent lifestyle.

Pulte is one of the largest home builders in the country, and Jessen described it as "so large it reminds me of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker—it doesn't turn very quickly…General Motors in 1972 made gigantic, gas-guzzling cars that in 1973 were made obsolete by the oil crisis. In 20 years, the homes that are built in this community will also be obsolete."

Following several hours of questions from the council—which were preceded by a remarkably short series of comments from the public—Mayor Javier Gonzales expressed some worry about how the conversation and pending vote might go.

"We've passed more resolutions as City Council [on creating affordable housing] than we've issued building permits, and that says something about how much building has slowed down in our community," Gonzales said. "What we have seen tonight, we have been almost dying for: to see a neighborhood association walk hand-in-hand with a developer and agree on something."

A roughly 10-minute meeting between city staff and the developers resulted in the conditions, and the proposal was quickly approved.

"If there's any place we could hold the line and really follow through with a master plan community that calls for higher user and mixed development, it's here, so we're missing an opportunity, in my opinion," Maestas said.

Both Maestas and Councilor Bill Dimas added, as they voted in favor of the affordable housing project component of the proposal, that they didn't like the location for it, which is bookended by the proposed gated community and busy roadways.

That approval makes way for the Housing Trust to pursue the tax credit application by a January 2016 deadline; the project could potentially break ground by August 2016. The first phase of homes built by Pulte is expected to begin shortly and become occupied at a rate of about five per month.

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