In June 2009, The Atlantic published a story titled “Cold Fusion”—a heavily serious headline for an article about cocktail ice. Suffice it to say that, in some coastal cities, mixology is a discipline, and cocktails are an art. Characteristically, Santa Fe is looking both ways—twice—before it crosses that street, but we’re getting there.

This city is terrified of young people, but it’s even more terrified of losing them. I am 19, and a stranger recently thanked me for being in Santa Fe—as if I had voluntarily entered a war zone.

On an unseasonably cold spring night, Santa Fe University of Art and Design students are busy cobbling together all manner of computers, projectors and speakers for a dress rehearsal of this year’s Outdoor Vision Festival—a free, outdoor celebration of interactive video installations.

Who doesn’t make bad choices, whether it’s choosing the brownie for breakfast instead of the banana or picking the life partner who lasts much less than a lifetime?

Gingrich dances to "Rocket Man", Romney OK with Limbaugh "slut" comment, and Martinez sides with Walmart.

This edition of SFR’s annual “Local Economy” issue contains fewer exhortations to buy local produce (still important!) or patronize local coffee shops. Instead, we asked several business and community leaders a single question: What’s one thing that Santa Fe can do to improve its own economy? In asking this question, we hope to start a meaningful conversation about economic development in Santa Fe. We also hope to provide a road map for public officials and community leaders so that they can contact these people, refine their ideas and make them happen. As long as a national economic recovery lurks elusively beyond our adobe walls, we may as well create our own way forward.

Instead of a City Council that produces radical, outside-the-box ideas—the types of ideas that are beginning to turn a crumbling Detroit into an urban-planning mecca, for instance—Santa Fe’s leaders turn repeatedly to the same government and tourism industries. Instead of stopping to think carefully about where we want our city to go, elected officials often seem complacent, quietly biding their time until “the economy gets better.”

What if it doesn’t? What if Santa Fe won’t improve unless we take action?

This is surprising, in a way, because Santa Fe is the type of place where people can smoke pot under the bridge, and everyone who smells it just smiles and keeps walking. Maybe you can’t put a satellite dish on your house in a historic district, but otherwise, people are pretty accepting. So why don’t we talk more about sex?

This fall, a series of community meetings revealed what many Railyard residents considered a serious problem: the rising homeless population in Santa Fe, and a perceived parallel uptick in crime. With the departure of the Occupy Santa Fe encampment and the opening of Santa Fe’s new Interfaith Community Shelter on Cerrillos Road, the complaints have abated—but the problem hasn’t.

It’s not easy to summarize an entire year in 10 abbreviated news stories.


Or is it?