City and state leaders promote Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), or casitas, as a promising solution to Albuquerque’s housing shortage. Yet very few are actually built because the cost to build one vastly outweighs the value it adds to the property.
Because an ADU cannot be separated from the primary home’s land, conventional lenders view it as a secondary amenity rather than an independent asset. Appraisers can assign value only to the structure itself - the land remains tied to the main residence. Homeowners cannot obtain standard financing to build them, restricting construction to those with deep pockets. Custom builds also mean paying top retail rates with no economies of scale.
Albuquerque’s neighborhoods with alleyways are ideal locations for ADUs. A casita with rear access can have its own entrance, parking, and utilities while preserving the front streetscape and the primary home’s privacy and use. This configuration supports gentle density without neighborhood disruption.
New Mexico should authorize “ADU-to-condo” conversions. By allowing homeowners to convert their property into a two-unit condominium regime, the land remains intact - avoiding conflicts with existing mortgage holders - while the casita gains its own legal title, ideally facing the alleyway. This enables independent financing and sale as an affordable starter home.
The city must also cut construction costs, by promoting prebuilds which are craned in and standardized caps on utility connection fees to protect homeowners from surprise tap fees running into tens of thousands of dollars.
Zoning changes only grant permission to build. Until we fix the underlying financing, valuation, and scale problems, casitas will stay a luxury option rather than a practical solution for working families.
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Mark T. Raney, SRA

The national news blames high mortgage rates for our frozen housing market, but New Mexico homeowners face a second, silent penalty unique to our state: “tax lightning.”
In New Mexico, a state law protects current homeowners by capping annual property valuation increases at 3%. If you have lived in your home for ten or twenty years, your property tax bill is likely highly discounted compared to actual market value.

But the moment a home is sold, that protection vaporizes. The county assessor immediately resets the property’s taxable value to current market rates.
If a local family tries to make a completely lateral move next door to a virtually identical $385,000 home, tax lightning strikes. The sudden, uncapped reassessment can instantly add $2,000 to $3,000 a year to their tax bill -roughly $200 extra every month just for changing addresses.

When you pair this $200 monthly tax penalty with today’s 6% mortgage rates, the math of a lateral move collapses. A family trading a 3% loan for a new one pays an extra $549 a month in interest. Combined with the tax jump, they face a $749 monthly penalty to live in the same house. On a $1 million home the same forces produce an even harsher result, with tax lightning and the rate jump together exceeding $1,900 in extra monthly costs.

It doesn’t just penalize mobility; it punishes families who need to downsize, grow, or relocate. Until New Mexico lawmakers allow long-time residents to transfer their 3% valuation cap to a replacement primary residence - as other states have done - Albuquerque’s housing inventory will remain firmly locked.
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Mark T. Raney, SRA

The landscape of the Albuquerque city proper housing market is undergoing a quiet but profound structural shift. Historically, our city maintained a comfortable balance where roughly 70% of residents owned their homes and 30% rented.
Today, that foundation has eroded. Driven by a persistent lack of affordable inventory, flat housing production, and a steep rise in single-person households, the city proper has effectively slid to a 60/40 split.
If current land economics,  and development trends continue, we are firmly on a trajectory toward a 55/45 split within a decade. When nearly half of a city becomes a tenant class, it fundamentally alters local neighborhood stability, household wealth accumulation, and the long-term economic mobility of our community.
To keep the "American Dream" attainable within city limits, Albuquerque must confront the zoning and policy so the constraints so that we are not pricing the next generation out of homeownership.
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Mark T. Raney, SRA

​New Mexico already protects homeowners with a hard limit on how fast their property valuations can rise each year. That protection was put in place so long-time residents wouldn’t be taxed out of their homes when the market heats up.
Commercial properties get no such shield.
In Bernalillo County, non-residential valuations have recently jumped 47–54% in a single year, with some small owners seeing triple-digit increases. Those spikes hit hardest on the people least able to absorb them: local owner-occupied shops and single-location family businesses. The big institutional owners can spread the cost or pass it through. The corner bakery, hardware store, or independent café cannot.
The Simple Fix
Extend a reasonable valuation cap - modeled after the residential protection - to local owner-occupied and single-location commercial properties.

• Applies only to New Mexico-owned, non-corporate, owner-operated or single-location businesses.
• Resets on sale or major ownership change.
• Leaves larger multi-tenant and out-of-state corporate holdings at full market valuation.

This is not a giveaway to every commercial building. It is a targeted Main Street safeguard that keeps independent businesses from being taxed into extinction while the chains and investment funds take their place.
Homeowners already have this protection. Local Main Street deserves the same fair treatment.
 
Mark T. Raney, SRA

As the Board plans the future of this site, we must acknowledge the history of the surrounding area. The International District has long struggled with blight and high crime. Around 2000, city leadership identified a root cause of this instability: the housing stock was skewed to 70% rentals and only 30% homeownership. At that time, the city recognized this imbalance contributed to transiency and crime, and a commitment was made, and reaffirmed in 2010, to flip that ratio towards the city average of nearly 70% homeownership.
Current proposals for Fairgrounds Reimagined double down on the formula that created the original problem. A plan calling for 70% rentals anchors the neighborhood to the unstable ratios of the past, rather than fulfilling the promise of a stabilized, owner-occupied community.
Furthermore, the proposed 30% homeownership tranche, which relies on a 99-year land lease modeled after the Sawmill Community Land Trust, is fundamentally flawed as a tool for community empowerment. While the model is "affordable," it is not equitable. Under this structure, the resident bears maintenance costs while their ability to build equity is legally capped. When these residents eventually sell, they find that the open market has vastly outpaced their capped returns (often at 25%), leaving them without the wealth necessary to purchase a standard, fee-simple home. They remain trapped in the subsidized system. The equity lost by these "renters with a mortgage" does not disappear; instead, it is captured by the Trust to use for other ventures. From a valuation perspective, these non-market value properties create lending obstacles for the very demographic they are intended to help.
We should not subsidize housing by extracting the wealth of our lowest-income residents to benefit an expanding Trust. Instead, the Board should utilize methods that achieve both affordability and true economic mobility.
For single-family homes and townhomes, the Affordable Housing Act allows the state to bypass the Anti-Donation Clause to legally discount land, granting true, fee-simple ownership. This can be paired with HB 200, which provides zero-percent interest loans for starter homes, allowing low-income buyers to safely enter the market and capture full appreciation.
For mid-rise structures, the Board could implement a Cooperative model with an internal cross-subsidy. Residents would collectively own the building fee-simple through a corporate structure, buying in via a low-barrier ladder system. Crucially, the cooperative should retain ownership of ground-floor commercial spaces. Revenue generated from those market-rate commercial leases would be used to cover the building’s capital expenses, insulating low-income homeowners from crippling HOA fees.
This project is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform managed dependency into an engine for generational wealth creation. I urge those involved to reconsider the 70% rental ratio and the 99-year lease, and instead build a development that offers a genuine path to economic independence.

​Mark T. Raney, SRA