Daniel Werwath, left, and Taylor Cook stand on a Roundhouse balcony overlooking the rotunda on Tuesday. Werwath and Cook, the newly named director of homelessness initiatives at the governor’s office, hope the Legislature will approve an executive housing office during the 60-day session, amid a worsening housing crisis here. (Photo by Patrick Lohmann / Source NM)
After a failed attempt in the 2024 Legislature, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is again seeking legislative authority for an executive housing office, one tasked with tackling the state’s widespread challenges with homelessness, unaffordable rent and skyrocketing home prices.
Daniel Werwath, the governor’s housing policy adviser, shared the draft legislation for a new “Office of Housing Planning and Production” with Source New Mexico. He said he feels optimistic it will pass.
If enacted, the bill would empower a small team in the governor’s office, including newly named Director of Homeless Initiatives Taylor Cook, to collect data, set goals and advise local governments and state agencies on how to get housing built fast.
A report last week from the Pew Research Center examines why housing in New Mexico is so unaffordable and homelessness so dire, especially compared with other states. It puts the blame largely on restrictive regulations like height requirements and zoning requiring single family homes.
Between 2017 and 2024, median rents in New Mexico increased 60%, far higher than the 27% increase seen in the rest of the United States during that period. Average prices have increased 70% in that time to more than $300,000. That has factored into the homelessness increase, which has increased by 87% since 2017, according to the report.
Elsewhere in the nation, homelessness increased 40% in that 7-year period, according to the report, which cited federal Housing and Urban Development department data.
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Slowing those trends, Werwath and Cook said in an interview Tuesday in the Roundhouse, requires a state Office of Housing to make a focused, coordinated effort leveraging all state agencies and resources. But it still won’t be quick.
“Replacing the missing 40,000 units or so in our housing system will take a really long time. Right now, we’re building just enough housing to sort of keep up with our gap,” Werwath said. “So if you could imagine if we increased our production 50% right now, that’s an additional, say, 5,000 units a year. It would take us eight years to close that gap.”
The governor’s office made a similar push for an executive housing office last session, but it failed amid pushback from some lawmakers and the New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority, which raised concerns about the governor’s office duplicating or confusing its efforts.
The MFA, which has since rebranded as Housing New Mexico, oversees hundreds of millions of dollars in housing programs, including down-payment assistance, affordable housing development and other programs.
In the last year, Werwath said the governor’s office has met repeatedly with MFA officials and board members, most recently in November, to try to get the authority on board with their effort.
“We’ve worked pretty closely with MFA to eliminate overlaps, which was a lot of their concern, to really clarify within the bill what the scope of what we’re trying to do is,” Werwath said.
The bill empowers the office to develop a statewide housing strategy, provide technical assistance to agencies and governments and collect fresher data to identify gaps in housing availability. As Werwath noted, the city of Raton has 300 vacant homes; Albuquerque needs 25,000.
One major goal, Werwath said, is to create a “dashboard” with the best data possible on gaps, available funding and goals. Current housing studies are based primarily on Census data, which is at least a year old by the time it’s released, Werwath said.
One difference between last year’s bill is that the new office’s director is not granted an advisory seat on the MFA board, according to the draft legislation.
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Kristie Garcia, a spokesperson for Housing New Mexico, said the authority was still reviewing the draft of the bill, but that, “We look forward to working with the governor’s office and the Legislature on a bill that will advance housing affordability by addressing the underlying factors impacting the cost of housing development.”
The renewed push for an Office of Housing occurs a year after the Legislature’s biggest-ever investment in affordable housing. That included $125 million in a revolving loan fund for affordable housing infrastructure and “workforce” housing development, aimed at providing shelter for those who make enough to no longer qualify for state or federal subsidies but not enough to afford housing.
It also included a one-time payment of $50 million to Housing New Mexico’s Housing Affordability Trust Fund, along with about $38 million recurring funding for that fund, which goes to programs like down-payment assistance and weatherization.
The Legislature also approved about $20 million for “anti-homelessness initiatives.” That money has not yet been spent, Werwath said, in part because organizations and governments across the state clamored for it, in a total ask of $45 million.
“There’s sort of some decisions we need to make about whether we do one or two big projects or a bunch of smaller projects. And that’s sort of what we’re working through with the governor right now,” Werwath said.
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The New Mexico Finance Authority has received bids to spend $30 million of the $125 million in housing loans, and is expecting to open another round of funding soon. And Housing New Mexico has obligated most of the money it received last session.
In addition to the Office of Housing, the governor’s budget this session seeks $100 million to address homelessness and provide down-payment assistance to first-time homebuyers.
The money is vital, Werwath said, especially in light of threatened cuts at the federal level. The state has received roughly $20 million in so-called Continuum of Care funding from HUD.
“Who knows what’s happening with that at this point?” Werwath said. “I think there’s an emerging reality that we also, depending on what happens on the federal level, may need to have additional resources to support existing capacity.”
Meet the new director of homelessness initiatives
Last week, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced the hiring of Taylor Cook as her new director of homelessness initiatives. She was the previous chair of the Texas Homeless Network and contributed national research to housing policy, according to a news release.
She told Source New Mexico she is motivated to tackle homelessness because she is “just really interested in working with people experiencing homelessness,” especially the “direct service piece of it.”
So far, she’s keyed in on homelessness prevention as a major focus, including in some unexpected areas, like small towns on the outskirts of Albuquerque.
“Homelessness comes up all over the state in places that have not had a robust response system to date. And so, in that same spirit of prevention, how can we get ahead of this and make sure that it doesn’t become an unmanageable humanitarian crisis?”
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She will tackle the issue amid sharp increases in homelessness statewide and following a Supreme Court ruling that allows cities to clear out or arrest people who are camping in public even if those cities don’t have enough shelter beds to house them.
Cook told Source New Mexico she has had conversations about guidance to cities about handling encampments of unhoused people, but she is not aware of legislation at the state level aimed at encampments.
“Every community is different, has a different take on some of these issues, but I do think we want to make sure that where places are removing encampments, that we’re thinking through that as a system, and making sure that we’re not just pushing people out, creating greater instability, and ultimately, just kicking the can down the road,” she said.
In Albuquerque, city-ordered clearings of encampments have provoked strong criticism from groups concerned the sweeps disconnect unhoused people from services or further destabilize them as they’re trying to navigate a return to safe and stable housing. People living in Albuquerque encampments regularly lose important documents, like birth certificates or family photos, in these sweeps, they told ProPublica.
Cook said she thinks a new Office of Housing can come up with “some good solutions” to that problem.
“Ultimately, I don’t want the state to be replacing everyone’s driver’s license and birth certificate every time it gets removed,” she said.