Council Recap, 2/18/25: The American Dreams We Dream

Council Recap, 2/18/25: The American Dreams We Dream

Just because you can say something doesn’t make it true. It’s like saying Coloradan Chile is better than New Mexico’s. Or that wealth trickles down.

And, misinformation spreads fast, especially when repeated enough times. Here in Las Cruces, rage-baiting online influencers have claimed the city’s zoning update is wiping out single-family homes. It’s not. No matter how many times they say it, the zoning update doesn’t ban single-family housing. It allows more options.

A guide for where a community is going is usually detailed through its comprehensive plan and ours was completed in the wild times of 2020. From there, you get working on the details. In this case, it was the Realize plan for local zoning, which hadn’t been updated since 2001.

This update gives property owners more flexibility. It lets people add an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) or a duplex in areas that were previously locked into single-use zoning. That doesn’t mean single-family homes are disappearing; it means homeowners have more choices. More options, more affordability, more room for growth.

For those so staunchly bent on freedom, it’s weird mental gymnastics to be against more choices for your own property. But I suppose that’s par for the course.

Let’s be real: the people attacking this change aren’t defending neighborhoods – they’re defending exclusion. I’ve received emails decrying “low-income renters” and how it ties back into crime. Many people are tying the worth of others, and their morality, with how much money they make. As the kids would say, y’all are telling on yourselves.

Well-meaning neighbors frame it as “preserving community character,” but that’s just code for keeping newcomers, renters, and working-class families out. They talk about how they were born and raised in Las Cruces, come from generations of families from Las Cruces, and worried intensely about their property values. Interestingly, in the same breath, they talk about how their adult children cannot afford a home in our town.

Housing costs are skyrocketing, and this update helps by increasing supply. Young families, teachers, nurses – people who contribute to the city – need places to live. Without changes like this, they’ll be priced out, and forced to move elsewhere. If you care about the future of Las Cruces, you should want solutions, not scare tactics.

Also, knowingly or not, people tend to be entrenched in the belief that we’re safe as homeowners. [Yep, I’m one too.] There’s no way that a medical issue or two couldn’t wipe away any of that accrued wealth, that property value, we have in our homes when the collectors come calling.

Opponents painted this as some dystopian overhaul. It’s not. Zoning laws evolve to meet community needs. Keeping outdated zoning restrictions hurts affordability, stifles growth, and makes living here harder for working families.

“How about an amendment to the –?”

How about you tell a builder that you forgot you wanted your new house to face south after he's poured the foundation and put up the framing? Well, sure, we can do that, but we’d waste time and taxpayer money. Again, the city has been working on this for four years.

“But we could have tabled it so that we can give input to –”

Input that could have come in since 2021? And here’s the inconvenient thing: a majority of the input from those invested in the city were in favor of this, because that input was already incorporated.

And yes, city council makes decisions not willy nilly on the dais because the work comes beforehand. There’s a lot of back and forth with staff [because we’re not urban planners like they are], reading the literature, and debating the macro view of a city in layers of economics and time. We express our concerns and give suggestions [many times given from residents], and staff folds those in.

We even have had multiple work sessions as a council since I've been on council:

https://lascruces.civicweb.net/Portal/MeetingInformation.aspx?Org=Cal&Id=10665

https://lascruces.gov/city-council-receives-update-on-realize-las-cruces/

Consultants and staff also incorporated the concerns and requests of involved citizens during meetings and meetings, and from online comment. (So much so in Realize that we had to streamline that process to give others, and council, a chance to have input too.)

This isn’t some radical scheme. It’s a necessary policy. The idea that Las Cruces is erasing single-family homes is flat-out false.

Quick notes or this’ll drag on forever:

-A Conoco isn’t setting up shop next to your 1970s 3-bedroom single-family home, unless your house is on a busy road already. You got a single-family home on Missouri, you also have Circle K, don’t you? Your house on a street with the name of local flower? Those are called “local roads,” designated in code, and they aren’t going to tear down your neighbor’s house to put that gas station in. Doesn’t make sense.

-Most single-family home neighborhoods don’t have enough land in their lots to build more than an ADU or a duplex. Are developers going to tear down multiple homes to build a complex? If they like burning money, maybe!

-Building permits still go through Community Development and that’s a fact that everyone likes to overlook. People from the city are going to take plans and make sure it conforms to what’s allowed or not in a neighborhood.

-We pay people to do that? Yes! Amazing!

-Higher walkability increases your property value and desirability in the marketplace.

-“We have so much land in the desert that we can – “

Do you know how much it costs to build infrastructure to support growth into the desert? Do you know how much it costs to maintain a road? Come back. I’ll wait.

-Spoiler: Tens of millions. Where’s that new money coming from? How much in taxes should we be collecting for that?

Influencers can rile people up all they want, but facts don’t change because they’re inconvenient. The update doesn’t force anyone to change their home. It doesn’t bulldoze neighborhoods or the American Dream as it was told to me via email. It allows property owners more freedom. That’s not tyranny; that’s common sense.

At the end of the day, this is about giving people choices. If you want a single-family home or developers want to only build single-family homes, great, nothing is stopping you or them. But blocking others from making different choices? That’s not the American Dream.