An interview with Councilor Randall Ryti
Housing affordability, land, and homelessness in Los Alamos
Published 1/11/2023
Interview by Stephanie Nakhleh, Sam McRae, and Minesh Bacrania
Photographs by Minesh Bacrania
Note: this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
On December 18, 2023, Boomtown invited County Councilor Randall Ryti for a wide-ranging discussion about some key issues facing Los Alamos, particularly housing and development. Councilor Ryti started us off on a kind note:
Randall Ryti: Well, I like your new project, Boomtown. It’s good to have.
Boomtown: Thank you, we appreciate that.
The nice thing is that people are getting information about needs. Because one of the questions that was asked in the town survey was how to rank different town priorities, and the social-services hub project was frankly ranked pretty low. But I don’t think people are aware of the needs we might have, and about what something like a social-services hub could do for the community.
A perception many have is that there are no problems in Los Alamos. That’s why we titled the first story “There Are Homeless People in Los Alamos?” Because there are still people who either don’t know or don’t accept there are those who struggle here.
I’ve heard similar things. We don’t have good data, so we don’t actually know the extent of the problem. Then, with inflation hitting certain core needs — food and utilities — that makes it harder for people who are on the edge of being able to get by. It is a little discouraging when people move to Albuquerque because there are more options. It would be nice to have as many options as we can here. We can’t solve every problem, but we should try working on them, and have some path forward.
Housing affordability
That leads right into a key question, which is what happens to a town where everybody who makes less than $106,000, the area median income, is displaced to Albuquerque or Santa Fe? What happens to Los Alamos if we lose all of our economic diversity? Why does it matter?
Well unfortunately it’s been happening for a while, so the question is: how do we reverse the trend? What can we do? Probably more generally it’s the missing middle housing.
What does “the missing middle” mean to you?
The state median income is something like $30,000, if I remember it correctly, and we’re looking at three or four times that number in Los Alamos. I’ve seen the number $126,000, so I guess there’re different statistics on the median income. We’re at such a large delta between Los Alamos and the state in general. Even in Santa Fe, where there’s a lot of income inequality: they have a higher median income than the state, but they are doing things like the excise tax on the $1 million-plus houses. With our market, you can’t just take what Santa Fe is doing and apply it here: that’s not going to work.
But you asked what’s going to happen if we don’t solve it. We’ve seen the problem. There’s a lack of workers for businesses of all kinds: that’s the impact. It doesn’t meet our goal of being a welcoming community either, right? From a point of pride, people want to feel like their community is welcoming to everybody, and you have a chance to live here and do more than just get by. I think that’s what most people agree with.
“If you’ve lived somewhere for a while you get used to how it is. You get used to it kind of slowly, over time, being hollowed out: you just get used to that as the norm. And you think, “well that’s okay, because I’m doing okay…”
Do you really think most people do agree with that? It seems many people don’t connect the dots between economic diversity and services. Some people are like, “It’s great that we only have the upper echelon living here.”
I can’t disagree with that. Certain people have expressed that or similar things. It’s kind of the “othering” of any group, right? You see that nationally. It’s the same thing here. People who want to blame things on certain groups of people. And when we have very low crime and good schools as well? Some think it’s the absence of certain other people that makes it good, but I don’t know that that’s the majority. Again, we need more awareness of what the issue is: it’s both the lack of housing and the cost. I mean just look at the movie Oppenheimer. We don’t see the people serving the scientists, they weren’t even in the movie. But they obviously had to exist or they would have all starved.
That’s a great point.
Some of that is the narratives we have. We don’t tell the whole story, so people don’t get the appreciation. You need to have other services. Now, we’re a very healthy community, but most people have the wherewithal to go somewhere else if they need specialty services which are just not available right in the county.
Could you define a little bit more what you mean by a healthy community?
US News and World Report rates us as “the healthiest county in the country.”
And that was referring to physical health. Is that correct?
Primarily, but you can look at the metrics they’re using, and one of them is housing affordability, which we actually rank very high on. I don’t know that we would view it as affordable to most people here, or even to people that have higher-paying jobs. Just look at the costs for some of the new housing, it’s $800,000. You can calculate what the mortgage is, and what income you need to have to be able to afford that.
If you’ve lived somewhere for a while you get used to how it is. You get used to it kind of slowly, over time, being hollowed out: you just get used to that as the norm. And you think, “well that’s okay, because I’m doing okay, and I can now order from e-tailers.” Instead of carrying a 20-pound bag of dog food from Walmart and bringing it to my car, they’ll drop it on my doorstep. And it’s actually amazing the kind of deals you can get when you have money, but people that don’t have money, they don’t get any deals.
It’s expensive to be poor.
Right, and those basic necessities: food, utilities, child care, health care. Unfortunately, there’s nothing much we can do about the price of utilities. The price of natural gas went sky high, so we’re having to apply a term catch-up to everybody’s bill. There are all kinds of systemic problems. It’s easier just to say, “It’s okay, I can go somewhere if I need stuff, or I can order online, but I can still get by.”
On the other hand, we are seeing businesses trying to succeed here. We’ve got two new coffee shops that have opened in Los Alamos. But we still have vacant buildings. So in preparation for this, I was looking back at the December 2019 Housing Study and there was a whole list of things: short term, medium term, long term. And I’m not sure if we’ve checked off many of the things on that list.
What from that list do you remember? What stood out to you?
In terms of the short-term, there was a large number of lots. I think 174 was the number that sticks in my mind: 174 already-plotted, scattered lots.
You’re talking about owned post-fire lots?
Mostly post-fire, with some other things too. On that medium-term list, maybe Arbolada on North Mesa was on the list, and Ponderosa Estates. We’re not talking about affordable housing.
It seems like one of the results of the pandemic was that all the planning got torpedoed, and the system kind of collapsed.
Right. It was this whole new emergency. The Housing Plan was released in December of 2019, and three months later we had the Covid emergency. Are there still things from that plan we should be doing? How can we incentivize them? It probably doesn’t help directly with the homeless population, but indirectly it helps if we can get more housing developed. Right now, our code is such that we don’t have requirements for affordability. In some sense Mirador had a component of that, because there’s the high-density housing piece to Mirador that’s pending still. It’s a small piece, but at least it’s something. If you look at the code, other communities do require a percentage of affordable housing. If you’re going to do a project in those communities, you’re going to have to have some fraction of it be affordable.
Shifting topics: something with the burn lots you mentioned that goes along with housing density is that those lots don’t necessarily have to be zoned for single-family housing.
No, some of the ones that burned already were zoned for multifamily.
So if a quad goes up on that one lot, then that’s much more affordable housing than a single-family. You get four houses instead of just one.
It helps, right. There’ve been some requests, but it’s very incremental. Certainly Covid seems like it slammed the brakes on things. Nobody was really tracking affordable housing, and people weren’t doing developments, although we did have the Bluffs continue, and Canyon Walk was finishing up.
Do you have any insight you can offer on why the prices on some new developments have almost doubled?
My understanding is that it’s due to the labor availability and cost. We had the 2007-2009 financial crisis where nationally we kind of stopped building anything. Many workers who were in that field had to find other work, and now they may have aged out even if they had been in that field. It’s a matter of not having the workforce: that has been one of the main issues with building cost. Certainly, the cost of materials just went sky high. Also availability, supply and demand, due to the pandemic — then all of a sudden trying to do a lot of construction. Now we have federal funds toward building, which also impacts labor and materials. That’s what we’ve seen in the County projects, and workforce availability has been the main issue. There’s even been discussion about providing worker housing of some kind.
You’re talking about workers living in a camp, a temporary field?
Maybe temporary, maybe not so temporary.
Where would it go?
That’s the question: where would it go? In that housing report, they listed a large number of possible units that could be built on existing land, but the category three, the potentially developable land, was all the stuff that’s been coming up for decades now. It’s the airport, golf course, stables, and Rendija Canyon: those are the four biggest areas that come up as “could be developed.” And of course we’ve been asking DOE for other land, but any near- or medium-term solution would have to be land we already own.
Land and Space
What’s your prognosis on DOE land transfers? Do you think DOE felt burned after what happened with the Bluffs?
I think that was a definite factor. That area was a part of the industrial complex for the Laboratory way back under the AEC, right? Finding something when you dig on or next to DP Road probably shouldn’t have been surprising. So how do you have more assurance? I think DOE wants more like 100 percent assurance. But any place up here potentially has cultural sites or contamination, unless you can determine there were no activities on that place.
If you can’t prove that a potential transfer is 100 percent free of anything, does it just become easier for DOE to say no, we’re not going to give it to you?
That’s a fair way of looking at it. It’s a lot easier. What’s the risk-benefit for DOE? The arguments also have been about providing some buffer to the sound impacts of detonations. Test detonations impact White Rock in particular. You can hear them occasionally in Los Alamos. As the crow flies, residents are not that far.
Cooperation and development
How would you describe the cooperation between the Lab, the County, and Los Alamos Public Schools? There are many entities at play here and many potential stumbling blocks. What’s working well and what could improve?
Triad came in just before I got on council, if I remember correctly. What I heard was that Triad is much more engaged with the County than was LANS [Los Alamos National Security, the predecessor to Triad]. The Triad managers came from outside and had their own impressions about the area, the issues, and where people were going to live. Triad’s budgets soon after the transfer started going up substantially. That created a huge pressure for them and they had to try to find workers wherever they could. There has been competition for workers. For example, I’ve heard from the City of Española that “Los Alamos is hiring our workers.” That’s been a source of some conflict. On the manager level there are regular meetings between Lab managers, the County manager, and different levels of Triad and the schools. The last thing I heard about was the Lab’s transportation plan and it didn’t have much engagement from the County, because again, the Lab needs to get workers to Los Alamos and they’re focused on that.
Is the county just a drive through? Somewhere for Lab commuters to get coffee, but nothing useful for the residents, especially after hours or on weekends?
It makes it more difficult. Just talk about the coffee shops opening and wanting to have some business, because there have been complaints about having Lab offices downtown, especially in storefronts. We need to get clear policy. There’ve been statements made about that. Triad doesn’t want to take up any space, but it’s also their subcontractors, and spaces that the Lab has had for decades.
Do you think the Lab feels a responsibility to the community of Los Alamos?
To a large extent, but it’s hard. They have their own metrics, right? They have to meet their milestones. That 2019 housing report seems kind of quaint, because it had the numbers that I remember back from the 90s — about half of Lab workers lived in town. Now of course it’s much less than that.
Right now about two-thirds of the Lab workers commute, right?
Yes. It’s bumped up substantially because basically there’s no housing.
Do you think when people say “We have to look more regionally” it means we’re not actually going to solve the problem in Los Alamos, we’re just going to push it off to Española and Santa Fe?
I’m concerned about that too. You have to continue to work here and try to redevelop. Land transfer from DOE is not likely. Even if DOE was amenable to the idea, transfers wouldn’t be fast. So the only solution is redevelopment and infill of vacant lots. It’s a question of what the County can do to help with that. We started with the Metropolitan Redevelopment Area (MRA) in White Rock
Has the MRA in White Rock resulted in anything?
Unfortunately, it’s not resulted in anything yet, due in large part to the land being privately owned. One of the main ways that a municipality, city, or county can participate is if they own land. So land ownership is where you can really incentivize some projects because you own the land.
So what the County does own is the 20th Street parcel: that could be dense housing. If the County considers housing to be a true priority, an emergency, isn’t that an option?
Yeah. The 20th Street development was a process to set up because we had gone through the previous experience of solicitation, getting responses and then negotiation with TNJLA for the Towneplace Suites with a conference center (which fell through in summer of 2022).
You’re talking about the Marriott?
Yes, and that would have used the whole thing for 85 hotel rooms. Now, we could have housing there or some mix of housing and retail.
What happens when existing residents write letters to you saying “We don’t want anything there, we like it the way it is.” How do you balance that with the needs of the town for housing?
We did ask people what they wanted. There were some people who said they didn’t want anything. We might continue to hear opposition, but we have made the decision to proceed with development options for 20th Street. It’s like the little parklet by the Municipal Building that became the Schools Credit Union. We got used to that being a parklet but it always had been intended to be commercial. There were a few people who thought it shouldn’t be. But the intention was to sell it and to have it developed and to be commercial. There’ll certainly be some people who don’t want change. Others will say they want more retail and some more housing.
Generally speaking, current residents don’t want more residents. The people who need housing aren’t here yet, so how do you balance the desires of current residents with the needs of future residents?
That’s true. I remember the North Mesa teacher-housing meetings. Some people didn’t want to see anything there, but others said, “We need more housing, we agree that the schools should be able to pursue something so their employees have housing here.” That’ll always be the case. I mean, I listen to everybody’s input, which is what you have to do, you know?
But you can’t listen to the input of people who aren’t here yet. Not hearing from those people is always the fundamental problem of housing, isn’t it?
But there are people who express the concern. For example, in the Climate Action Plan Survey, commuters were asked: How many of you might want to live here? Because that was part of the assumption in that 2019 Housing Plan. This was before the LANL buildup, right? And back then we were still many housing units short. So getting input from commuters for the CAP did have an impact.
When you deal with development, we are required by the code to look at the parameters like traffic and noise. You can’t just build as high density as you want, anywhere you want. We have a problem with cul-de-sacs, right? DP Road is a cul-de-sac entirely. How many people do you want living on a cul-de-sac? We’re getting to the point in some places where maybe you don’t want to have a lot more people living in that neighborhood. DP Road has some land available, but that’s maybe a better place for more commercial. Probably that land isn’t appropriate for housing further east. Maybe you have the opportunity to redevelop other areas where you could have some density, where there’s going to be better traffic flow. You’ll have more people, but it won’t seem so much more. We have to try to not remind people of when Canyon Road was closed. We only had one road in and out and that was just horrible, right? We have some situations where there’s problems with traffic flow. We have to work with the geography we have to mitigate those problems.
But I don’t hear from many who say, “We don’t want any more residents in Los Alamos.” The density is focused on particular parts of Los Alamos and White Rock: People recognize there’s real benefit to having more people in the town center and downtown because that’s going to lead to more vibrancy. Then more people will look at moving here.
Traffic can be mitigated by density, as well, which is sort of counterintuitive. But if people can walk or use transit and therefore need fewer cars, that helps with traffic.
Yeah. That was another thing this year: the lack of transit drivers. That’s been an ongoing staffing issue and, again, that’s partly related to pay for the County versus pay for Triad or their contractors.
Did the projections that were made in the 2019 housing report line up with the actual hiring the Lab has done?
It was way under. Triad hiring was a lot more than projected.
Is there any way the County could work together on this with the Lab? As opposed to its being one organization’s responsibility?
When Dave Teter [LANL’s associate laboratory director for infrastructure and capital projects] came to the council meeting he just said fairly bluntly, “We’re not expecting you to solve the problem.” This was in response to their employee survey. He told us that he’s not expecting us to solve the problem. So instead they’re looking at Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Rio Rancho.
But LANL Director Thom Mason himself said it’s difficult to retain employees commuting from Albuquerque. They’ll do that for two years and then quit.
There are disconnects. Triad is primarily thinking that if you can have buses, then people will come any distance.
Is that wishful thinking?
I don’t know. Maybe they’re thinking buses are the only option because of the traffic. It’s not sustainable for people to drive themselves an hour plus each way, let alone two hours plus. And being on a bus means it will be even slower getting here.
Wouldn’t one solution be to work with the County to subsidize some housing density in Los Alamos?
Apparently the University of California is doing something for student housing in Los Alamos. Dan Ungerleider [the economic development administrator for Los Alamos County] mentioned that UC was proceeding with developing a master lease agreement for a developer of the former Hilltop House. The Dec. 5 Council meeting may have more details. I have been asked by many people about student housing over the years.
Why not expand that and work with the County to build up more housing here, near where people work?
It might have to do with what they’re allowed to do, because they’re a contractor to the government, right? So what is DOE allowed to do?
As a County Councilor, do you feel like you would like to see the Lab engage more with the community on this topic instead of saying we’re just going to house them all in Albuquerque?
It would be great for the community to have the information they need to provide more informed feedback as opposed to saying, “Well I just like it the way it is; I don’t want more people and more traffic; I remember when Canyon Road was closed, that was horrible—it’s going to be exactly like that.” White Rock has had the problem of way too many evening commuters so the solution of having some more housing up here helps everybody. If the Lab is trying to reduce their carbon footprint, then get people living here so commuter cars or buses are off the road. Maybe use some other local transit. It’s better for everybody if you could work together to figure out what the solutions are.
I’d like to have more of a dialogue about transportation, housing, and other County priorities. The process is hard when you’re sitting in a council meeting and somebody is giving you a PowerPoint presentation about what they’re doing — it’s not a discussion really. And that’s why the council meetings aren’t really a great place for discussion — it’s a problem with the structure of them.
Let’s talk about dialogue. People get survey fatigue. Surveys and public comment can be undemocratic because they privilege people with the time and the emotional upset to bother with the effort.
We do the Polco survey every two years, and that’s supposed to base trending and baselining, which shows changes in the survey results over time. We’ve had many surveys come out, but when you have that one Polco opportunity, you might take it more seriously. You can see if there is a real difference between these respondents and the people who answer polls without getting statistically sampled. You can’t micro-poll every decision, you know?
There’s more to explore, but let’s stop here. This has been great. Thank you so much, Councilor.
Thank you.