“Having a boom without the housing is a real problem”
Author Gregg Colburn on Los Alamos's "boomtown" phenomenon
Los Alamos faces a growing housing crisis that could jeopardize its future as a hub of scientific innovation. With housing loss and food insecurity affecting ever more residents, the town grapples with a persistent problem: providing adequate housing for its workforce.
More than half the workforce at Los Alamos National Laboratory commutes long distances due to the housing shortage. “It's not a favorable recipe going forward,” said Gregg Colburn, associate professor at the University of Washington and co-author of “Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns.”
Colburn, who will be speaking at the Livability in the Land of Enchantment Speaker Series in Santa Fe tomorrow (Thursday, June 20), said that decoupling jobs from housing has a major downside. “There's nothing wrong with prosperity, and there's nothing wrong with job growth,” he said in an interview with Boomtown. “Those are all good things for a community. But if you don't pay attention to ensuring that people can continue to afford and be able to access housing, then there are some significant consequences associated with that prosperity.”
Los Alamos has seen its major employer increase its workforce by 41% in just a few years. However, the town's housing stock has remained flat at around 8,000 units for several decades. Housing insecurity in wealthy, high-growth areas, which Colburn describes as the "boomtown" phenomenon, is not unique to Los Alamos. "There have been some boomtowns that have actually accommodated that growth, especially in sunbelt cities in Texas and South Carolina," Colburn explained. “The real problem boomtowns [happen] when you have a boom and then population growth without any additional housing, which is what’s happened in San Francisco and Seattle and Los Angeles. ... Having a boom without the housing is a real problem.”
Colburn's research, conducted with data scientist Clayton Page Aldern, dismantles common theories about homelessness, contending the true culprits are artificial housing scarcity created by local over-regulation and lack of federal funding. “The places in the United States with the highest rates of homelessness are the most affluent places,” Colburn said. “Seattle, San Francisco, and Boston are probably the three richest cities in the United States in terms of median income, and they're the three biggest in terms of rates of homelessness.” Los Alamos, though far smaller, can expect to see homelessness and displacement rise as high-paying jobs flood in without a commensurate dedication to increasing the housing stock, he said.
To address the housing deficit, Colburn suggests increasing federal housing vouchers (also known as Section 8) and allowing denser infill development — “infill” means allowing more housing to be built where there is already infrastructure in place. The term is usually used in contrast with sprawl that encroaches on forests and wild spaces.
Colburn praised an innovative approach underway in Kentucky, where the government proactively plans for housing in tandem with each new jobs program. When Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear recently spoke at an event just before Colburn, “He used the term ‘homes are where jobs go at night,’” said Colburn. “And [he said] that every time they announce a new jobs program, through economic development, they're going to announce a parallel commitment to housing, which is really awesome.”
Colburn said that affordable housing advocates and environmentalists are usually pitted as enemies, but he believes they are natural allies. Their core beliefs should align in, for example, supporting dense multifamily housing near transit as a sustainable solution. “Rather than opposing any new development on the grounds that it's bad for the environment, what we want to do is to support denser infill development — ideally in partnership with transit,” he said. “That's much better in terms of environmental stewardship and also promotes the additional housing units and greater affordability.”
Colburn is the second speaker in this year’s Livability Speaker Series’ lineup: the first was Jerusalem Demsas, who writes for the Atlantic. Her talk, “Planning for Santa Fe’s Future: How to Make Land Use Policies Work for All,” is available here. The Livability Series was created in 2023 to bring local and national speakers to Santa Fe to help residents learn how housing markets become unaffordable, and to spark conversation about how the region can meld affordability and sustainability. The series was born out of Santa Fe's housing affordability crisis and long legal battles over proposed affordable-housing projects. (Boomtown plans to cover more of this series, as it pertains to Los Alamos.)
At his upcoming talk at the Santa Fe Farmers Market on Thursday, Colburn will discuss conventional beliefs about what drives homelessness — including mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, generosity of public assistance, and low-income mobility — and why none of those alone fully explain the root cause: housing market conditions. He will outline the types of policies that can best help cities like Santa Fe and Los Alamos address this issue.
Ultimately, Colburn believes overcoming homelessness will require a profound shift in how policymakers and the public approach housing. “We don't think about housing as infrastructure — but it is,” he said in our interview. “We think about streets and transit and schools as infrastructure, but so is housing. Really including that in the conversation is absolutely essential.”
For Los Alamos, heeding Colburn's insights could be crucial to ensuring the town remains a thriving, inclusive community where scientific innovation can flourish. As Colburn puts it, “However you see the problem, the solution is to get more housing built.”