Published 11/16/2023
Story by Stephanie Nakhleh
Photographs by Minesh Bacrania
When most people think of homelessness, they think of big cities, tent encampments, panhandlers on street corners. They don’t think of small towns, and they certainly don’t think of a place like Los Alamos, New Mexico.
But Los Alamos, among the cities with the most millionaires per capita of any in the United States, does have a homeless population. And it appears to be growing.
“Each week when I go to the Farmer’s Market this issue comes up and people are blown away,” said Deni Fell, case coordination specialist for the Los Alamos County (LAC) Social Services division. “They say surely there’s only one or two [homeless people], and I say, oh no, there’s many more than one or two.”
While reliable data on homelessness in Los Alamos are scarce, Fell said her office has “about 25 to 30 people we’re working with,” a number that includes everyone from those sleeping under the stars to people who are couch-surfing, living in cars, or doubling-up with other families. “Everybody’s in a different situation,” she said. “There are job losses, divorces. We see school employees, county employees, that are housed, but insecurely. We see all age groups. We have people from their 20s to their 70s.”
“Everyone thinks the person has made poor decisions but often it’s a car accident, a medical emergency, domestic violence, an unforeseen family crisis that takes them off of that thin line and pushes them over the edge,” said Dan Osborn, the newly-hired housing coordinator for Los Alamos County, who joined the meeting with Fell to talk about housing insecurity in the county. Osborn came to Los Alamos from Summit County, CO, which has some similar challenges with its high housing demand, challenging terrain, and rural homelessness, which is more hidden than city homelessness.
Studies have found that most people who experience homelessness remain in the same area where they lost their housing — in other words, they don’t move somewhere else to become homeless. This also seems to apply to Los Alamos. “Many were born and raised here, they know it’s safe, it’s familiar; they have some sort of ties,” said Fell. Other people facing housing insecurity may arrive to be with family who are already established here. “Many families have brought their elderly here to get them out of a situation, and all of a sudden they’re stuck here, and it’s causing a lot of friction,” said Fell.
It can also go the other way: “Lots of people have had to move in with their parents again and never thought they would,” she said.
“Doubling up” — where one family absorbs another family facing a loss of housing — is a common form of hidden housing insecurity. According to Fell, “a lot of people are doubling up to keep their kids in the school district.” In other words, if a family with kids in the Los Alamos Public Schools system is facing eviction or can no longer afford rent, they will make sacrifices to keep their children in the same school.
“Also, I hear of doubling up from families who come here, and a relative needs medical care, and they say ‘you can live with us for a little while,’ not knowing the landscape of our housing crisis,” said Fell. “There’s a lot of friction in a family that results. Most of these are Lab employees who’ve called us and said, ‘we need a place for my mom, there’s a hoarding situation.’”
Nowhere to go
The trouble is that there is no place for mom to move. Los Alamos County had virtually no housing supply growth for years, in spite of increasing demand pressure from new hires eager to move into the town.
In contrast, Los Alamos National Laboratory has seen over a 40 percent growth in its workforce in recent years. The static housing supply with increased demand has led to a rock-bottom rental-vacancy rate (<1 percent) and sky-high median housing asking prices (>$550K). Those twin pressures increasingly push all but the wealthiest Los Alamosians out of housing.
“This is a problem that’s 50 years in the making,” said Osborn, speaking not only about Los Alamos but the nation’s housing stock as a whole. “We haven’t been building lower-end, mixed-use, smaller houses. We’ve only been building single-family detached housing for 40 years, so we haven’t been building to the density that we need. With mixed density comes an opportunity for a wider range of housing types and associated housing costs. We should have seen this coming for the last 50 years, and we haven’t, and it’s embedded in our zoning codes.”

A 2021 housing report from the New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority emphasizes Osborn’s point: “Beginning in 1990, New Mexico’s housing production shifted heavily towards single family detached homes,” the report states. “Single family detached homes have remained the dominant housing type built — making up 82 percent of residential permits issued between 2010 and 2020 — despite changing needs. Multifamily units made up 15 percent, and attached units — townhomes, duplexes, small multifamily structures which typically offer better affordability — made up just 2 percent of units permitted. Excluding diverse housing types from a community’s housing stock has the effect of excluding diverse residents.” (emphasis added)
Recently, the county has been making steps toward correcting this decades-long exclusionary building pattern, Osborn said. “Los Alamos has done a good job over the last few years in adding density and having conversations with the community to say, ‘if we want more supply, it’s infill.’ With that, we get developers interested, and financing, and capital. Infill is green, it’s a more economic way to develop, it’s a better use of infrastructure; we can get things remediated and back into use.”
(Infill housing is housing that fills in vacant, underused lots scattered among existing properties. The term is meant as a contrast with sprawl, which is housing that creeps out into previously undeveloped areas.)
The high incomes that come with the Lab are an overall benefit to the region, but nobody can deny the effect on housing costs, he added. “The median income is $106,000. It’s so far skewed because of the high salaries here, and those are setting rents and house prices. Look at the school district, at workers at grocery stores, what are they making? Thirty to 50 percent of their income goes to housing if not more. Why are so many people struggling with housing? Low pay, and the market will never provide for them.”
Osborn adds that subsidized housing is necessary to keep economic diversity in a town like Los Alamos. “Ten years ago I wouldn’t have said this, but I say it now: we have to have the government intervene and supply housing, like LIHTC [Low-Income Housing Tax Credit] housing, because the private market can’t touch [the need]. There are so many costs with labor and materials. The private sector won’t provide it without government funding.”

Reaching out to unhoused people
Although the housing crisis is increasing pressure on low- and even moderate-income families, leading to increased housing insecurity, there is some good news, said Los Alamos County’s Social Services manager Jessica Strong.
“The State of New Mexico’s Department of Health issued a request for proposals earlier this summer, in conjunction with the Coalition to End Homelessness, for rural and frontier counties in the state to propose mobile-outreach programs to address homelessness in their counties,” Strong said. “So we applied, and found out that we received the grant at the end of the summer.” The total grant amount Los Alamos received is $165,000 for the one-year pilot, she said. “We will be hiring a part-time healthcare specialist, depending on timing — it’s in the works in HR right now — so, that’s coming. And then [the grant] allows [us] to buy things, goods for the person we’re helping, which we have not been able to really do.”
The program is designed to shift the burden of connection from those seeking help to those providing help, said Josh Swatek, the hepatitis and harm reduction manager at the New Mexico Department of Health, which oversees the grant. “The theory of harm reduction is to meet people where they’re at in terms of their substance use or other risky behaviors. But this [grant] is also meant to meet people where they’re at literally, too. We go out to people who are experiencing homelessness to provide them a variety of services: IDs, food, linkages to housing, all those sorts of things that homeless-services do. We want to make sure we’re going to people, because there’s often a barrier to coming into an office. It’s hard for individuals, particularly in rural areas, to come into offices to get served.”
“We want the stories”
The program also aims to gather data. The state conducts annual “point in time” (PIT) surveys that are meant to capture data on homelessness by conducting a head-count on a single night of the year, usually in January. But these PIT counts, which face criticisms of undercounting to begin with, are even less accurate for rural areas than for cities. “You don’t have as many people gathering in one area; it’s more expensive [to collect data], it takes more time, more effort,” Swatek said. “Point-in-time surveys are simply a count. We’re trying to get more in-depth data.”
The state expects that grant awardees will provide not just quantitative but qualitative data. “We want stories from the providers,” said Swatek, “and more importantly, we want the stories of the people who are experiencing homelessness. We want to know what it’s like directly from them. That gives us the story behind the numbers.”
Mobile outreach gets those stories cataloged and hopefully allows workers to intervene at an earlier state of crisis, Strong said. “We don’t have the data on people who are actively unhoused, and I would love to find more about people who are in precarious situations,” said Strong. “People come in once the crisis has gotten too big to manage, like step eight or nine. I would love to connect with them at step three or four, before it becomes that big. We’re all optimists and we think we can manage it. I get that: it’s human nature, right? I’ve been in this [social-services] world for 20 years. But I’m always like, oh you guys, if you had just come in when you got that first bill!”
Strong said they had to estimate the number of Los Alamosians at the housing-crisis point when applying for the grant. “When we did our back-of-the-envelope, kind of quick-and-dirty calculation, within 10 minutes we came up with at least 50 to 75 people that we could use these grant funds for, if we were awarded them. We know there are 12 to 15 people right now that are not permanently housed.”
The grant gives the LAC Social Services division more staff and other resources to connect with people whose housing insecurity is more hidden, she said. “It allows us to take a [digital] tablet, take an emergency food box, take our paperwork, and come out to where the person is. It may be a car in front of the old Smiths, it may be somebody who is doubling up or couch surfing, but it allows us to connect with them and not wait for them to come to us.”
“A car has been parked at Main Gate”
Asked how the Social Services staff knows where to find people, Strong said, “That is a great question: I moved here from Pittsburgh three years ago, where we had bridges, and known church gathering spots, where there were communities of folks who had built their community while unhoused: we don’t really have that here. Here, the police might call us, because they have been called to do a well-check on a car that has been parked at Main Gate for a number of days. Or we will get a call from a church, or from any of the other nonprofits that are in our orbit, to say hey, we’ve been working with somebody. And can we kind of collaborate together on this.”

Because personal information isn’t shared without permission, the various service providers in town have to be very mindful of privacy while collaborating, she said, “But it’s a really close network of people working together.”
The network’s primary goal is to make sure that whatever entity a person turns to, that’s where someone gets help: they aren’t sent somewhere else. “We’re trying to build that network of ‘there’s no wrong door,’” Strong said. “Social Services already works closely with a lot of these community people; this grant should enable us to get all the extra stuff done. Like, to apply for an apartment you need a photo ID. Well, if you don’t have a photo ID for whatever reason, you need the paperwork to get your birth certificate, to get the photo ID re-issued, right? There’s multiple steps and it all takes six, eight, 12 weeks.”
Housing insecurity and homelessness often involve complicated bureaucratic and paperwork tangles that people who are already overwhelmed aren’t always equipped to unravel. Sorting through those tangles is a major part of the help people need, and that Social Services aims to provide, Strong said.
Car repairs and bear spray
The grant faces a major obstacle to meeting the most immediate need — actual housing — because the grant stipulates that the funds may not be used to purchase housing vouchers, pay rent for buildings, or for procurement of other physical shelter such as tents, said Strong.
These restrictions are in place because direct-shelter needs are managed elsewhere, Swatek said. “This is just one specific project; there are other projects, other sources of funding that are looking at housing vouchers, building structures, shelters, and things like that.”
Instead of housing, the grant money can be used for minor car repairs, bear spray to protect someone sleeping outdoors, or gift certificates to Metzger’s or Smith’s, Strong said. “We’re hoping to use the funds in an immediate crisis time to fix what we can, so that we’re that bridge to the next step,” she said. Outside of the grant, the state’s anti-donation clause constrains Social Services in how much material help they can offer clients. (That clause prohibits the spending of public resources to benefit other organizations or individuals, see more here.)

The mobile-outreach grant will help Social Services get a better handle on the number of homeless and insecurely-housed people in the town, because the network of care providers is noticing a distinct uptick in need for services of all kinds, Strong said. “We are definitely seeing an increase. We have emergency food boxes here, because if you’re here filling out Section 8 paperwork, or Medicaid re-enrollment forms, we’ll ask about food stability,” she said. “We were previously giving out two to four food boxes a week, and last week we gave out 10. And we will likely give out that many this week. More folks are coming into Social Services, almost all with some kind of housing challenge, but it feels like nearly everyone now is saying yes, I could use that food box, absolutely, yes.”
She has heard similar reports from partner nonprofits like LA Cares and Self Help. “My understanding, because we work very closely with them, is they have seen the need double in the past couple of years,” Strong said. “Where there were 35 to 40 families before the pandemic, it’s now closer to 90 on a regular basis.”
(Note: Lyn Haval, director of LA Cares, confirmed that about 90 families a month are seeking food assistance, an increase over previous years; a future article in this series will focus on the nonprofits.)
“Someone is making sure they’re alive in the morning”
Like Fell and Osborn, Strong has observed an increase in seniors seeking help. “We have a handful of older adults who have come into Social Services in the past six months that pay rent or have reverse mortgages or some other financial hardship and are very worried about becoming homeless,” she said. “I think we have this idea, and it’s true for a lot of people, that [when you’ve reached that age] you’ve paid off your mortgage, now you’re retired, you just get to enjoy life. But we see people literally every single day or get calls from them — they don’t have a pension and they don’t have a paid-off house. And with the increase in food prices, gasoline prices, etc., they don’t know which they should pay first.”
Social Services has also worked with “a couple of folks who were living at the stables,” Strong said. “And we know there are a handful of folks moving tents around in different locations in the county, or they park their car at the old Smith’s, or at a church, and someone is kind of keeping an eye on them in a very kind neighborly way, someone is making sure they’re alive in the morning. So that’s a small handful [of homeless residents]. There is another group we know of: families at the school district who are doubling up, who are living in more than the allowed occupancy… so you’ve got, say, seven people in a two- or three-bedroom quad.”
A final group is “folks that are getting out of the detention center who may not want to return to where they were previously housed,” or who may not be allowed to return, she said. Often a domestic-violence situation can result in multiple members of a household becoming unhoused, because two incomes were needed to afford rent. Another common story is someone getting out of jail, and fresh in recovery, who wants to avoid triggers associated with their previous housing — such as having roommates who use drugs. (A future story in this series will focus on police and courts.)
“So how do you get out of that situation?” Strong asked, rhetorically. “It’s not like we can say, oh, here’s a bunch of available apartments, right?” Social Services at one point tried to keep track of apartment vacancies, she said, but “My understanding is with the property managers, there’s been a lot of turnover there. Some have gone out of business, or stopped renting, or turned it into other things. When there are no vacancies anywhere, it became hard for us to keep that list up to date. It would require somebody checking on it every week.”
Some residents may be surprised at these stories, she said, because they don’t see how unstable housing can be. “People are really good about hiding it, because there’s a lot of shame. Even if you do have a professional white-collar job, at the schools, at the county, at the Lab, and you end up in a precarious housing situation, you don’t want that broadcast! There’s a bunch of judgment that comes with that. And so people are really savvy at finding places to wash, finding places to get clean clothes, finding food.”
In the end, many people facing housing insecurity in Los Alamos end up having to leave the county, she said. “I would love for there to be more affordable housing up here for people who want to stay up here,” she said. “But there are way more jobs in Albuquerque, there’s more things on a bus line, there is a greater availability of mental health resources. … Given where affordable housing is in the state, we end up, yes, working very closely with Santa Fe and places in Albuquerque, because there are just more people who take vouchers there. And then we help get them connected to the ‘us’ in those places.”
Without reliable data, it’s difficult to know the scale of homelessness in Los Alamos. But there are nearby measures, such as a clear increase in food insecurity, that correlate with housing instability, especially in a tight housing market. Service providers also report anecdotally that they are seeing an increase. The grant that Los Alamos Social Services received ought to bring in more data — numbers that can help paint a picture of just how much housing insecurity residents of the county are experiencing.
“Talk to me in July,” said Swatek.
If you or someone you know needs help related to the issues discussed in this article, contact Los Alamos County Social Services at 505-662-8068, M-F, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The Social Services office is located at 1183 Diamond Drive, Suite E, across from Los Alamos High School, and provides assistance in-person by appointment only.
Further reading:
What a landmark new study on homelessness tells us
New Mexico sees a 48% surge in homelessness
The challenge of rural homelessness
Homelessness is a housing problem
The root cause of the homelessness crisis
New Mexico homelessness spikes as housing costs surge
New Mexico governor hopes to go big on housing, homelessness