Part 4: How Affordable Housing Happens

A Case Study in Los Alamos

The Bluffs: Senior housing on DP Road nears the finish line

By Stephanie Nakhleh

Photographs by Stephanie Nakhleh and Minesh Bacrania

I met Todd Slocum, project manager of the Bluffs housing complex on DP Road, on a hellaciously windy day at the end of March. As I slipped through a gap the chain link fence and crossed planks over a conduit ditch to shake his hand, dust and grit swirled around us. We could hardly hear each other until we ducked inside the unfinished walls of the affordable senior-housing apartment building, still several months away from being habitable. I was the only one on site not wearing a hard hat or steel-toed boots, but that wasn’t saying much—because I was one of the only people on site, period.

“Did you see the ‘laborers wanted’ sign I put out front?” Slocum asked, as he pushed a door shut against the wind. I had seen the sign, spray-painted in bright orange on a large chunk of plywood and attached firmly to the chain-link fence I’d just navigated. “I mean, this …