Like an executive tweet, these clams are bandied about but almost never fact-checked. Yes, growth has and is occurring in Santa Fe County, and most would agree “smart growth” or “sustainable growth” is good and should perhaps be encouraged. But what exactly is the acceptable rate of growth?
Our community has always attracted the outsider. Sometimes welcomed, often not. Puebloan people suffered the Athabaskans over 1,000 years ago. They both suffered the Spanish 500 years ago. All suffered the opening of the Santa Fe Trail in 1821.
Then all suffered the influx of baby boomers 50 years ago, many embracing environmental author Edward Abbey’s famous dictum: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.”
Short of building a wall around ourselves and declaring “we are full,” growth occurs whether we like it or not. The only known phenomenon that slows growth is the price of homes, which Santa Fe has relied upon for decades.
Unfortunately, the results are people who can afford them, which makes displacement and gentrification worse.
There are two ways to measure growth. The obvious is the natural growth rate, which is the number of births versus deaths. The second is net migration, which is the number moving in versus those moving out.
A shocking statistic recently revealed
by the state Department of Health showed that in 2018, for the first time, the deaths in Santa Fe County (1,212) were higher than births (1,133). That means any growth we experience now is from net migration. Compare those numbers to 1960, the waning years of baby boomer births, when 1,428 babies were born and only 295 people died.
We won’t know with any certainty until after 2020 census numbers are tabulated, but it appears the annual growth rate for the past decade has been less than half a percent. That minuscule rate is almost all from net migration since the rate of births versus the rate of deaths has steadily declined for decades.
Santa Fe has seen growth rates much higher than the past decade — but nowhere near what most Southwestern cities have experienced. Las Vegas, Nev., hardly existed a century ago, and Phoenix was then a dusty speck. The population of Maricopa County, Ariz., where Phoenix is, was about 90,000 in 1920. Santa Fe County’s was about 15,000. Today, Maricopa County has about 4.5 million resident and Santa Fe County has about 150,000. Yes, we’re 10 times bigger than in 1920, but Maricopa is 50 times bigger.
During the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, our annual growth rate was around 3 percent. In the 1920s and ’30s it got as high as 6 percent annually. But the last 20 years have barely seen a 1 percent annual growth rate. Some, including me, would call that smart and sustainable growth.
If we imagine our metro area to be approximately 120,000 people and we have a 1 percent growth rate, then we have 1,200 new people every year. At 2.1 people per household, which is lower than state and national averages because of so many second homes, then we would say we need around 600 new dwelling units every year to meet new demand. Until the collapse of homebuilding in 2008, we were essentially building to meet the demand.
In the decade following the 2008 collapse, even with a shrinking growth rate but one still climbing from net migration, we annually built less than half of what demand would call for. Housing supply is not meeting demand from growth, which is why housing prices remain high and available inventory low.
That’s not sustainable but is likely to slow growth even more. Growth is not out of control, housing prices are.
Kim Shanahan is a longtime Santa Fe builder and former executive officer of the Santa Fe Area Home Builders Association. Contact him at shanafe@aol.com.
