With a projected housing need of 55,000 new units by 2045, the city has passed some minor housing reforms in recent years, including legalizing accessory dwelling units and allowing more housing near major transit lines. But the city has been reluctant to undertake citywide zoning reforms, despite the city’s housing needs assessment recommending doing so.
In 2025, this was reiterated after city leaders participated in a Bloomberg Harvard City Fellowship. Even now on the official city government website is the finding: “Compared to peer cities (like Milwaukee), Albuquerque’s zoning does not allow enough density citywide, limiting housing supply, types of housing and growth potential.”
Despite all this, on February 19, the City Council voted 5-4 to reject proposed changes to the city’s Integrated Development Ordinance (IDO), including allowing duplexes in all areas of the city currently zoned for single-family housing. Also denied were the legalization of townhomes in all areas of the city.
Councilor Tammy Fiebelkorn argued that legalizing duplexes citywide represents a form of gentle densification, would not suddenly transform every home into a duplex and is fundamentally a property-rights issue.
“We talk a lot about private property rights, but I don’t know that we mean it,” she said. “I don’t know that we think people actually have private property rights unless people are doing what we think is the right thing on them… Again, I do not find a duplex, in any way shape or form, scary.”
Speaking on the broader zoning reform package, William Indelicato from Strong Towns Albuquerque told the council that, “If you say you want increased housing supply, you need to pass the original IDO charges … If you are concerned about your neighborhoods changing, preventing change results in stagnation.”
But arguments against change and property rights remain politically potent.
Before the meeting, one head of a local neighborhood association framed the proposed upzoning as the city attacking neighborhoods. “We don’t need people to come and tell us how we should live in our neighborhoods,” she said. “We can decide that on our own, and the City Council has failed to listen to us. They want to change the character of our neighborhoods.”
Of course, this line of argument gets things twisted. Altering “the character of” neighborhoods is often invoked as a sacrosanct line that can never be crossed, with the status quo of neighborhoods and existing government-dictated land uses cast as not only the way things are but as they ought to be. This line of thinking is why housing markets are so restricted and why neighborhoods are less able to evolve through the choices of residents, renters, buyers and property owners.
Critics also echoed the rhetoric of a Change.org petition condemning “the exclusionary upzoning of Mayor Keller and Councilor Fiebelkorn.” That petition condemned upzoning as a “handout to promote corporate urbanization at the cost of equity, history and identity.” Councilor Fiebelkorn read the petition during the meeting and rightly commented, “There’s nothing exclusionary about adding duplexes, y’all.”
Councilor Dan Lewis was perhaps the most outspoken defender of the city’s zoning rules, arguing that he represents a district with single-family homes and that people bought into the area precisely because of strict zoning rules.
Here, again, I think Fiebelkorn put Albuquerque into appropriate context: “What I think is really great about Albuquerque is that if you drive around Albuquerque you see a lot of cool stuff,” including a variety of different building styles within many neighborhoods, “because we were built before zoning codes… Where we really had the idea that you know your neighbors… And then we changed that with our zoning codes to say, ‘“But we don’t want those people in our neighborhood.’”
That last bit ultimately is, if not the explicit subtext of, the effective message of many zoning codes. Rigid zoning codes allow a subset of people, through the government, to exert considerable control over what types of housing are available, what property owners may do with their property and therefore who can live within a given area.
But again, that’s the argument that prevailed at the meeting.
That’s not where the story is sure to end though. It was recently reported that apartment construction dropped 37% in the first quarter of this year compared to last year. If that reflects an ongoing trend, that will only mean a tighter housing market and even tougher conditions for renters. According to the city, half of Albuquerque’s renters reported being rent burdened in 2023, meaning they spent 30% or more of their incomes on housing.
The city can only resist broader reforms so long before more sweeping reforms become unavoidable.
Sal Rodriguez is opinion editor for the Southern California News Group and a senior fellow with the Pacific Research Institute. He is the author of “Dynamism or Decay? Getting City Hall Out of the Way,” published by the Pacific Research Institute.