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It’s official: Santa Fe’s population is aging. That’s the conclusion of the city’s latest housing needs assessment, although a brief glance around the audience at any of the city’s famous cultural events, or even a short tour of the nearest grocery aisle, might have said it just as well, and more briefly.
Just half of the city’s residents are under age 55 now, a sharp decrease from more than a decade ago, in 2000, when fully 63 percent were such comparative youngsters. The median age of city residents has gone up four years in the meanwhile, from 40 in 2000 to 44 in 2012.
Santa Feans may be getting older but they’re not getting richer. Or more accurately, they’re likely to be comparatively worse rather than better off if they’ve stuck around here for the last decade.
The city study was aimed at helping officials keep tabs on the property market — and anticipating the mix of housing, particularly of the affordable variety, that the city can be expected to need into the future.
Today, only 14 percent of renters in Santa Fe can expect to earn enough money to finance a median-value home in the city. That’s a stunning decrease from a dozen years ago, when a third of the city’s renters could expect to buy such a home if they wanted to.
Moreover, rent prices have gone up by a full 25 percent in the last decade, while income, at least among renters, has gone up only four percent. Similarly, less than 40 percent of the people who work in the city now also live here, down from just over half a decade ago. And, the real estate bubble-piercing notwithstanding, Santa Fe’s home values have increased over the last decade, as has the number of real estate transactions in the city that involve out-of-towners.
If you’re young, just starting out, stuck in a low-wage job or living on a fixed income, this is disheartening at best, and must represent a real economic squeeze for many.
But, four years after the biggest economic downturn in decades, it’s still not entirely clear what these numbers may mean in the long haul, or whether Santa Fe is really any worse off than many other places.
It’s no surprise, for example, that the population is aging: retiring Boomers are a huge demographic kink in statistics everywhere in the country.
Santa Fe’s jobless rate has never been as bad as national or even Albuquerque-area figures, even in the depths of the recent recession. But again, don’t count on getting rich here — or even in Albuquerque. The latest Western-states Mountain Monitor report on the recession and the economic recovery, released last week by the Brookings Institution, says Albuquerque — the only New Mexico metro area included — has been “left completely behind” by the only-slowly improving national economy.
Again, the point of this latest city study was to help with housing strategies. Santa Fe has nationally recognized efforts that enable workers and their families to live in a town where real estate values are famously pricey. Based on the latest round of data, we can expect to need such programs well into the future.
