The backers of a controversial plan to establish tent sites for the city’s widespread and growing homeless problem have yet to secure a funding source to underwrite the “safe outdoor spaces” plan.
“It could be the city or the county,” Brad Day, a commercial real estate owner who spearheaded the plan, told the New Mexico Sun. “It’s up in the air.”
Day put the cost of housing at the homeless sites at $200 per month per person. He cited a New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness estimate that the city has 1,400 homeless, with an estimated 170 encampments. But he believes the real number could be double that.
Safe outdoor spaces will become legal in Albuquerque — New Mexico’s largest city — on Thursday, July 28. The City Council ultimately added the safe outdoor spaces as a new use in the city’s Integrated Development Ordinance (IDO), which was approved by the council and will take effect July 28. The update to the code will allow safe outdoor spaces in certain nonresidential and mixed-use zones and limit the sites to 40 spots for tents or vehicles and a total of 50 on-site residents.
While the City Council could vote to make them illegal just a few weeks later on Aug. 15, such a quick reversal would not necessarily preclude safe outdoor spaces from already taking shape because the zoning in place at the time of a land use application carries forward regardless of future changes to the zoning code.
City Council Vice President Dan Lewis, who voted against the plan when it was approved by council in early June on a 5-4 vote, put the costs to fund the program much higher.
“A homeless encampment run by San Francisco costs the city $60,000 per year, per tent, twice the median cost of a one-bedroom apartment for each tent,” Lewis, citing a 2021 San Francisco Chronicle article, wrote in a memo.
He also noted what the city is already shelling out each year for the homeless, with many not taking advantage of the benefits provided.
“The 2023 budget funds $60 million dollars to housing and homeless services,” he wrote. “The city runs the Westside shelter with over 100 beds that are unused every night.”
Day and other supporters of safe outdoor spaces have a window of a few weeks to win approval from the city’s Planning Department for what he hopes are four to six sites that will house 200-300 people.
The application window will then close quickly if a measure to kill the plan, sponsored by Councilor Brook Bassan (Northeast Heights) is approved by council; it’s expected to be taken up in mid-August. Bassan was one of five of nine councilors who approved safe outdoor spaces in June as part of the city’s annual zoning code update. She reversed her position after later facing angry constituents in a town hall meeting.
Bassan told the Albuquerque Journal that “her backtracking is due to public outcry combined with her growing concern that the plan was not fully formed and that it would not lead the city – as some had hoped – to step up enforcement of illegal camping and trespassing.”
Day said he’s been talking to nonprofits and churches about operating the sites. He declined to name them for fear of backlash before the applications are submitted.
“If the names got out, who knows what Bassan and others might do to stop them,” he said.
Day insists that the plan, as some fear, will not result in more Coronado Parks, the park north of downtown with an estimated 70 tents and more than 100 homeless, and where a shooting death recently occurred.
The sites will be located in non-residential zoning areas, he says. Most will be north of downtown and in the southeast of the city, where most of the homeless now reside. Each site can hold a maximum of 40 spaces for tents or vehicles, with a maximum of 50 people. Showers, toilets, and some social services will be included.
Day began working on the plan nine months ago - two years after he hired a homeless person to patrol his properties at night, which include buildings at San Mateo/Copper and Lead/Interstate 25.
He and other commercial real estate owners, who likewise hired the same person to patrol their properties, learned more of the plight of the homeless, he said.
Retired for 20 years from the insurance business, Day now refers to himself as a “private citizen and volunteer.”