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Citing the need to make immediate progress on the subway homelessness crisis, an Albuquerque councilwoman said she sees potential in empty parking lots and other unused spaces.

Councilor Brook Bassan proposes the concept of “living lots” – designated places where people are allowed to sleep at night in tents, cars or RVs. She says it will be a low-cost, temporary, and easy action the city can take while realizing larger-scale initiatives like the Gateway Center shelter in southeast Albuquerque. She called the idea a “low-cost, low-barrier compromise” that provides designated spaces for people who might otherwise already be sleeping in parks, sidewalks and arroyos.

“People are camping everywhere now; people are currently defecating anywhere. People need help all over our city,” Bassan said at the May 2 city council meeting. “We are fed up; we are frustrated. They are fed up, they are frustrated.

She describes it as the “first step” in a continuum of services and an easier-to-access option than even safe outdoor spaces, also known as sanctioned encampments. Safe outdoor spaces – which the city council already considers a new land use – would have more requirements to start with, including on-site showers, 24/7 on-call support services and walls to block the view of the tents.

Housing lots should include toilets and hand-washing stations, even if they were just portable units, but Bassan said they wouldn’t need anything else. She said the city would be responsible for cleaning and maintaining them, but they may ultimately require less manpower and resources than the city currently spends dismantling and cleaning up unauthorized campsites in all the city.

Her proposal would allow living lots in certain mixed-use, non-residential areas, and she said the city could identify some of its own properties or work with other public agencies, and even private landowners, to find properties. locations.

Bassan argues that providing low-barrier campsites could make it easier for the city to enforce laws such as trespassing or loitering when people sleep at unauthorized sites because the city can provide an alternative.

“We find that common ground; if you want to live in a tent – ​​some people just want to – you can live in a tent, but you can’t do it just anywhere,” she said in an interview.

Bassan’s proposal has drawn scrutiny from some fellow advisers, such as Trudy Jones. She said she wanted more specific information, including how the city would choose specific sites.

“I like the big picture, but the devil is always in the details, so let’s take a deeper look and see what we come up with,” Jones said.

Choices Beyond Shelter

Councilor Dan Lewis, however, made his opposition clear by suggesting that when the proposed housing estates come to a vote, it will state that they can only be located within the boundaries of Bassan’s Northeast Heights council district.

Lewis was among a handful of councilors who also voiced their objection to safe outdoor spaces, a concept presented to council as part of the city’s annual Integrated Development Ordinance update. Lewis has since launched a campaign against both ideas, saying in a Friday press release that “the sweeping proposals that sanction tent camps will not reduce homelessness in our city and will only make it worse.”

IDO legislation currently being debated by council plans to add safe outdoor spaces as a new land use – something Councilor Louie Sanchez unsuccessfully tried to remove from the bill at the May 2 meeting.

Sanchez argued that the city shouldn’t mix zoning and social issues. But his proposal failed on a 3-6 vote as only Lewis – who questioned both the morality of sanctioning such projects and the public’s appetite for them – and Councilman Renee Grout joined him to attempt to block safe outdoor spaces.

“I think everybody wants to find solutions, (but) I don’t think anybody wants us to do something if that something is the wrong thing, and I don’t believe it’s the right thing,” he said. Lewis said.

Lewis and Sanchez later – but unsuccessfully – attempted to pass an amendment ensuring that safe outdoor spaces are prohibited in each of their West Side neighborhoods. The permanent proposal would allow safe outdoor spaces in some non-residential areas and some mixed-use areas. However, it is generally silent on council districts, except that it prohibits more than five each in each of the city’s nine districts.

A map detailing where zoning would allow sanctioned encampments under this proposal shows at least one area in each council district, although a large concentration of eligible areas is between San Pedro and the railway tracks, north of Menaul to the northern limit of the city. However, the map does not take into account religious institutions, which would have more flexibility in their location.

When Bassan asked Lewis directly if he had any good ideas for tackling homelessness, given his objections to other ideas, he replied that his answer was the Gateway Center. Located in the former Lovelace Hospital in Gibson, he said it was a “humane” place for people to access services.

City voters in 2019 approved $14 million for the project, and officials finally expect to launch several services on the property this winter, including a 50-bed women’s shelter, a thought-provoking center and a space designed to provide “medical respite” care for people who would. have no place but a hospital to recover from illnesses and injuries.

But councilor Tammy Fiebelkorn also defended the morality of providing choices beyond shelter, saying some people living on the streets are still too traumatized to stay in shelter.

“The answer for these people is to find something that works for them that gets them out of parks, open spaces, and your alleyways,” she said. “It’s the human response we talk about all the time.”

Accompaniment with warning

Lewis and Sanchez weren’t the only ones trying to protect their neighborhoods from safe outdoor spaces.

Councilwoman Klarissa Peña also introduced an unsuccessful amendment that would have blocked the city’s first five spaces from going to areas of high social vulnerability, including large swathes of her own southwest neighborhood. She noted that she already lives near several affordable housing projects.

“I support (safe outdoor spaces), but I just think if we’re going to do that, we should look at areas outside of areas that are already aggravated by services like this,” she said.

Peña’s amendment would also have isolated large parts of Councilman Pat Davis’ district from the first five safe outdoor spaces, but Davis voted against it, saying it would “essentially ban projects in neighborhoods, frankly, where we see density higher. people in need of services.

The council is due to resume IoT legislation on May 16.