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By Jesse Jones, The Paper. — Residents and visitors can’t help but notice the empty buildings Downtown; the sudden structural failure of the Lindy’s building made those eyesores into a public hazard. Now, a councilor who pushed for stronger regulations on vacant and unkept properties Downtown other councilors removed from a prior bill.
Sponsored by Joaquín Baca, a new ordinance, O-26-30, targets vacant Downtown buildings by increasing vacancy fees and requiring faster structural safety repairs. The proposal aims to reduce urban blight and protect historic properties before they fall into irreversible disrepair. Under the ordinance, any building with at least 30% of its usable space vacant for nine months would have to register annually with the city.
According to the bill, the city is replacing its old flat penalties with an annual vacancy fee tied directly to a building’s square footage and the length of time it sits empty. The base rate climbs as the space gets bigger, ranging from $1,000 for spaces under 1,000 square feet up to $5,000 for properties larger than 15,001 square feet. Property owners who refuse to let city inspectors inspect their buildings during reasonable hours face a tough penalty: the city can automatically classify the building as vacant and slap the owner with the maximum $5,000 registration fee, regardless of the property’s actual condition.
This marks the second attempt to strengthen Albuquerque’s vacant buildings law after councilors said last year’s version left major gaps. The city passed the Downtown Vacant Premises Ordinance in 2025 to track and tax empty storefronts, but the final version focused mostly on ground-floor vacancies after several provisions were removed during negotiations. According to Baca, councilors originally pushed the law because they were worried about aging downtown buildings and situations like what happened to Lindy’s Diner. “In order to get it passed, we took out some provisions that would have helped prevent what happened,” Baca told City Desk.
The updated ordinance expands the vacancy rules to include second-floor spaces and gives city code enforcement clearer authority to inspect buildings for structural problems. “We have a history of buildings being abandoned downtown for literally 40 plus years,” Baca said. “Lindy’s obviously wasn’t abandoned, but it also wasn’t maintained, and you know we just want to take care of what we have.”