As Albuquerque’s housing crisis deepens—with rents rising, homelessness up 83% from 2022-2023 and a shortage of 20,000 units—city leaders are turning to “supply-side progressivism” to speed affordable housing construction.
The law, sponsored by District 2 Councilor Joaquín Baca and co-sponsored by District 6 Councilor Nichole Rogers, passed unanimously 9-0 at the Aug. 18 City Council meeting. The ordinance mirrors efforts by Democratic leaders, such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has also pushed to cut barriers to housing development.
“This is an update clarification of our existing Procurement Code, and essentially, we are clearing the red tape to get housing built,” Baca said during the council meeting.
Local Crisis
A recent city housing needs assessment estimated Albuquerque will need 55,000 new housing units by 2045 just to catch up.
According to a January 2025 Pew Charitable Trusts analysis, the city added 31,400 jobs over the past three years but permitted fewer than 9,000 housing units. Nearly half of renters are “housing cost-burdened,” spending more than 30% of their income on housing, and homelessness jumped 83% between 2022 and 2023, according to the ordinance.
“Clearly, the housing supply shortage is huge, and this won’t address all of that by any stretch, but what it will do is streamline the process for developers who are applying to city funds to help build affordable housing,” Baca explained in an interview.
“We know that we need about 20,000 units of housing,” Mayor Tim Keller said at a recent press conference endorsing the now-failed in committee Opt-In Zoning Ordinance. “We know that we have neglected adding housing for decades, and now it is finally catching up with us.”
Instead of helping people afford high housing costs through subsidies, the supply-side progressive model aims to lower prices by increasing supply through regulatory reform.
As Councilor Dan Lewis said in previous housing debates, “For too long, attempts to address the most pressing needs of our City have been held up by red tape and unnecessary appeals.”
Supply-Side Progressive Philosophy
Albuquerque is embracing a new approach called “supply-side progressivism,” which flips traditional Reagan-era supply-side economics on its head. Instead of cutting taxes to spur investment, the framework focuses on increasing the supply of essential goods—like housing, health care and clean energy—by removing bottlenecks and investing directly. Inequality, the idea goes, isn’t just about redistributing wealth—it’s also about scarcity.
In their 2025 book Abundance, Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein argue that liberal cities have long been “more concerned with blocking bad economic development than promoting good development since the 1970s.” Supply-side progressives aim to flip that script, streamlining regulations to increase supply and address affordability crises.
Locally, the approach goes beyond traditional progressive solutions like housing vouchers and rent subsidies. Instead, it focuses on boosting the actual supply of affordable housing by cutting through bureaucratic red tape.
When asked whether the ordinance prioritizes results over process—a central critique supply-side progressives make of traditional Democratic governance—Baca said, “100% yes, A, I’m a Democrat and B, you know, this is a series of changes.” He described a comprehensive approach to increasing housing supply through regulatory reform.
Baca explained how current procurement processes create delays: “How it typically would work is the city would say, we’ve got this lump sum of money… And so then developers would apply, and there’d be a scoring process, ranking process, make sure they qualify, then they’d also be like the Development Commission. Oftentimes, you’d have to send it there for approval. It’s just a lengthy process to pick a winner, so to speak.”
The ordinance clarifies and streamlines this process, allowing projects to move forward without going through the full competitive bidding cycle, cutting months—even up to a year—off typical timelines.
Baca said the changes are part of a three-phase strategy that reflects systematic supply-side thinking. The approach started with “[ordinance] 177 that we just passed [in the] previous council [meeting], that will identify three different projects within the downtown and [other] MRA zones [and] laid out just how much they need in gap financing so that they can… get housing done. And so this is the Procurement Code update to allow for that. Then we’ve got another bill coming, which will be the affordable housing code.”
In Albuquerque, officials are loosening zoning rules for casitas and apartments, cutting permitting delays, and investing millions in public-private housing projects to create enough homes so working families aren’t priced out.
Keller said the city has “done more zoning reforms in the last three years than we have in the last 40 combined,” indicating Albuquerque’s recent embrace of regulatory reform to address housing shortages.
National Context
Across the country, policymakers are experimenting with ways to speed housing development. Baca said the ordinance follows a proven playbook.
“We all recognize stuff has just been moving too slow. It’s not like I came up with this. I’m just following the playbook on how to get things done,” Baca said when asked about similar efforts by Newsom, who recently proposed cutting red tape to speed housing development.
In New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s Building Resilient and Affordable New Developments (BRAND) West report also calls for simplifying and streamlining processes to address the housing crisis.
According to the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee, the state’s unhoused population rose 11% from 2009 to 2023 and 48% between 2022 and 2023, based on Department of Housing and Urban Development Point in Time data. Albuquerque saw an 83% increase in unhoused residents over the same period. The report notes that up to 40,000 rental units could help ease shortages if development processes were streamlined.
Supply-side progressives like Thompson and Klein argue that Democrats have focused more on regulatory processes than on achieving housing results. Supply-side progressives offer an alternative to both heavy regulation and fully deregulated markets, arguing cities can solve affordability by making essential goods abundant rather than just accessible.
Implementation
Council Bill O-25-95 creates targeted procurement exemptions for affordable and transitional housing projects using state capital outlay funds, including money from House Bills 2 and 450, with what Baca called “critical deadlines.”
The ordinance aims to simplify and streamline the process for getting housing built.
Rather than removing oversight, the measure introduces a “Request for Qualifications” process that can bypass traditional bidding when appropriate. Unlike competitive bids based on lowest cost, the RFQ evaluates contractors on “experience and qualifications,” according to city staff.
Projects over $100,000 still require City Council approval, maintaining democratic oversight while cutting months of bureaucratic delays.
The ordinance also directs the Health, Housing and Homelessness and Municipal Development departments to review procurement policies and report back to the council within 30 days, identifying changes that would further streamline affordable and transitional housing development.
The strategy is already showing tangible outcomes. “One project has already broken ground, knowing they’re going to get some funds from this. And then two more will break ground, at least the Wells Fargo [project] broke ground this year as well,” Baca said.
He added that getting legislation “signed off at the legislature in March and having groundbreaking within the same year, I think that’s pretty phenomenal” by city standards.
“The challenge with housing is it takes a while, because obviously, physically building houses takes time, but laying the policy groundwork to do that has to come first,” Keller said at the press conference.
What’s Next
The 30-day review will test whether city departments can adapt to a supply-focused strategy. If it works, the ordinance could prove that smart deregulation helps build more housing instead of slowing it down.
“Government can be a solution,” Baca said at Monday’s meeting, reflecting the belief that good policy can create abundance rather than just manage scarcity.