Study explores how ABQ, Santa Fe could make dent in housing shortage with ‘dorm-style' units
Researchers with a national think tank on Tuesday published a report that offers a unique solution to Albuquerque and Santa Fe's housing shortages: affordable, 'co-living' complexes with shared bathrooms and kitchens.
In Albuquerque, the Pew Charitable Trusts' proposal represents a possible key to the puzzle of converting vacant office spaces into housing. By turning the centers of office complex floorplans into shared bathrooms or kitchen spaces, all renters will live in apartments with natural light, and developers can keep costs low by reducing the number of individual kitchens and plumbing features.
Albuquerque had a 24% downtown office vacancy rate in the first quarter of 2025, according to the report, which translates to approximately 535,000 square feet of downtown vacant office space.
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Across the city in the first quarter of 2025, nearly 2 million square feet of office space lies empty, representing a city-wide vacancy rate of 14%, according to a market report from Colliers investment management. According to the report, that's a decrease, but only slightly, from the 16% vacancy rate in the first quarter of 2021, when many offices across the city and nationwide were emptied due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
While office buildings in Albuquerque sit empty, homelessness has greatly increased across the city, growing by 108% since 2017, a rate more than two times the national average. Median rents here also increased 46% between 2019 and 2024. Santa Fe has seen similar growth.
Alex Horowitz, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts' housing policy initiative, told Source New Mexico on Monday that 'flexible co-living,' which he also called 'dorm-style housing,' would make the most sense in both Albuquerque and Santa Fe for low-income, rent-burdened households, mostly of one or two people.
'This is not housing for people coming off the street, necessarily, but it would slow inflows into homelessness sharply by offering housing at a lower price point,' he said.
In consultation with the Gensler architecture firm, researchers mocked up floor plans based on actual Albuquerque buildings, Horowitz said, and arrived at estimated rents of $700 and approximate public subsidies of about $230,000.
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In such a building, 'instead of having 60 bathrooms, you might have 18 or something, and that's plenty, but that gets costs down sharply. Same with the kitchens,' he said. 'And by being located near commerce, right near stores, near transit, that puts people in a good spot to be able to get around, get to a job, school, services — whatever they need.'
And Horowitz said the same concept is true for Santa Fe, even though it doesn't have the same central business district or inventory of large office buildings. Pew recommends developers build 'neighborhood-scale' co-living apartment complexes, a model researchers said 'may also be suitable for similar communities across the state.'
'In Albuquerque and Santa Fe this would be a way to add a lot of low cost housing that would be much less expensive to build than regular apartments and certainly less than houses, and would enable lower rents in two cities that badly need housing at a lower price point,' he said.
Current median rents in Santa Fe are nearly $1,500, according to the report. Pew estimates rents would be $800 at one of the complexes it hopes developers would build.
Horowitz estimated current per-unit building costs for developers are about $300,000. By converting Albuquerque office space into apartments, that price plummets to $130,000 a unit, he said. In Santa Fe, even with the cost of building a new complex, the savings the co-living model produces brings the price down to $184,000 a unit, according to the report.
In addition to the report, Horowitz and a co-author wrote an article about their proposal here, and Horowitz will testify next week in Los Lunas to the interim legislative committee tasked with rural development and policy.
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