BY SEAN WILLIAMS
Automotive Professionals

People sometimes ask me if I miss Los Alamos, and the answer is no. I give the cheeky reason: in Santa Fe, you have to think about what you want for lunch. Burrito Spot? El Rey del Pollo? One of a dozen food trucks on Airport Road? Chipotle? Panda Express? It runs a lot deeper, of course.

There is a place for commercial landlords, and it’s worth mentioning that some business owners don’t want to own real estate. That question has a little to do with agility, and a lot to do with time horizon and risk preference. But getting a commercial mortgage requires at least
two years of good financials and a sizable down payment, and one typically has neither when
starting out. Especially when considering other startup costs.

With success comes options, and when you look at the options in Los Alamos, you eventually learn that the best option is leaving. There are a lot of reasons for this, but all the complex
dynamics boil down to one basic point: to buy something, you’d have to pay a fortune for badly maintained buildings and/or badly platted land.

Then you find that prices are comparable, if not cheaper, in Santa Fe. Here on Airport Road, we got a rectangular acre with three buildings and a lot of parking for about $830k. In Los Alamos, we’d have had to pay $1.4m for a triangular acre with comparable square footage, needing similar levels of remodeling, and much worse parking.

Mille (née Fleur de Lys) got three buildings a couple blocks from the Plaza for about a million, which already had a fully functional commercial kitchen. In Los Alamos, a million would’ve gotten a defunct gas station/auto shop that wasn’t zoned for auto repair, across the street
from the high school, meaning no beer and wine license.

This all matters because popular businesses like Fleur de Lys are anchors that get people downtown, some of whom will stay a while and look for other things to do. A business like Boomerang therefore struggles because the downtown isn’t a destination in itself. You’ll mostly only go if there’s something you want, you think the thrift store will have it, and you care enough to make the trip.

That’s the point where you’re competing with Amazon.

There’s a common narrative that this is because of the county government. Your government
is good at provisioning certain services, and terrible at managing complex economic realities.
But let’s talk about regulation anyway.

Permitting in Santa Fe is quite painful. They use a dysfunctional online system for managing permits and inspections, and they give you no idea when or whether an inspector will show up. We almost got red tagged because the city neglected to give us the big corrugated plastic sign you put up to show there’s an active permit. This year, I submitted our business license renewal in January, and didn’t get a new license until April. Calling the city is basically pointless, and it’s never clear who you have to talk to.

More to the point, I always opposed injections of public cash, from LEDA and MRA to buying the old CB Fox and Reel Deal, because none of them address the actual problems. More likely, those efforts will exacerbate the problems. I’m intensely skeptical of academic economics, but even I recognize that public cash injections into a supply-constrained market will only increase prices. Indeed, Los Alamos has never suffered from a shortage, but rather a glut of cash. The fact that throwing good money after bad is the only thing your government can think to do is an incredible indictment of its staff and councilors.

The one other idea that a lot of people have glommed onto, probably because it’s inoffensive,
is tourism. The county has a tourism contractor, who thinks Los Alamos should focus on two kinds of people: boomers who are into World War II history, and millennials with families. I know if I had kids, I’d want to go to a place with no hotel rooms and minimal amenities.
Tourism talk in Los Alamos has always reminded me of that bumper sticker—Jesus is coming,
look busy.

It’s an open secret that the position of the Los Alamos Chamber of Commerce is that
landlords are businesses too. Which is funny, since it’s called the Chamber of Commerce, not the Chamber of Corporate Entities. In a place with so little commerce, I guess the Chamber would never survive if it had to rely solely on dues from retailers and service providers. So the Chamber and Main Street limit themselves to event planning, while landowners and realtors fight tooth and nail to defend high property values.

For its part, the Incorporated County of Los Alamos (aka the government) maintains that it’s a
wholly separate entity from the general public of Los Alamos, and therefore has no real
obligation to the public. This is mostly used as moral justification to blow off comments and
emails.

But don’t worry, the same class of experts who’ve managed the county into its current state are still running the show. Of course, the staffers themselves aren’t responsible for outcomes, because decisions are made by the council. And the council isn’t responsible for outcomes, because they voted based on expert advice.

In the end, everyone has someone else to blame, and isn’t that what really matters?