BY STEPHANIE NAKHLEH
Los Alamos

I serve on the Plan Los Alamos steering committee, though I write here only for myself. Kevin Holsapple’s letter about the draft comprehensive plan raises concerns I share. It also rests its central argument on numbers I don’t think hold up—and on a belief about growth I find troubling and exclusionary.

But let’s start with what he and I agree on. Public input should be easy to see. The first survey results Mr. Holsapple obtained through a records request were presented to the steering committee in May, and any resident should have been able to find them without filing one. Also, if his records requests were reasonably bounded, he should have received the information, including meeting minutes, promptly. As a steering committee member, I assumed (still assume) these meetings were public record. The public has a right to the minutes and slide decks.

He is right, too, that “affordable” housing pegged to Los Alamos’s high area median income often isn’t affordable to teachers, nurses, or firefighters—this is an issue I’ve written about for years, and one I raised often during my six years on the Planning and Zoning Commission, which I termed out of earlier this year. And I agree that infill—meaning underutilized land already served by infrastructure —should come first, and that most of our open space should stay protected.

We part ways on the claim that a “clear majority” wants a stable population of about 20,000. He writes:

This opacity masks a fundamental divergence on our county’s future, starting with population growth. In the official County survey, a clear majority of 53.45% of respondents explicitly favored planning for a stable population of around 20,000 residents focused on long-term sustainability. Yet, this majority preference is completely absent from the draft, which instead pushes for aggressive growth to accommodate ongoing job expansion at the Laboratory.

This didn’t sound right to me; I had to go digging for where he got this. His figures come from the first online survey, where participants were asked to choose between “We should plan for a stable population” and “We should try to grow.” His 53.45% comes from the online survey alone: 155 of 290 respondents. It leaves out the March open houses, where residents who came in person chose growth 27 to 10. Add those to the tally and the split is about 54 to 46 among not-quite 300 self-selected participants in a county of 19,400. 

We just don’t have enough numbers to say confidently what the people of Los Alamos County want, and in any event it is quite a stretch to call this “a clear majority.”

Mr. Holsapple treats the housing pipeline as proof that enough is on the way. Enough for whom? The Affordable Housing Plan he cites derives its 1,300-to-2,400-unit range from the number of in-commuters who want to move here, and it describes the lower figure as what’s needed just to maintain the status quo and halt a growing shortage. Its targets also end in 2029. A comprehensive plan looks two decades ahead. Meeting a five-year estimate, assuming every approved project gets built, doesn’t settle what we owe the people who will fill LANL’s jobs in 2035—not to mention where the firefighters, nurses, teachers, and County workers who are already displaced are supposed to live. 

Next point: the pipeline he cites can’t coexist with the population he wants. At the June 23 Council meeting, Councilor Suzie Havemann estimated that even after setting aside troubled projects, the pipeline implies about 5,000 new residents, which would put us near 24,000. Mr. Holsapple can argue that the pipeline is enough, or he can argue for a population of 20,000. He can’t argue both. My best guess is that he’s arguing to (reluctantly) let the approved homes come and then (firmly) close the door. That is a coherent position. I think it’s the wrong one.

Again, to be clear, let’s remind ourselves of who these new people would be: not an invading army from Mars, but our own workforce. People who spend their days here and, because we haven’t built enough homes for them, must wearily make their way to a bed in another county. 

Another weakness in this much-vaunted “pipeline” figure is that it counts approvals as homes. In June, Housing Special Projects Manager Dan Osborn told Council that about 500 of those units had been built. Some approved projects have stalled for years, and one major downtown project won’t start construction until 2028. We should stop calling it a pipeline, because many of these projects are more pipe dream than pipeline. They are not imminent.

Mr. Holsapple says the current draft of PLAN Los Alamos contains a “push for aggressive growth.” Those are scare words. The plan’s baseline is the University of New Mexico projection, which has the county leveling off between 20,500 and 21,000. If anything, I think the draft leans too hard on that minimal forecast, because it assumes the housing constraints of the last 40 years will continue.

We already have a stable population. We’ve had a nearly stable population since I was a freshman at Los Alamos High School with a girl-mullet and pink Esprit capris in 1985. The decades since show what that ‘stability’ has cost us. The county held near 18,000 residents from the 1980s through the 2000s, while jobs kept coming. By 2023 the county had nearly two jobs for every employed resident, and in-commuting had risen 77% since 2016. LANL reports that about two-thirds of its workforce lives outside the county. 

Refusing new neighbors won’t stop the Lab from hiring. Obstruction just makes those people sleep somewhere far away: in Española, Santa Fe, even all the way out to Rio Rancho. Where twice a day they have to navigate our deadly roads—“the terror part of their day,” as former manager of NNSA’s Los Alamos Field Office Ted Wyka put it. That’s a situation we can do something about. 

And when we say no to new neighbors, when we say “our population is perfect just as it is,” we bear those costs at home, too. When homes are scarce, higher earners outbid everyone else, even for units meant for moderate incomes. County staff found Lab employees earning more than $200,000 living in apartments on Ninth Street. Lab employees—who are not the enemy, who just need a place to live like anyone else—are outbidding workers with smaller paychecks, who end up displaced. Our working-age population is flat while the number of retirees climbs. 

Mr. Holsapple asks the County to support local business vitality. I agree: we should support our business—by allowing in more shoppers. A town that caps its population caps its customer base. Downtown shops need more people living within walking distance, and they need employees who can afford to live here. Young people who grew up here, and the teachers who taught them, need somewhere to live. We can’t have these things if we choose not to grow. Communities aren’t members-only clubs. We shouldn’t force would-be residents to apply for entry: “OK, you get to live here, you’re a nurse, we like you. But you don’t, because we just don’t like the look of you—you get to commute.” That’s not the kind of town I think Los Alamos wants to be.

I believe the community input we’ve received so far, tiny as it is, points somewhere better. In every round of this process, residents said to grow by reusing underused commercial sites and focusing on corridors with existing infrastructure. I’d urge the Planning and Zoning Commission and Council to ask one question of the final plan: does it make it legal to build the homes we need in the places we already agree on? That means accessory dwelling units by right, duplexes in more neighborhoods, an end to parking mandates, and real density downtown. Those tools protect open space and make room for the people who keep this town running.

“Stable” is such a nice word. It sounds so modest. In practice, it means the people who already live here decide that the people who already work here can’t join them. Los Alamos has tried that for 40 years now. We know how it turns out.