BY SARA ANN MASON
Los Alamos

While the current draft Los Alamos County Comprehensive Plan makes great strides in emphasizing the need to add more housing, we can still do more. The most important opportunity to address is the “Future Land Use Map” (p. 42-45) showing broad swaths of Los Alamos and White Rock’s residential zoning taken up by low and medium density zones (9 or fewer DU/A), placing an artificially low cap on housing in revisions to Chapter 16 of the County Development Code.

The rest of the plan’s language provides flexibility to consider more housing-friendly changes to Chapter 16 (e.g., “[evaluate] opportunities to modernize parking requirements” [p. 47].

Consider flexible standards for building form, height, setbacks, parking, and the integration of  residential and commercial uses” [p. 46], emphasis mine). The opportunities afforded by this flexible but ultimately timid language will be hamstrung by the artificially low residential density caps in the Future Land Use Map.

The community has spoken up that they don’t want new greenfield development in order to preserve our county’s beautiful open space. However, with 10,000+ daily commuters into Los Alamos, keeping housing low is actively harming those open spaces through unnecessary carbon pollution. If protecting our open space is important to you, the only option is to allow more dense housing in areas like the existing residential zones. Let’s make sure we take advantage of this once in a decade opportunity to welcome more early career LANL employees, teachers, healthcare providers, service workers, and small business owners as neighbors.

Write our Planning and Zoning Commissioners (PZC@losalamosnm.gov) and our County Councilors (countycouncil@lacnm.us) today and ask them to increase the artificially low density limits on the Future Land Use Map.