Heinrich visits Taos to discuss domestic violence, sustainable housing

U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich visited Northern New Mexico last week, making two stops in Taos to discuss domestic violence with Community Against Violence (CAV) staff and affordable, sustainable housing with representatives from the town, county and state.

On Wednesday afternoon (April 20), Heinrich met with community leaders involved with CAV to discuss his recent reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. He spoke with Executive Director Malinda Williams, Deputy Director Debbie McCann, Director of Client Services Celeste Trujillo and Sexual Assault Services Coordinator Dolores Lewis about ways the group has leveraged public funding to address domestic violence in the community.

Williams and Trujillo painted a picture for Heinrich of the ups and downs of running the center during the pandemic, and described various gaps in services.

“We're working with domestic violence and sexual violence survivors, and they're walking through other systems and they also have co-occurring issues — that could be drug and alcohol, sexual assault — so they were failing other service providers' steps and they were not able to walk through their system,” Trujillo explained.

Trujillo added that some people can have biases against people who come to them seeking services. “[Service providers] call those survivors ‘hard to work with,’ or ‘people who just don't follow through,’ and it's not that they don't follow through, it’s that they don't understand all the things that are asked of them.”

Recently, Community Against Violence has been working with the federal Office on Violence Against Women to identify affordable housing options for women they work with in Taos County. This money helps to provide rent and utility assistance for up to two years while survivors of domestic and sexual violence work with CAV.

The discussion then pivoted to general housing problems in Taos County. “Even though we've had a huge amount of funding from OVW, and it's relatively easy [to get], the biggest issue right now is finding housing for people because the rents are really ridiculous,” said Trujillo.

Heinrich noted that New Mexicans in almost all communities are seeing prices go up “with only modest change in population shifts.” He said there was a bill he could sign onto that would help. “[It] would incentivize a lot more construction of affordable housing. But, I mean, we have to figure out what we are going to do right now,” he said. “I don’t have all the answers. I'm just trying to figure out what all the tools are that we can try to bring to bear.”

Meeting with sustainable architect

The next morning (April 21), Heinrich met with New Mexico House District 42 Rep. Kristina Ortez, Taos County manager Brent Jaramillo, interim town manager Andrew Gonzales and others at a net-zero house in El Prado built by architect Joaquin Karcher.

The conversation again centered around affordable housing and low emission households. The group discussed ways to leverage various public funding resources to make net-zero houses affordable for local residents.

District 4 County Commissioner AnJanette Brush explained Taos’ wide range of housing needs. “We need housing across the spectrum,” she said. “I personally have neighbors who moved out of here because they couldn't afford the way that their home was being heated.” She also referenced 11 teachers who recently turned down jobs in Taos County because they could not find a place to live.

However, Brush explained Karcher’s designs might be able to help. “For those of us who are extremely concerned about sustainability, extremely concerned about climate, [Karcher’s] building construction and his knowledge has been part of the conversation.”

The net-zero house can be built for $272,000, and comes with an average electric bill of just $58 a month, including charging for an electric vehicle.

Heinrich said he hopes federal rebates might soon be approved to reduce that cost. “We'll see what happens in the next month and a half. But if we're able to get the zero emissions home rebates built into a reconciliation package, it would dramatically incentivize this kind of building,” he said. “You would be able to buy all of those technologies for the same prices as inefficient technology.”

At the state level, Rep. Ortez said there are a decent amount of funding possibilities. “It’s a really interesting time in the state right now because we have so much money in various buckets in the state government to make a place like this truly affordable,” she said, referencing sustainable building tax credits and the Community Energy Efficiency Development Program. “That makes investments in energy efficiency for low income New Mexicans so, so affordable,” she said.

Heinrich noted it was good to see the town, county and state all in the same room together. “If you're on the same page and applying [for funding] together, that pushes you up the food chain really quickly,” he said.

Ortez echoed this: “I think it helps to have [Infrastructure Capital Improvement Plans] aligned, and to also have conversations with the governor's office, because there's a lot of money the governor is able to appropriate,” she said.

With various funding sources combined, and the town and county on the same page, Ortez said it is likely they could bring the cost of building a net-zero home down from $272,000 to about $200,000.

Taos County Manager Brent Jaramillo said, with the town and county working together, they would “ideally find a sole person to work on housing… You have funding in all these various places where it takes a full-time person to figure out where the money is,” he explained.

After the meeting, Heinrich told the Taos News that housing change can come from the federal level. “One of the things that we've done, that's a change for my office, is we built an economic development team inside the office to be able to partner with state legislators, municipalities and counties to align the different potential funding sources and grants so that we can get together and work as a team.”

He explained that it is important to show people how to build wealth rather than spending all of their money on rent and utilities. “We want people to be able to put their limited income that they spend on housing and energy into things that grow their equity over time,” he said. “The lower we can get people's energy burden upfront, the more wealth that can build over time, and for low- and moderate-income families, that's key.”