Tiny homes resurface as Las Cruces weighs new strategy on homelessness
Las Cruces councilors are again discussing tiny homes as part of the city’s next strategic plan after public outreach identified homelessness as a top concern.
Councilors urged the city to revisit an idea included in its previous long-range plan as homelessness, housing and neighborhood safety rise among residents’ top concerns
Damien Willis, Organ Mountain News
LAS CRUCES - Tiny homes are back in the conversation at Las Cruces City Hall as officials decide what the city should prioritize over the next several years.
Multiple city councilors raised the idea Monday while reviewing early public-feedback results for a new strategic plan intended to guide city spending, staffing, services and capital investments during the next two to five years.
Councilor Bill Mattiace was the first to raise tiny homes as councilors were asked which priorities they wanted consultants to emphasize.
“I’d like to see tiny homes and that would take care of a lot of the homelessness and the supply, the housing supply,” Mattiace said.
Mayor Eric Enriquez agreed the idea could become one part of the city’s approach.
“One of the things, and I agree with Councilor Mattiace, may be tiny homes as an option that we can put in our strategic plan and say that’s one of the ways that we’re dealing with homelessness,” Enriquez said.
He cautioned, however, that housing alone would not address homelessness, also pointing to mental health and substance abuse as issues the city needs to consider.
Councilor Cassie McClure also supported revisiting the idea, including possible uses for seniors on fixed incomes who may want to live near family members.
But McClure also noted that tiny homes are not a new concept for Las Cruces.
She said the subject had been included in Elevate Las Cruces, the city’s long-range comprehensive plan, but the envisioned work never materialized.
“The tiny homes conversation was in Elevate specifically to do sort of programmatically, what does that look like?” McClure said. “And it never happened.”
She suggested the city review where earlier efforts stopped as officials build the next strategic plan.
Damien Willis
Homelessness rises to the top
The renewed tiny-home discussion came as consultants presented preliminary findings from the city’s recent public-engagement process.
Single Space Strategies Vice President of Data and Research Brittany Pass said 331 people completed the city’s community survey, while 86 people attended five community meetings. She cautioned that the survey was not representative of the city as a whole, noting respondents tended to be older, more highly educated and more likely to own homes than Las Cruces residents generally. Renters, people of color and residents whose primary language is not English were among the groups less represented.
Even with those limitations, several concerns repeatedly surfaced.
Almost one-third of survey respondents identified homelessness as an area where they wanted to see progress during the next two to five years. Nearly 30% mentioned neighborhood safety and about one in five identified transparency from city government. Road conditions, youth programs and affordable housing rounded out the top six responses.
Homelessness also “far and away rose to the top” when participants at public meetings were asked which issues were most important for the city to tackle, Pass said.
Participants also identified homelessness, affordable housing, environmental sustainability, mental health, water and safety among the most urgent issues.
When asked how they would allocate a limited pool of city money, however, participants put mental health and youth programs ahead of homelessness, which ranked third.
The survey also showed a strong preference for maintaining what Las Cruces already has. Seventy percent of respondents favored taking care of existing city assets over building or expanding new ones. More respondents also preferred making sure the city can keep pace with growth rather than prioritizing the construction of more housing.
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Support Organ Mountain NewsWhat happens next
Las Cruces is still early in the strategic-planning process.
The city expects to receive a draft strategic plan at the end of September, when councilors will have another opportunity to review its priorities and direction. More detailed performance measures and timelines are expected to be developed in October, with adoption anticipated in November.
Pass said the new plan is intended to build from Elevate Las Cruces rather than start over.
“We don’t want to just come up here and say, like, solve homelessness,” she said. “We want this to be actionable, implementable, measurable.”
That means tiny homes are not an approved city program or project. But after appearing in the city’s earlier planning work without being implemented, the idea is again being placed squarely into the discussion as Las Cruces decides what it intends to do next.
Damien Willis is founder and editor of Organ Mountain News. If you have a personal story to share or a lead we should follow up on, reach out at OrganMountainNews@gmail.com or connect with him on X at @damienwillis.
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