No. 29 | Urban Sense: That Old Santa Fe Style

In the January edition of The Santa Fe New Mexican’s Home Magazine, I reflect on how Santa Fe’s adherence to an “Old Santa Fe Style” aesthetic led to suburban, low-density housing choices that sacrificed climate-responsive, higher-density vernacular design—contributing to today’s environmental, housing, and livability challenges. Urban Sense.

As I write this, we finally have a dusting of snow on the mountains and the hint of moisture in town. It’s mid-November, perhaps the latest snowfall in my 30-plus years in Santa Fe.

According to old-timers, we used to have real winters, but by all accounts from forecasters our winters will continue to get hotter and drier because of climate change. (And sadly, less snow sports easily accessible from Santa Fe.) This is a global issue but the result of local decisions.

When Santa Fe decided to keep the “old Santa Fe look,” city leaders adopted the stylistic but ultimately surface characteristics of old Santa Fe, abandoning the courtyard and long rectilinear adobe buildings—features that offered flexibility in the allowable uses and fluctuating density of people living in those homes. That older look also favored a single-family home on a single lot fronting on a street with the appropriate setbacks for suburban development—leading to what’s now called “Old Santa Fe Style.” That was in 1912. And ever since then, we have been building suburban developments in a style that mimics old Santa Fe outwardly but lives like any other suburban neighborhood anywhere else in the country. We chose single-family housing (often on the largest lot available) over vernacular building types with higher densities such as courtyards, duplexes, triplexes, row houses and live-work buildings, some of which allowed 26 dwellings per acre versus three to five units per acre (see the Stamm neighborhoods), and one unit per acre (as in DeVargas Heights) as long as it was in the city’s designated “style.”