Archives for September 2014

Walkable, bikeable and mass transit are the buzzwords of new urbanism these days.
A walkable, bikeable urban environment with mass transit is conducive to reducing our dependence on cars – or so the reasoning goes – which has the domino effect of reducing our carbon footprints and, in turn, reducing climate change.
A new generation of consumers, known as millennials, has given some added impetus to that rationale.
“The millennials get it,” said Todd Clarke of Cantera Consultants & Advisors. “They want to live in a city where you spend less time in a car and more time enjoying life.”
It’s not easy to illustrate visually what walkable, bikeable and transit oriented means to our carbon footprint – not to mention air quality and rush-hour traffic – but a group of people from both the public and private sectors has produced a posterlike image that seems to do it.

Headlined “NM Transportation Comparison,” the poster has three side-by-side photographs taken on the first block of Gold Avenue SW, looking east toward the Alvarado Transportation Center.
The photo on the left shows the block filled curb to curb with 36 cars. The photo in the middle shows 36 bicyclists stopped in the middle of a mostly empty street. The one on the right shows one city bus stopped with 36 passengers standing in front of it, again on a mostly empty street.
“The idea was conceptualizing an image so the public could understand it quickly when they look at it,” said Augusta Meyer of the Mid-Region Council of Governments.
The idea for grouping the images on a poster originated almost 15 years ago in Muenster, Germany, and has since achieved almost iconic status, said Clarke, who orchestrated the effort to do a localized Albuquerque version through the Urban Land Institute’s New Mexico chapter.
“We were all tired of using the dated German poster,” he said.
The poster image will be distributed free to urban planners, economic developers, real estate brokers and any others who might want to incorporate it in presentations, Clarke said. The poster’s target audience is primarily millennials, so called because they came of age somewhere around the year 2000 and later, he said.
An important element in the poster is the line that gives the walk, bike and transit scores for the Gold Avenue location. The scores are impressively high – 91 for both walking and biking, 58 for transit – and emphasize that Albuquerque has been called one of the most walkable, bikeable and transit-oriented cities in the West, Clarke said.
The walk-bike-transit scores are from the Seattle-based website WalkScore.com, which ranks Albuquerque as the 28th most walkable large city among 141 that have been rated. In addition to offering its walk-bike-transit scores, the website is a marketplace for rental housing.
Noting that most errands require a car here, WalkScore.com says, “Albuquerque has some public transportation and is somewhat bikeable.”
Albuquerque also shows up on the website as the fifth worst city in the country for residents to have grocery stores selling produce within a five-minute walk from their homes.
Only 7 percent of Albuquerque’s population can walk quickly to a store to buy fresh vegetables, according to WalkScore.com. The bottom cities are Indianapolis and Oklahoma City at 5 percent, and Charlotte, N.C., and Tucson at 6 percent.
The low rating brings to mind the yearslong effort to locate a grocery store in Downtown, which could come to fruition with the planned construction of the Imperial Building at 205 Silver SW. Scheduled to get underway in December, the ground floor of the four-story building has space for a grocery store.
WalkScore.com has walk-bike-transit scores for neighborhoods in Albuquerque. Not surprisingly, the top 10 includes nine neighborhoods in the Central Avenue corridor from Old Town east to roughly San Pedro, and one neighborhood on the east side of Uptown.
It’s likely not a coincidence that at a recent “Infill 101″ seminar held by a commercial real estate group, the Central corridor was described as having high potential for redevelopment from Old Town to Nob Hill. The seminar featured a series of hypothetical redevelopment scenarios, two of which were in the corridor.
A third hypothetical redevelopment scenario was the novel concept of a cyclist-oriented brew pub on a vacant lot at Menaul and Vassar NE, next to the heavily used bike path along the North Diversion Channel. A bicycle shop would be co-located with the brew pub.
A cyclist-oriented brew pub sounds hipster, but it was noted at the seminar that a lot of people would bike to a brew pub to avoid drinking and driving.
Don’t expect Albuquerque’s love affair with the car to go away anytime soon. Most home builders will tell you that a garage is prerequisite for a new home to sell, thus all the subdivisions where the view from the street is rows of garage doors.
It remains to be seen whether millennials will prove all that different from their parents living in bedroom communities.
By: Richard Metcalf (Albuquerque Journal)
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New Mexico’s job growth continues to lag the nation, but that is not the worst of it, said Jeffrey Mitchell, the new director of the University of New Mexico Bureau of Business and Economic Research.
“The very weak performance relative to other states seems to cut across the economy,” he said. All employment sectors are under-performing, which leaves New Mexico with no engine to power growth in the economy as a whole.

(The one employer sector showing growth in New Mexico is in the oil and gas industries, focused in southeastern and northwestern parts of the state. Here, students tour a drilling rig sit in southeast New Mexico.)
“If you look at it historically, typically recoveries at any level, but specifically in New Mexico, are driven by one or two very strong sectors which are creating jobs and paying high incomes, which creates demand, and the whole virtuous cycle occurs,” Mitchell said.
Discussing the Journal‘s twice-yearly Economy Watch review of state and local conditions, Mitchell said the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of businesses shows New Mexico’s employment grew about 0.4 percent in the second quarter. Albuquerque’s growth was “about flat.”
Doubting the data

(Donald Boucher, second from left, an aerospace engineer at Honeywell, and Lori Fuggiti, from Honeywell’s Human Resources, talk to veterans about Honeywell jobs during the fourth annual New Mexico Veterans’ Business Expo & Job Fair at the Albuquerque Convention Center this summer.)
“We tend to be very skeptical about those numbers,” he said. They are subject to significant revision when
Census Bureau data begin appearing months after the Labor Department surveys have been released. “I wouldn’t put too much faith in those numbers.”
“For almost any time frame you pick from 2010 through 2013, and now if you take the first quarter of 2014, for which we have real data, New Mexico comes very, very close to the bottom in terms of job growth,” Mitchell said.
That bottom-tier growth rate is true of almost every employment sector as well, he said.
Especially troubling is how badly the professional and business services sector has performed, Mitchell said. “It’s one of the fastest-growing sectors in the U.S. economy, and it tends to be an area in New Mexico that is really dragging.”
This sector captures employment of relatively well-paid jobs for lawyers, architects, engineers, researchers and scientists. The sector’s performance reflects continuing problems in the construction industry and cuts in spending by the national laboratories, military research facilities and other scientific and engineering employers.
The sector employed 98,300 people in June, according to the state Department of Workforce Solutions. In June 2007, before the national recession hit, the sector employed 108,800. In June of 2009, following the financial panic of September 2008, it employed 105,500 people.
Oil, gas doing well
BBER found that mining, which includes oil and natural gas production, is the only sector in the state that is doing well, but it doesn’t employ that many people, employment seems to help only the northwestern and southeastern part of the state, and employment growth is slowing.
Mitchell said the industry is producing record revenue for the state general fund, but that employment growth, at 6 percent in 2014, is slower than growth in 2012 and 2013.
State and local government payrolls have stabilized after dropping for the past three years. “The private sector isn’t doing much better than it was before, but the public sector is not dragging total employment down,” Mitchell said. “That’s why we’ve gone from slightly negative numbers to flat numbers.”
The Albuquerque area’s poor economy was dragging the state’s performance down as well from 2011 through 2013. Albuquerque employment seems to be stabilizing. Census data from the first quarter of this year were “surprisingly positive,” Mitchell said, showing a 0.8 percent increase in jobs.
“By real-world standards, that’s nothing to write home about, but those are stronger numbers than we’ve seen,” he said.
Shrinking workforce

New Mexico’s labor force is also shrinking, and for reasons other than retirement of older workers.
Latest surveys show the state is losing workers at a 0.5 percent annual rate. The workforce nationally is growing.
A Pew Research study shows that before the national recession in 2007 in New Mexico, 79.1 percent of people aged 25 to 55 years were in the labor force. Today that number is 69.9 percent.
Mitchell said that every state has lower workforce participation than was the case in 2007, and 29 states are below their 2007 levels by a statistically significant amount, including New Mexico.
There are no data to show what kinds of workers are leaving the labor market, Mitchell said.
“There is an awful lot of discussion about brain drain (from New Mexico), the flight of professionals,” he said. “No one really has the data to substantiate the argument that we are seeing an out-migration of professionals. That doesn’t mean that it’s not true. Any evidence of it would be anecdotal.”
BBER Research Scientist Michael O’Donnell said that New Mexico’s income growth also is weak, mostly because wage growth is weak, thanks to poor employment prospects.
As of the first quarter of this year, income grew 3.1 percent in New Mexico, but wage and salary income growth was 2.3 percent, largely because government wage and salary income declined 0.2 percent, O’Donnell said.
By: Winthrop Quigley (Albuquerque Journel)
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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico showed a spike in the number of people living in poverty last year and maintained the nation’s second-highest percentage, according to U.S. Census Bureau numbers released Thursday.
Census figures indicate that 21.9 percent of New Mexico residents lived in poverty last year, roughly 22,000 more people than in 2012. That’s a jump from 20.8 percent.
Nationally, the rate was 15.8 percent in 2013, compared with 15.9 percent the year before.
Only Mississippi had a poverty rate higher than New Mexico’s in 2013 with 24 percent of that state’s residents living in poverty.
The numbers come just weeks after Tesla announced it would build a battery factory in Nevada instead of New Mexico and months after state lawmakers failed to come up with a compromise on an early childhood program in the state.
“It’s a crisis,” said Javier Benavidez, executive director of the Albuquerque-based SouthWest Organizing Project, an anti-poverty organization. “Our public policies that nibble at the edges aren’t cutting it.”
Benavidez said elected officials needed to come up with more bold solutions to fight poverty in the state.
Veronica Garcia, executive director of New Mexico Voices for Children, said she believed that state lawmakers were too focused on offering tax cuts to attract businesses rather than pushing for programs like expanding early childhood education.
Behind the new state numbers, Garcia said, are the untold stories of poverty’s effect. “These numbers don’t show the hunger, the toxic stress, the drug abuse and the homelessness that result from poverty,” she said.
Census figures also show the median income in New Mexico rose slightly from year to year: From $43,423 in 2013 to $43,872 from last year.
The median income in the U.S. rose from $51,915 in 2012 to $52,250 in 2013.
New Mexico also has the highest percentage of Hispanic residents, 47 percent, Census numbers show.
By: Russell Conteras (Albuquerque Journal)
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