The person who buys the model home I’m standing on the porch of will have TWO sets of mountains available for viewing. The sun will come up over New Mexico’s Sangre de Christo Mountains and go down over the Jemez Mountains. And if you’ve always wanted to have a buffalo herd as neighbors, you are in exactly the right place.
The Buffalo Range subdivision at the Nambe pueblo on the high desert plateau west of Santa Fe is a work in progress. Four years ago, you would have seen only a dusty and unused multipurpose building there among the surreal rock formations called barrancos. The Nambe Pueblo Housing Entity, which is developing this housing for members of its small (650 people) pueblo Indian tribe, knows it is a slow process to make the desert bloom with snug new houses. They assume it will take ten years to achieve their ambitious plans, which come to a total of 61 new housing units.
Why is that ambitious? The village tribe has 47 families waiting on its housing list. The Buffalo Range subdivision is going to make a big difference in that.
For now, they are doing a few at a time. On a recent visit with project manager Andrew Martinez and executive director Christine Brock, two modular homes stood on a lot ready to be put in place, mirror images of each other and looking like one big house cut right down the middle. There are four houses up and sold, out of a planned 37 single-family units and 24 multifamily units. Nambe is hoping to have ten or twelve in place by the end of the year.
And, in something not conceivable a generation ago on an Indian reservation, mortgage finance will be a part of the mix. All 37 of the single-family homes will have HUD 184 mortgages on them, made by lenders like Wells Fargo, Bank of Albuquerque, and Gateway Mortgage, with a monthly mortgage payment of about $350-$400 apiece.
The project has also created three full-time jobs, with as many as eight people working during peak times.
Nambe will incur no debt on this project. It has raised more than $10 million for infrastructure and construction, and the individual owners will have the mortgage debt (though the tribe plans substantial downpayment assistance/soft second mortgages up to $75,000).
Where has the money come from? Some has been through the federal stimulus program and the project has been awarded money on three separate occasions from the state TIFF fund (tribal infrastructure fund). Nambe has just received another $2.2 million which will pay for a road to be paved through the desert to connect the subdivision with a state highway.
The 45 acre site has a large and very green athletic field, a pond stocked with trout, a playground, and that same multipurpose building, which has been spruced up and added to. The bison herd is close by (our American variety of buffalo is actually called bison), and the eternal wind of the high desert will be in the face of whoever buys this model home with views of not one but two mountain ranges from its porch.
