Santa Fe, New Mexico—the Southwest haven for artists and writers where I’ve lived for the past 14 years—has undergone the fate of bohemian enclaves across the rest of the country. It’s become gentrified and overrun with real-estate speculation, rendering the city unaffordable to the very community that shaped its reputation for creativity, innovation, and broad-based middle-class comfort.
The old Santa Fe is now as much of a postcard relic as the original frontier town of the Wild West. For me, even the balmiest days here are tense and anxious, ever since the average rent soared to roughly $1900. The city’s booming real estate scene came perilously close to having me live on the streets. My story reflects thousands of pandemic and post-pandemic housing nightmares that have played out, with significant regional and local variations, throughout the country.
In 2021, after several decades of making a solid if unspectacular living as a freelance writer, I experienced the worst rental experience of my life. I was two months away from being named the poet laureate of Santa Fe, yet I found myself on the brink of homelessness. This saga brought home to me how fragile my standing was as a self-made writer in a housing economy designed to push all struggling renters to the margins. The housing crisis is as brutal and impersonal as the pandemic that sent it into overdrive: It can upend the livelihoods and security of all modest income earners—service workers, essential workers, academics, together with writers and artists who sometimes prefer to believe they are charmed and “déclassé” instead of pawns in an economic grind.
My debacle began after I applied for affordable housing at an artists’ complex. Santa Fe’s robust tourist trade has long relied on a steady influx of free spirits and artists to a milieu that civic boosters since the early 1900s have called “the City Different.” But after more than a decade here, I had seen many bohemian souls fall into penury. I leapt at the chance to land a subsidized unit at the Siler Yard Art and Creativity Center, a complex sponsored by a local housing coalition and backed by funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The new complex offered more than 40 apartments for artists, at affordable rents well below what the red-hot rental market normally bears. I was selected for a unit at $689 a month rent. I was appreciative, but ultimately disappointed.
The final months of construction were scheduled for mid-2021, a low point in the Covid 19 pandemic. The timing delayed progress significantly. Two weeks before our November 15, 2021, move-in date, several dozen artists accepted into Siler Yard were abruptly told that their units were unavailable because the buildings had not passed housing inspections.
This news not only came as a shock—it also threatened to render many of us homeless. We had previously received e-mails advising us to give notice at our current residences, so that we could move into Siler Yard. Now, we were in a lurch. Like the other frustrated and bewildered artists suddenly without assurance of a place to live, I made daily calls to the Siler Apartments representative, pleading to know when we could officially be housed.
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The landlord at the apartment I had planned to vacate took financial advantage of the situation, knowing that if he held me to the November 15 move-out date, I wouldn’t have a roof over my head. He claimed he had already rented the place out. He couldn’t let me stay longer, he explained, that is, unless I agreed to pay the next month’s rent immediately plus additional charges, including the fee for replacing a gas meter (a peculiar demand). Otherwise? I could vacate now, and move all my belongings into storage. To spend several weeks in a hotel room could easily cost over $2,000. I instead remained in my old apartment, and paid the landlord’s blackmail demands.
It is hard to describe what it’s like to exist precariously between homes. You feel lethargic, heavy, and weighted. You’re depressed by the mounting sense of insecurity, yet at the same time your pulse constantly races; every minute stretches to an hour. You are mistreated at every turn, with few resources and no access to affordable legal backing that would help you to stand up for yourself. The scenario is so obviously unjust it should be illegal, yet in your isolated, self-punishing frustration, you cannot put your finger on the precise injustice you’re suffering, and what a remedy could look like in a court of law.
I received daily calls from my landlord, until my reserve began to be overtaxed by his demands. I was hesitant to pick up when he called, because I might start to scream that I had paid him all I had. Or should I scream at the representatives at Siler Yard Apartments for their preposterous incompetence? If so, would they remove me from the housing list? Then I would find myself cast into deeper housing limbo. The unhoused residents stuck it out until late December, when we received keys. Siler Yard had us immediately fork over the first month’s rent. Some grumbled that for our travails, we should have had one month of rent waived.
Not a chance. No one received any compensation for the ordeal foisted on us by the administrators. I remained at Siler Yard for one year. Although I still believe in artists’ housing projects, the debacle proves that significant change will come only when national policies change.
How so? In terms of finding ways for cities to preserve a local ethos by supporting artists, a model to look it is the way it’s done in Ireland and Canada. Artists are offered considerable support from the federal government via tax breaks and other incentives. These incentives are often specifically tied to keeping them in positions where they enable diversity and community. Other countries use subsidies from new construction to fund robust local arts councils and foundations that create massive affordable housing projects and studio space for artists, as part of a broader anti-poverty agenda offering security against unfettered displacement and gentrification.
But massive increases in assistance for artists are probably not coming in the near future, leaving them in the same boat with everybody else. And aren’t artists workers like everyone else? Aren’t they thrown back on their own meager resources to face the same brutal reversals of fortune as others amid a grossly unequal housing market? My bout of near-homelessness, due to no fault or negligence on my part, reinforced the knowledge that our housing laws disadvantage people living in precarity.
Landlord-tenant laws in most states are biased against renters. Long ago, we abandoned our expectations for affordable housing in terms of cost, until the quest for safe, sturdy, and rent-controlled housing at affordable prices has become an all-but-utopian reverie. In a market-driven race for any open spot in a diminishing and dilapidated urban housing scene, tenants feel pressured to take whatever they can get. And we lack the agency, power, and confidence to advocate for ourselves whenever disputes arise. The system is wrong. And it’s only getting worse as housing prices skyrocket.
According to a 2021 study, the average rent in Santa Fe increased by more than 40 percent over the preceding five years. And 85 percent of renters earning less than an annual $50,000 paid more than what they could afford to stay housed. This means it costs, at minimum, $50,000 a year to live here. The rising cost of living has far outpaced wage growth. Nationally, since the pandemic, rental costs ballooned on average by 22 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the before times, rents ticked up by 2 to 3 percent annually.
Apartment hunting was always a rigged game. Three decades ago, when I was a first-time renter in my 20s, a South Carolina realtor pulled out an addendum to the lease—unmentioned until that moment—that had me sign over my rights to sue him over various issues, including lead poisoning in a pre-1970s apartment. In other lease agreements, I’ve had claims that “landlord pays utilities” summarily retracted. And I’ve been informed that the price listed in an advertisement for an apartment increased in the time since I tendered my application to rent it.
With this grim lesson in the real-world economics of renting, I no longer think in terms of “negotiating” leases. My freedom to negotiate is thin. With weeks to relocate, I’m often forced to consider one of a few units I can afford. Where do I go if this arrangement doesn’t pan out? I may have no more than a few minutes inside a landlord’s office to make a decision, although the landlord may not have mentioned or underplayed significant issues. I tell myself I’m lucky to have saved myself from a worse deal, if I have avoided the most blatant tenant traps, like those reported to me by fellow renters, who discovered upon moving into a new apartment that the the roof leaks, or the windows don’t open. For many of us, feeling trapped by coercive deals is all we’ve ever known.
Do vulnerable tenants have a fair shake at an affordable living space, with enough left over after rent to experience a significant margin of freedom, leisure, or self-determination? No. Precarity is not an occasional condition. It’s a lifestyle.
Before Santa Fe, I lived in Charleston, South Carolina, where I spent my 20s and 30s. I was in Charleston long enough to see a city known for its neighborliness turn into an expensive and exclusive community. Like most Southern cities, Charleston retained countless cultural traditions from its formerly enslaved Black population. I loved living where Blacks took pride in their historical legacy, until gentrification swallowed up the small city at the height of the doomed housing boom of the aughts.
Gentrification pushed Charleston’s significant Black middle class—and me along with it—to the margins. A sense of powerlessness stymied me. Nonetheless, being a freelance journalist gave me a certain cultural class mobility. I discovered that my interest in imaginative writing had grown—I began publishing poetry, in the broadest sense, influenced by the range of literary and visual arts. Where should I move?
I chose Sant Fe, a city highly reputed for its wink-in-the-eye precocity, its tradition of welcoming craftspeople and decorative artists, a major hub for classic and contemporary painters in a range of styles—and, most unusually, a city where you are never more than six degrees of separation from other poets, painters, and composers.
My move was a success in significant ways. My writing career flourished, with increased recognition from publications, and prize committees. I broke into several national magazines; I published three books between 2010 and today. But in 2010, I quickly found a Santa Fe apartment that rented for $650 a month. The $650 apartments now cost $1,500. If I were contemplating a move to Santa Fe today, there’s no way that I could afford it.
By the time of the Siler Yard fiasco, I began to feel like a housing refugee. I outran housing shortages and price gouging in Charleston only to run smack into them again. How long before the Santa Fe Sunday painters will give up, unable to pay rent and studio space? How long before the poets, dancers, and side-hustling musicians move further away from the city proper, distanced both geographically and emotionally from a sense of opportunity?
Home is wherever you have answered “yes” to the following: Is it worth it to live where you have a shot at building a happy family, or where your brood is nearby? Is it worth it to live near a special college, or institution?
Is it worth it to live near beautiful parks, or lakes, or spaces of sociability? To abide in a place that may help you become a successful person?
“Yes” means you believe in your social bargain wherever you live.
“No” means you have no time, energy, or opportunity to work toward objectives beyond basic survival.
“No” means that you see the open spaces and parks in your city becoming the enclaves of the wealthy.
“No” means you live three steps further away from your ambitions for your family and children.
“No” means that you feel victimized by your own city rather than supported by it.
Across the country—at an unprecedented rate—significant numbers of “Yes”s have changed to “No”s.
Artists have always struggled with defining their role in society, but this also means the housing crisis presents an opportunity for them to answer for themselves. I like to imagine artists who have been displaced from cities into the surrounding areas—sharing this fate with millions of city employees, school teachers, and essential workers across the country—coming together in a movement to protest this soul-diminishing race to the bottom of the housing market. Artist and writers could mobilize the platforms and the outlets to public attention they’ve cultivated to depict the housing crisis as the same sort of existential threat that the rise of artificial intelligence poses to their work.
Now, I live in market housing, with the same general fear as others. When the lease expires, will I be able to cover the next rental increase? Can I afford even a small bump in my rent? Or will I be blindsided by a hike in line with the extreme $400 increases of the post-pandemic years? Artists have the skills to portray the wrenching nature of this dilemma. But many of us are just fighting to survive.
All around us, we see the tragedy of homelessness afflict more and more of our neighbors. The same tragedy is at the heels of millions more. It’s long past time for painters, musicians visual artists, in fact creative people of all stripes to pull together with a sense of urgency to draw attention to the plight of the precariously housed—after all we are them; and they are us—and remake a system that only manages to offer as the ultimate reward for our labors the thin promise of narrowly escaping homelessness.
This story was co-published and supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
