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Whither & Yon
The Santa Fe Real Estate Market Past, Present, and Future
By Mike Baker
Alex Was Right*

In the early 19th Century, a French nobleman, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote about the America he had come to study. In Democracy in America de Tocqueville pointed out that our founders and immigrants were basically made up of the restless, visionary and adventuresome strains of European and other cultures. Today, as it long has been, America is formed by our acceptance and even glorification of mobility. This trait, combined with our desire for a better life (and a need to see what is beyond the next ridge), defines our country.

Individuals seeking improved circumstances have always cherished freedom to move, to investigate new opportunities. Santa Fe has always benefited greatly from this legacy because these types of people have the desire and/or money necessary to move here.

Too often, if we just consider Santa Fe from within, we don't understand what huge forces are at work in America and literally the world. If one stands back and studies major trends then the situation in Santa Fe becomes clear. Now one can see Santa Fe as if it were a boat floating in a river of historical trend. Limiting oneself to studying Santa Fe from a local view point restricts your understanding. It's as if you never got out of a packing crate in the hold of that same boat.

Once a liberated observer combines historical truths with present day observations they can actually start to lay out the probabilities for where the future is likely to fall. Quite simply, Santa Fe is a test tube for what is going to happen in areas like ours in the early 21 st Century.

Santa Fe is a bi-furcated community in that physically and financially it is on one hand a resort and on the other a more traditional community. The financial boundary currently establishes itself in the $500,000 to $600,000 - perhaps $750,000 - home price range as this is the level beyond which Santa Fe rarely provides the income to buy. With few exceptions, most buyers above $600,000/$750,000 have sources of income which lie outside Santa Fe, or are very much better employed than most other Santa Feans.

Up and down the Rocky Mountain spine, and in similar resort areas around the country, towns like ours receive buyers moving out of metro areas for social reasons, exacerbated lately by 911. This out-migration is made easier because of still relatively recent electronic inventions, as well as the further development of existing tools - and the promise of many more to come.

The computer, internet, cell phone and the fax are major contributors to these migrations, making the relocation of buyers in their working years possible. Equally important is that the "me" generation - the baby boomers of whom we may all be too tired of hearing - developed a class ethic which said it was o.k. to be different, to move to non-traditional locales. We were once a nation constantly on the move; then there was a call for stability and family life, now we are on the move again.

*No, thankfully not Mr. Burgess' Alex.