Rio Rancho Estates - The Nightmare Unleashed


Tribune caption: Earthmovers are the only occupants of what will one day be Rio Rancho's new Downtown six miles west of the city's current center. In this aerial photo, Unser Boulevard runs along the bottom of the photo, crossed by the under-construction extension of King Boulevard. (Craig Fritz/Tribune)

Nothing in my life has been so bothersome to watch as the relentless, sprawling growth of Rio Rancho Estates, west of my hometown of Corrales (which, in turn, is NW of Albuquerque, NM). Nothing can stop the cancerous spread of Rio Rancho, with its utter contempt for the land and the living creatures on it. [Note: I've had many good friends from Rio Rancho over the years - my complaint is with the form of development, not the people].

The most ominous part of the growth is that there seems to be no natural limit for it. Rio Rancho, and the WESCORP development planned further to the west could eventually dwarf Albuquerque, and become even larger than, say, Phoenix. But even then, there would be no natural stopping point. It could outstrip LA even, and envelope any and every possible barrier, spilling past Mt. Taylor, chewing north and south, and west, west, west. Only the spread of a contagious, fatal human virus could stop it.

The Albuquerque Tribune has recently run a special series, looking at the feeding, breeding, building, despoiling horde out there.

Today, this suburban Shangri-La is just a few subdivisions away from becoming the third-largest city in New Mexico, behind Albuquerque and Las Cruces. In a few years, its borders are expected to span a massive 300 to 400 square miles - nearly twice the geographic size of Albuquerque and Las Cruces combined.

In the last Ice Age, Rio Rancho used to be a vast 400 square mile Serengeti Plain, with mammoths, camels, and other large grazing animals roaming around. There are plenty of red, clayish, river-mud-like rocks, for example, in the hill north of the Country Club, that indicate the Rio Grande once wandered across that vast area. The Rio Grande eventually settled into its current valley near the Sandia Mountains, and the vast plain dried out a vast steppe, with its own, unique charm.

Now, the place is being carved up, and what little life left is being systematically erased.

It’s a strange social environment too. Development always takes surprising turns out in Rio Rancho. The place has developed a strange, schizophrenic dichotomy between those homeowners who built their own homes in detached independence, and those who have their homes built for them, as part of clashing subdivisions. A drive up Highway 528 just highlights the strange weirdness of the place – the clones and the cowboys. Are they in harmony? Or are they at war? Or are they all – just plain weird? What must it be like to be a kid there, growing up?

"It was a mesa with millions of tumbleweeds," longtime resident Arturo Boniello says of the nowhere he bought into in the 1970s. "It was a bunch of nothing."

People misremember their own history. No, the tumbleweeds sprouted up in your wake! Tumbleweed is an opportunistic plant – it grows in disturbed soils. If the place had been left in a more-natural state, there wouldn’t have been nearly so many tumbleweeds!

When I was 15, I used to walk from Corrales to Rio Rancho, where I’d either go visit friends (particularly Jeff Anderson) or go to work at a tree nursery where I had a summer job (Jeff helped get me that job). I remember the two of us once approached a lonely, unfenced, modern-looking suburban house that had sprung up suddenly along my usual path. Dust blew everywhere from the disturbed soil. I heard a lonely, frightened man with a Brooklyn accent warily shout hello. We said hello back – we meant no harm, and we were just passing by – but I always wondered what he was thinking, lost and adrift in this strange, new, sunny, barren world, where unknown teenagers can just walk right up to your door, or buzz past on dirt bikes.

I could see the rapid transformation of the place, how grading the hills above Corrales stripped the sugar sand of any coherence whatsoever, allowing instant arroyos to be made when the summer thunderstorms came along. One 30-foot deep arroyo appeared overnight in 1974, north of Ella Drive, where Corrales and Rio Rancho shared a boundary, and where the Rio Rancho folks had unwisely decided to dump water from the gutters of Corrales Heights. Lots of money was spent corralling that damage in. A dam was built, but there was enough water fetch on the face of the dam itself to allow continued arroyo development downstream, dam or not: the 30-foot deep arroyo became 50-feet deep below the dam. I can only imagine what a wretched mess that particular place must be, 30 years later.


This picture epitomizes everything that angers me about Rio Rancho: the dunes, like all major soil disturbances out there, are pretty-much man-made. Tribune caption: Vincenzo La Mendola, 10, rides down a sand dune north of Northern Boulevard on Unser Boulevard. Vincenzo's grandfather moved to Albuquerque in 1974 from New York after seeing real estate advertisements; he later moved to Rio Rancho. The dunes are typical of what all of Rio Rancho once looked like, but they are destined to become the city's new Downtown. (Craig Fritz/Tribune)

In the beginning of Rio Rancho Estates was the Word, and the Word was Greed:

The campaign was concocted by a fledgling New York conglomerate called American Reality and Petroleum Co. - AMREP for short - whose main stock in trade before Rio Rancho had been mail-order roses.

"I got those advertisements showing rivers and green grass, green, beautiful," Boniello says. "I hesitated when they started coming, but those mailed things kept coming."

…Rio Rancho, they said, was a lucrative investment, costing as little as $10 down for half-acre lots, which started in the 1960s at $795, but reaping as much or more than 150 percent in resale values as the shining metropolis of Albuquerque spilled westward.

Rio Rancho, they said, offered fishing, camping, swimming and golfing in a place where the sun shone 360 days a year. It sloped along "one of the greenest most fertile valleys in the world," the brochures bragged. It was "a resort region featuring giant lakes," another said.

…By 1969, some 1,500 people lived in Rio Rancho. The community had one police officer and a volunteer sheriff's posse. …New Yorkers then made up a large percentage of the population, earning Rio Rancho the nickname "Little New York" and making memberships to the New York Club the hottest social ticket in town.

…"There is no question that Intel made this place," Forbes says. "It exploded afterward. Before, we were like one big, happy family here, even though we were all different religions and backgrounds. Unfortunately, it's changing."

The place is straining to stay ahead of the boom:

This school year, more than 13,621 students are enrolled in the district's 16 schools, up from about 5,905 in seven schools in 1994, when the district began.

…To help pay for the buildings to house such successes, Rio Rancho voters in 2003 approved the maximum sale of general obligation bonds, taxing themselves to the limit and maxing the district's bonding capacity.

…Hveem has seen the high school's population skyrocket from about 2,000 in 1997 to 3,481 students in the 2004-05 school year, 693 more than the second-largest school in the state, Cibola, at 2,788. Hveem says this year's population could reach about 3,700.

And the boosters:

Not surprisingly, Mayor Jim Owen, a hopelessly optimistic man who can make a weed seem like a rose, sees it differently.

Rio Rancho, he says, is a clean slate, free of the usual mistakes older cities have made. Its personality is broad, fresh, American.

"We're a good blend, a new breed," he says. "We're the maverick people who can get things done."

No, you are a parasitic clone.

"In 1995, there was not one stick of wood out here," he says. "Now it's rooftops as far as the eye can see."

A newcomer might see ugly, uncontrolled sprawl. Owen sees a beautiful future.

"We'll be that big because we can be that big," he says. "Albuquerque is hemmed in, but Rio Rancho has room to grow."

…Finishing up his first term as mayor, Owen has turned into the city's primary salesman, a veritable P.T. Barnum.

His stories of the old days act as the prologue to a tale of unparalleled growth, of a city with so much potential he terms it "the Dallas to Albuquerque's Fort Worth."

"I'm the one that coined the phrase," he says of his Dallas reference. "Everybody thought I was insane.

"But everybody's saying it now."

By Owen's estimate, Rio Rancho could someday grow to almost 400 square miles once it envelops all the land he hopes to annex.

If that comes to fruition, Rio Rancho would more than double the land of present-day Albuquerque.

"We can be that big. Albuquerque can't be that big," Owen says. "The only way they can move is west, and they have no heart to move west.

"We will go west all the way to Laguna (Pueblo)."

... Nearly 90 subdivisions are under construction.

"You can't fight growth," he says. "We exist as a result of being able to have affordable housing. We're trying to build this community in such a way that you don't have to go to Albuquerque and Santa Fe."

One good feature of the Tribune series is to focus on the role of “redevelopment” in trying to establish some coherence to development in Rio Rancho. Redevelopment in such a place is like trying to repair the damage caused by a suicide bomber: civic planning would have been a better thing to do, but who has the time to plan during an explosion:

"Redevelopment is the acquisition of property for the public good," Tollefson says.

Using powers granted by the state, a municipality like Rio Rancho can buy individually owned lots in tracts of land that have not been developed or are developing too slowly.

...The city of Rio Rancho, incorporated in 1981 and now with a population of about 70,000, uses redevelopment as a tool for what it calls orderly growth.

…Matt DeAveiro of Coldwell Banker, who has been selling real estate in Rio Rancho for 18 years, says the redevelopment process has two sides. Owners fret the process will cheat them out of a fair price, he says, but the money might be the only chance they have to get anything out of their unimproved land.

"The only way you are going to improve those properties is by bringing utilities in, and (individual owners) are not going to do that because they can't afford to," he says.

"And redevelopment is the only way the city can go forward and help citizens throughout the community."

According to Tollefson, roughly 25 percent of Rio Rancho's 103 square miles is developed or under development.

...Tollefson says tracts selected for redevelopment are those adjacent to or surrounded by developed tracts and so are those that have immediate access to infrastructure.

"Rio Rancho wants to retain a rural character and large lots in some areas," Tollefson says. "We want a diverse mix of residential development.

Rio Rancho has never had a rural character, and never will. It is hostile to rural values, like living off the land, rather than grading it into oblivion.

Their population estimates four years ago showed Rio Rancho would be home to 100,000 people by 2020. Now officials peg the total at 125,000 by 2010.

At that rate, the city will add about 11,000 people a year, Tollefson says.

To pay the tab for so much development, Rio Rancho in 1995 started an impact fee system, charging developers for improvements like roads and parks.

"In terms of financial improvements, we're able to keep up because of impact fees," Tollefson says. To hold that trend, city councilors have proposed raising the fees by 51.4 percent. As it is, an average house price includes $6,094 in impact fees. That would rise to $9,229 by January 2007.

In Albuquerque, impact fees - increased in July of this year - vary depending on the location of the house. A 2,000-square-foot house on the West Side, for example, includes $8,000 in impact fees; something similar in Nob Hill includes $1,332 in fees.

The place eats resources too:

In securing a future with water, Rio Rancho must play catch-up to Albuquerque, where Duke City officials in the early 1960s set up the San Juan-Chama project, giving it the right to sip water from the Rio Grande.

Rio Rancho, by contrast, must keep buying water rights under a permit granted by the state Engineer's Office. So far, says state Engineer John D’Antonio, the city is on the right path.

"There is enough, but it gets increasingly harder to find water and land to take out of (agricultural) production," he says. "It's going to be expensive. Water rights are available, but it's difficult to find willing sellers."

Costs vary, but water rights have sold for several thousand dollars an acre-foot in the Middle Rio Grande Valley. Under a 1979 permit with the state Engineer's Office, Rio Rancho is entitled to 12,000 acre-feet of water a year but must offset the effect of its pumping on the Rio Grande.

What can stop the sprawl? The counter-culture can’t do it…

There it lies, at the end of Rainbow Boulevard, a secret treasure.

Where the rough dirt road stops, an ancient escarpment drops into the scrubby vastness of the Sandoval County desert. Silently, it marks the northeast border of Rio Rancho with a stunning, postcard-worthy view.

Gilbert and Virginia Otterstetter, living in a solar-powered trailer just three uninhabited miles from the site, have it mostly to themselves. For now. But in about five years, Rainbow Boulevard will be paved and lined by houses, and the secret treasure won't be much of a secret anymore.

Gilbert, 62, and Virginia, 60, moved there for the solitude, for the big sky, for the independence. The sun powers their hot water heater, oven and electricity. A friends hauls 1,500 gallons of water to them for $50.

"We are totally off the grid. We don't owe anyone anything," Virginia says.

…"Eventually they are going to be out here," Virginia says. "But are they going to want to build around my ugly trailer?"

She doesn't think so. She worries that a developer, as has happened in the city's past, will persuade the city to use eminent domain to claim her plot so it can be absorbed into a tidier development parcel.

I liked the words of V.B. Price:

I've never been a fan of the concept of Rio Rancho - a supersprawl, developer city built around the Eisenhower-era fiction of limitless water and limitless petroleum, a generic American place plopped on a distinctive New Mexican landscape, with no ecological or cultural sensitivity and no conservation strategy, selling people "affordable housing" miles away from most of their jobs.

…Granted, Rio Rancho is an economic competitor. But even with Intel's semiconductor plant there, the city's self-promotion as a "tech-savvy community," with broadband for all, and its expanding call center industry, Rio Rancho is still an economic parasite on Albuquerque, where most of its jobs and cultural attractions reside.

From an airplane, before Rio Rancho became a city, the area's endless miles of bulldozed roads seemed to many New Mexicans like airstrips for an invasion from Long Island, N.Y. And as Rio Rancho has grown, it has, indeed, invaded some of the most beautiful country in our area, sprawling right up to U.S. 550, without any buffer zone. The mountain-blocking walls on N.M. 528 along River's Edge make driving in Rio Rancho like driving in occupied territory.

It's for reasons like this that many New Mexicans see Rio Rancho more as a land-gobbling amoeba than a City of Vision.

It's worrisome Rio Rancho is a city that's growing beyond its water supply and that's clogging the interstates into Albuquerque with lung-wrecking traffic congestion.

Rio Rancho's water problems could get serious, especially if it tries to grow to 100,000 residents by 2020. Right now, it's in a struggle with the state Engineer's Office over transferring water rights from Sierra County. Rio Rancho's growth means taking water from rural places that might like to do a little of their own growing one day.

If Rio Rancho does continue to grow, I wonder if it will feel some of the animosity from rural New Mexico legislators that's always directed a Albuquerque. At least that would be sharing a burden.

Remember, Sierra County is more than 150 miles away. Rio Rancho, the behemoth child, is hungry, and getting hungrier....