Tag: real estate buying and selling (Page 1 of 5)

On Christmas Eve as I cruised across Otowi Bridge, I was excited to see the huge turnout for the Ice Rink’s Christmas Eve Skate. The main lot was packed, the overflow lot was packed. The rink was packed! What a beautiful night to skate!

In a past post, (you can check it out HERE) I discussed the development of a the Ranch School’s Douglas Pond into our beautiful ice rink. As I stated then, Los Alamos has the only outdoor ice rink in New Mexico. It is one of many “onlies” that happen here on the Pajarito Plateau. But as we gear up for the Los Alamos Ice Rink’s New Year’s Eve Party, I got to thinking about the long history of ice skating parties here in Los Alamos.

Los Alamos Loves Winter

There is absolutely no getting around this fact. Winter is an important part of our lives here in Los Alamos! We have a ski mountain so close that you can actually see skiers tooling down the mountain from certain places here in the townsite. Our ice rink is a constant gathering place full of parties and fun. We have access to snowshoeing, cross country and downhill skiing, skating, and sledding. You can get a permit to cut your very own Christmas Tree for ten bucks which involves a glorious amount of trekking through snow in an area barely thirty minutes from town. We exist in the shadow of a mountain range that has offered recreational activities to residents of Los Alamos since the ranch school opened sometime in 1917. And if you want to get really technical, it’s been going on longer than that!

This image of the Ranch School Boys playing hockey in their camp shorts is one of our local faves. I grew up looking at this image and always being so distracted by the fact that they’re wearing shorts, that I didn’t necessarily look at the big picture.

In John D. Wirth & Linda Harvey Aldrich’s book, Los Alamos, the Ranch School Years, they spend a lot of time discussing the reasons why families paid a crazy amount of cash to send their sons to school out west. The boys came out here to get strong and healthy.

Go outside and take a big, deep breath of air. It’s so difficult to even imagine what it might have been like to breathe the air in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, or even Chicago and St Louis in the 1900’s. Just getting to spend a few months in the clean climate at the Los Alamos Ranch School could make a significant impact on the physical health of these city kids. Add in the activities and parents probably wouldn’t even recognize their boys when they came home for break!

The image above is a Toboggan Slide built by the students and masters in 1919-1920. How cool would that be to have a Toboggan Slide on the lawn at Fuller Lodge? Think about it from an academic standpoint. Building something like that requires a lot of mathematics, engineering concepts, hands on woodworking, location of resources, acquisition of resources, and a heck of a lot of teamwork! Then you follow it up with the enjoyment of actually using the slide. What an incredible educational perk!

The school eventually owned more than 780 acres. However, the big draw of the ranch school was the additional acreage and activity opportunities offered by land contracts with the Forest Service. In order to expand their opportunities, Ranch School operations made agreements to obtain leases on quite a lot of forest land.

These land areas came complete with several tumbledown cabins that were renovated thanks to donations from some of the ranch school families. This winter scene is at a place the Ranch School called Camp May. Sound familiar? This was a crazy popular place for the boys to use as a base camp to go snowshoeing, skiing, and sledding in the winter. I think it’s pretty darned amazing that it’s providing the same services today!

At the end of it all, the boys of the Ranch School loved parties. In the winter, skating and hockey parties were as intensely popular back then as they are now. So if you’re ready to tie on some skates, hit the Los Alamos Ice Rink on New Year’s Eve!

The County is pulling out all the stops for this event! There will be a mini carnival, hot cider, popcorn, and music. There’s even a ball drop at midnight to celebrate the new year!

Festivities begin at 8:00PM and end at 1:00AM. General Admission applies and rental skates are available. Get dressed for the occasion and enjoy a night on the “new” Douglas Pond! And when you’re ready to call this wonderful community your own, give me a call! I’d love to talk Los Alamos Real Estate with you!

I was chatting with an acquaintance here in town not long ago and the topic of the Denver Steels came up. This individual was hoping that they could find a house in that area due to the wonderful opportunity to own a small, manageable, single family home in a “starter neighborhood”. I had to agree. Those homes are really great for exactly that! It also crossed my mind to be thankful that the Denver Steels are still around. Because, if you look back to 1960, they weren’t supposed to remain in the Los Alamos housing pool at all.

It’s difficult to help newcomers to Los Alamos to understand the intense discussions regarding the disposal of government housing in Los Alamos. If you’ve been here in town for long, you can see why housing has always been a hotly debated topic. There’s just not a lot of space to build! And back in the 1960s, there was a lot more space to work with than we currently enjoy. And yet the Atomic Energy Commission created a Residential Real Estate Task Force at that time to evaluate every housing option here in town in order to choose the best route forward to develop a lasting community.

The first recommendation of the Residential Real Estate Task Force was that the Denver Steels be removed along with “all substandard housing”. The label of “substandard housing” was actually applied to the old Wingfoots, Hanford Houses, and other wartime stopgaps that had been trucked up to Los Alamos during the war years. (More about that HERE) But the Denver Steels weren’t the same as those temporary homes. Sure. The Denver Steels were prefab homes. They’d been assembled from kits. (More about that HERE) But the residents of the Denver Steels didn’t agree with the declaration of a 1965 Los Alamos Comprehensive Plan that suggested the Denver Steel neighborhood should be removed “because of its potential as a slum area.”

In fact, when the 192 families residing in the Denver Steels in 1965 were surveyed regarding their opinion about their homes, 178 of those occupant families wanted to buy their existing Denver Steel home! The residents reached out to Senator Clinton Anderson and asked the AEC o reverse the decision to raze the Steels to the ground.

Part of this process required the current occupants or “renters” of the Steels to do some research about low cost housing available in both Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Turns out, our little Denver Steel homes were much nicer, more cost efficient, and had better potential for renovations than comparable housing in other areas. There were supporters within the county as well. One spokesperson argued that there were no other low cost housing or “starter homes” in the area. John McLeod of the Unitarian Church (More about that HERE) suggested that “removal of the units represents an attempt to create an artificial community populated only by families with incomes substantially above the average.” He went on to further state that “Such a community is an unhealthy moral environment.”

Whether you agree with the moral environment comment or not, there is no doubt that the Denver Steels have long been the “starter homes” of Los Alamos County. In spite of their limited space floorplans, metal construction, and other issues cited by the AEC, the Denver Steels have seen some of the most impressive renovations in all of Los Alamos County!

In late 1967, the committee assigned to debate the topic of the Steels came to the conclusion that they would only remove 50 of the Denver Steels from Los Alamos. The Denver Steel neighborhood we’re familiar with today holds the remaining 142 homes saved. These homes were offered for sale to their occupants, who almost universally agreed to purchase the home they’d been renting.

The 50 Denver Steels that were removed once sat on Rim Road and Pine Street. It’s hard to believe that there were once 50 Denver Steels crammed onto that canyon rim. In place of those 50 homes, the Planning Commission granted permission for 18 new houses to be built. 50 homes replaced by 18. Those numbers alone suggest a strong reason for why housing has become increasingly scarce. Take a look at the original Denver Steel floorplan below.

This used to be a fairly decent sized home for a family of three or four. Our expectations of comfort and space have changed so much since this floorplan was created! Folks used to want more lawn and space between themselves and their neighbor’s windows. Now, you find in most pre planned neighborhoods or “track housing” neighborhoods, that builders have applied for variances in order to place the largest home possible on the smallest lots.

Whether you like them or not, the Denver Steels are a vital part of the Los Alamos Housing pool! This preservation of the Denver Steels is part of the story of the disposal of housing in Los Alamos. Nobody thought the process would be so long and so complicated. I hope that as we explore this time in our town’s unique history, you find some interesting new facts about your OWN home! And if you’re buying or selling your home in Los Alamos, give me a call! I’d love to chat Los Alamos Real Estate with you.

In a previous post, I mentioned that the Group 16 homes in Eastern Area were considered one of the most highly sought after on the housing lists here in Los Alamos. Why were these homes so popular? What made them different from other “group housing” here in Los Alamos?

By 1953, the Eastern Area was still made up of orderly blocks of prefab housing such as the Mckees, Handfords, Wingfoots, and Fort Leonard Woods. You can read more about those tiny homes HERE. In October of 1953, the Atomic Energy Commission took bids on these units and began moving them off the hill to their new homes. By February of the following year, the AEC went forward with plans to build new housing in the Eastern Area and Group 16 went under construction.

For the first time, the government listened to the residents of Los Alamos and did not plan any multiple family units in the new construction. Instead, the first batch of Group 16 included 83 homes in the areas of Canyon Rd, Myrtle, 9th, & 15th streets. This construction creaked Oakwood, Sage, and Pinon Loops.

The second batch of 37 Group 16 homes went up on the south side of Trinity Dr near the Medical Center and 35th street with a few stragglers on Sandia Drive near 47th & 48th streets. This brought the total number of Group 16s to 120.

Part of the excitement and desirability had to do with the fact that Group 16 included on 13 two bedroom homes while providing 74 new three bedroom homes, and 33 four bedroom homes. For a town that had been clamoring for larger floorplans, this felt like amazing progress!

The homes did lack a fireplace, but each dwelling had a carport. Residents considered these a close match in quality to the Original Westerns, and the pitched roofs were the first seen in Los Alamos since the Lustron homes were built in 1949. Because these were concrete slab construction, the floors were tile over concrete instead of hardwood floors. But having a single family home in such a traditional floorplan with a pitched roof made Group 16 the most attractive housing option available in Los Alamos since the Original Westerns were built and residents were excited!

I did find some of the construction information quite interesting. Craig Martin discussing some of the cost issues associated with building here in Los Alamos in the fifties in his book, Quads, Duplexes, and Sunken Living Rooms.

In March of 1954, the average cost of building a home in Santa Fe and Albuquerque was $10,000. (Don’t think too hard about that. It was a long time ago!) Similar homes built in Los Alamos tended to cost $14,000 to $18,000 to build. A Congressional committee actually cut funding initially to build homes in Los Alamos at that time due to the discrepancy in the numbers. The budget cut caused the number of projected houses to be lowered, thus causing the Congressional committee to invite the Los Alamos Project building manager to Washington for a chat. His chat at least partially restored the budget, but of the 122 Group 16s planned, funds could stretch to only 120 homes.

These days, locals are entirely aware of the challenges associated with building and maintaining homes in our somewhat remote community. It calls for some DIY elbow grease, good plan ahead skills, and a healthy respect for any contractor who is willing to come up here. Most of us have a list of companies or local resources and we show them the love whenever possible! I sometimes enjoy imagining Frank DiLuzio of the Los Alamos AEC office explaining to the suits in Washington what a drive up the Main Hill Road is like for a semi trailer full of building materials!

While the old myth about our streets being laid out “in Washington” by folks who had never been here isn’t true. What is true is that most of the decision makers who had a lasting effect on our Los Alamos landscape had absolutely no idea what the terrain is like here. I still have to remind myself that Main Hill Road is not “normal” for some folks, which is why they drive cautiously and want to stop and get a photo of the breathtaking view!

Next time you’re cruising down Trinity Drive or Canyon Road, check out the wonderful Group 16 homes still sheltering local families today! They’re still popular even after all these years for being exactly what they are: a functional home with useable living space to raise a family. And when you’re ready to buy or sell your home here in Los Alamos, give me a call! I’d love to chat Los Alamos Real Estate with you!

In the last few blog posts, one of the underlying talk points is the point system that governed early housing life here in Los Alamos. Your family’s point value was determined by the number of Laboratory/Zia employees in your household, years of service, salary, and in some cases, your importance to the overall mission. Whether we realize it or not, importance to the mission is still a critical piece of life in Los Alamos. In the next few years, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that “Industrial Crane Operator” carries more value than “Physicist”!

Not long after private lots on Barranca Mesa were sold to the public and homes were in the process of being built, the housing office here in Los Alamos was frantically trying to keep up with the needs of our growing community. Craig Martin gives the statistics in his book, Quads, Shoeboxes, and Sunken Living Rooms.

7,532 names on 61 separate housing lists for the Laboratory alone. This didn’t include Zia employees, which accounted for everything else from gas attendant to maintenance crews. Folks on the list were current employees of the Laboratory asking for larger or better housing. The longest list had 390 names of folks requesting the Group 16 three bedroom single family homes. (We’ll talk more about these popular dwellings in a future post)

To give you an idea of how unbalanced the supply and demand was, there were 13 Group 13 single family homes on the Laboratory’s housing allotment and 312 people on the waiting list for that home.

Most of the housing available to newcomers were one bedroom apartments in the old Sundt buildings. It certainly wasn’t a popular option for a family!For the first time in Los Alamos, new hires were not guaranteed housing and it was suggested they seek housing in the Espanola Valley or in Santa Fe.

This situation doesn’t actually seem that outrageous to our modern minds. Getting hired at LANL doesn’t imply in any way that you are guaranteed to get a house. But our modern housing situation was a direct result of the dispersal of government homes. As I mentioned in a previous post, this was the number one reason Norris Bradbury spoke out so often against the disposal of government owned housing here in Los Alamos.

What I sometimes find so interesting about the history of our development as a community is that certain local perceptions of neighborhoods in Los Alamos stem directly from this point system.

White Rock has one of those long standing neighborhood perceptions. White Rock was originally a Construction Camp. You can read more about its history HERE. Because of the high point value required to “buy into” housing on Barranca Mesa, the perception at the time was that only “rich” or “scientific staff” could live up there. This also gave rise to the perception that the development of a new, post Construction Camp White Rock in the 1960s was for the lower income or less project connected personnel.

An acquaintance of mine who built a beautiful new home on Bryce Ave in White Rock back in the mid seventies still remembers feeling as though the residents on “the Hill” looked down on the residents of “White Rock” in more ways that just geography. It’s entirely possible that a good deal of this perception was due to the fact that in the 1960s and 70s, there were many Laboratory and Zia employees who had great difficulty forgetting that White Rock was no longer a Construction Camp designed to house temporary workers. Today, living in White Rock and working at LANL means you get a head start to the guard gate just past the State Rd 4/Grand Canyon intersection!

Likewise, Barranca Mesa has long been a very desirable location here in Los Alamos. Many long time residents still consider it a “really expensive neighborhood”. Yet there are plenty of neighborhoods that have larger, newer, or more expensive homes. Plus, if you’re considering commuting issues, the drive from White Rock to the center of town vs the drive from Los Pueblos to the center of town takes just as long. And White Rock is much closer to LANL than Barranca or North Mesa!

The beautiful home pictured here is near the end of Los Pueblos and is quite some distance from both LANL and downtown amenities. It was also built more than forty years after development of Barranca Mesa began.

In our current market, two of the most sought after neighborhoods in Los Alamos are Pajarito Acres and La Senda, both located in White Rock. These country living estates were popular first with equestrians, but now appeal to anyone who wants a bit more privacy on a roomy lot with incredible views!

I’ll be talking more about the development of Pajarito Acres and La Senda in the coming weeks. Until then, think about your perceptions of your neighborhood here in Los Alamos. What have you heard or experienced that might be a leftover of the past? And when you’re ready to buy or sell a home in any neighborhood here in Los Alamos, give me a call! I’d love to chat Los Alamos real estate with you!

Most of us are familiar with the concept of remodeling our home. Even when I help clients find their “dream home” I hear them talking eagerly about making changes. Here in Los Alamos, the ability to remodel or change your living space is what makes life possible in a place where moving to a home with different features or amenities isn’t always possible. So what would life in Los Alamos be like if you were unable to do a minor remodel or weekend project to improve your space?

That’s probably a difficult concept to imagine. Sure. Plenty of folks live in rented housing. Either they’re living in a temporary location and don’t want to commit to a purchase or they’re saving up a down payment or waiting for a raise or a promotion so that they can purchase their own home. When we rent, we’re often in apartment complexes where we can’t paint the wall or a rental home where the landlord is ultimately responsible for changes and remodels or updating.

But what if there was absolutely NO possibility of EVER purchasing your own home or changing your space? In the early days of life in Los Alamos, even the furniture belonged to the Zia Company!

We’ve talked some about this in the past. I think it’s difficult to imagine what it was like in those days simply because our modern minds can’t grasp it. In 1954 Norris Bradbury spoke out against the “disposal” of government housing in Los Alamos because his number one concern was how the Laboratory would be able to remain fully staffed if they lost any of the pool of homes. Hanford, Washington and Oak Ridge, Tennessee had gone through similar issues with privatized housing, but there were alternative housing options for Laboratory employees in the surrounding areas. Here in Los Alamos, that’s always been a difficult fact of life and continues to be one today. There’s just not enough land to build on!

The issue of privatized housing or the disposal of government owned homes was permanently tabled in 1954. However, by 1957 the Laboratory staffing was being deeply affected by a high number of employees leaving their jobs while citing “lack of opportunity to own their own home” as the number one reason for leaving Los Alamos. Who could blame them? In the 1950s especially, home ownership was the biggest part of the American Dream!

Plans were moving forward to allow private citizens to own homes on Barranca Mesa, but this didn’t alleviate the housing pinch for everybody. In my last blog post I talked about the point system and how the number of points your family had determined whether or not you could even apply to purchase a private lot on Barranca Mesa. To say nothing of the enormous cost of building your own home from scratch!

To try and bridge this gap, Los Alamos got its first remodel opportunity since the government owned homes were placed on their foundations. It was actually a sound plan for both parties. Back then, if you moved houses in Los Alamos, Zia Company moved you. You can imagine the costs associated with moving people across town on an almost constant basis. With this in mind, the Atomic Energy Commission agreed to pay for certain modifications to the existing housing. After all, if residents were happy with their current homes, they wouldn’t need to move. Less cross town moves means less money spent on moving expenses.

The first remodeling contract provided funds to add one bedroom and one bathroom to 30 existing homes. There were quite a few rules though. A resident couldn’t request a fireplace, a carport, or the movement of existing walls in their remodel requests. Of course, the housing office was swamped with requests for just those things and so very much more!

The AEC managed to squeeze their budget to provide for another 80 home remodels. This time they allowed two bedroom additions. However, residents who had their homes remodeled had to agree to remain in that home for two years. The exception to this rule was if a larger home came available within that timeframe. But if you added two bedrooms to your existing two or three bedroom, the likelihood of a house bigger than four or five bedrooms coming available was almost nil. Certainly a family might have had to pass up a nicer home of a similar size, but that was the risk you took when you agreed to the remodel terms.

Over 500 residents made requests for remodeling projects in their existing homes. The budget initially accomodated the first 30, and then an additional 80, and finally 4 remodel projects that ran the project money dry. 500 requests, but only 114 accepted. Still, it was a huge improvement and it did alleviate some of the housing crunch issues.

According to Craig Martin’s book, Quads Shoeboxes and Sunken Living Rooms, the residents called the list of proposed modifications the “Needy & Greedy Additions”. This name was meant to be ironic.

If your family had four or more children, your request was made because you were “needy”.

If you were called “greedy”, it wasn’t because your requests were outrageous. It was because you were making reasonable remodeling requests in a place where you couldn’t take on even the simplest DIY project on your own.

Unfortunately, as you might have guessed, the 114 remodeling requests were given to those with the most housing points. The final project converted many Group 11 three bedroom homes into five bedroom houses, added one or two bedrooms onto several Group 12 four bedroom homes, and many interior walls were removed from Group 13 single story duplexes to turn them into five bedroom single family homes. Given that, it became very clear that the remodeling project was geared more toward helping larger families get housing space that had room for their expanding needs! As I’ve said before, families tended to be pretty large in the 1950s. Can YOU imagine cramming a family of six into a two or three bedroom home? Yikes!

Regardless of whether or not you want to remodel your existing home or you love it the way it is, I’m sure we can all agree that living in Los Alamos is an adventure! When you’re ready to buy or sell a home here in this unique community, give me a call! I’m your hometown real estate broker and I’d love to chat Los Alamos Real Estate with you!

Most of us like to believe we have choices when it comes to our living space. We have choices regarding what the inside of our space looks like. Sometimes we can choose furniture, paint colors, knickknacks, rugs, and other details. Where the apartment or house is located perhaps, or how large of a space you want to rent or purchase. In most cases, these things are determined by the amount of cash you can afford to spend on your space. But what if it had nothing to do with buying power at all? What if the living space you were allocated was entirely dependent upon how valuable you were as an employee?

Los Alamos in the 1950s and 1960s was a very different place to live. Not only were you renting a home, but you had almost no choice in which home you rented. Your housing was assigned. There was very little opportunity to change that assignment. And the dream of home ownership was practically unattainable. In wasn’t until the tail end of 1956 that any of the powers-that-be in Los Alamos even addressed the idea that some of their employees might want to own their own home and permanently settle in Los Alamos. By the end of 1956 the AEC was considering releasing land in order to promote the building of privatized housing in Los Alamos. In December of 1958 the first deed to a lot on Barranca Mesa was finalized and by the early 1960s, homes were being built in this “new subdivision”.

Again, it’s very difficult to wrap a modern mind around what was happening. Let’s say you and your family of six were living in a three bedroom duplex somewhere in town. You and your spouse both worked for LASL or Zia Company. You have four kids and you’d love to have a larger home for your growing family. What were your options? Could you apply to the housing office for a four bedroom home? What if you and your spouse decided you’d rather purchase your own home? Could you simply apply to the housing office to purchase a lot and build a new home on Barranca Mesa?

The answer is mostly likely, no! There were very few four bedroom homes in Los Alamos at that time. And even if you wanted to purchase a home, your options were limited by the same factors.

In order to qualify for the right to even be placed in the lottery to be drawn to purchase a private home lot on Barranca Mesa, you had to have enough “points”. The point system is something that completely governed housing in Los Alamos. It’s something we struggle to understand now, but at the time it was created, it was considered a fair way to distribute resources. And here in Los Alamos, housing has always been one of the most limited resources!

According to Craig Martin, “the first version of the point system boiled a complex problem down to mathematical efficiency: One point was given for each dollar of monthly salary and two points were awarded for each month of tenure the worker had with the employer.”

After the first year the point system was in effect, it was tweaked to cap the number of points per year that could be accumulated at 24. Everyone’s points were recalculated each year on February 2. (What an interesting Groundhog Day tradition, right?) So how did having lots of points get you a better housing situation?

There were dozens of housing waiting lists at any given moment. Each home in town was categorized by type and size and those categories then maintained a waiting list. A family could put their name on as many waiting lists as they qualified for. If a house in any category became vacant, the list for that type and size of home would be consulted and the next person on a list was notified. Certain homes had more exclusive waiting lists, which required a family to have a minimum point value in order to be added to that waiting list. This minimum point value also came into play when the lottery for privatized housing was created. In addition, only “project connected personnel” were allowed to apply to purchase a lot on Barranca Mesa in February of 1958.

Sounds a bit frustrating, doesn’t it? That means if you were that six person family desperately wanting to move into a larger home, you were probably going to wait on one of those lists for a very long time. Statistics from the original construction suggest that there were 157 four bedroom units in all of Los Alamos and only 24 of those were single family homes. The rest were Group 12 Duplexes. 21 of those duplexes had a two bedroom unit on one side and a four bedroom on the other side. There were 56 Group 12 duplexes with a four bedroom unit on both sides. If you consider that there were a lot of families with more than two children in the 1960s, it wouldn’t take long for those larger units to be in high demand. Especially since homes in the 1950s and 60s did generally not boast multiple bathrooms, living rooms, entertainment areas, or dens. That meant your family of five or six would pretty much be on top of each other all the time!

If you look at Los Alamos today, there’s no getting around the fact that trying to find and maintain living space when you’re not at all connected to a LANL is difficult! So how on earth did teachers, nurses, trash collectors, and the guy who runs the sandwich shop find a place to live back in the “old days”? Well, they were all employed by Zia Company and therefore had points. Their rent was also based on their salary. This was the only way that Los Alamos could function.

A grade school teacher might be critical to the mission since no self respecting physicist would move their children to a town without a school, but teachers don’t generally make a salary anywhere near that of a physicist. Therefore, your point value determined which housing you were offered. But the rent was entirely based on your wages. In a previous post, I talked a little more about rent in Los Alamos. You can check it out here.

When it comes to privatized housing, we’ve come a long way here in town! If you’re ready to buy or sell your private residence here in Los Alamos, give me a call! I’m a hometown girl who enjoys chatting about housing in Los Alamos and I’d love to talk about your housing needs!

If you’re looking at the title of this post and thinking of pleasant sounding chamber music on your home stereo system, think again. When I say Musical Houses in Los Alamos, it’s more comparable to the children’s party game involving chairs and fast paced music.

How many times have you moved from one home to another in your lifetime? Once? Twice? Twenty times? More? According to relocation expert Joshua Green, Americans move an average of once every 5 years. Green also points out that statistics suggest most people move within their own county or town.

Truthfully, Americans have always been rather mobile. Isn’t that why the United States became a thing in the 1600s? Perhaps we should all just be glad we’re no longer having to move via three masted sailing vessels or covered wagons. Considering how “easy” it is to move these days, it’s not a surprise that so many folks decide they want a change of scenery.

What if I told you that residents of Los Alamos in the 1950s were almost certain to move to a “new” house every spring? Why spring? Because every year on February 2, the Housing Policy Board recalculated the number of “points” accrued by each employee. More points meant a “better” house. Some residents called this process “musical houses”. If you’ve ever lived on a military installation, you’re probably familiar with the idea. But if you’ve ever wondered why Los Alamos has such a difficult time with housing and how it worked “back in the day”, then let me back up and explain a few things.

In an earlier post about how “rent” used to be calculated in Los Alamos, I spoke about what one early resident called the “curious experiment in socialism”. During wartime, rents were based on salary and not on the type of quarters you might be occupying. Interestingly enough, there wasn’t nearly as much drama associated with that situation as with what happened beginning in 1947 when the “point system” went into effect.

The Housing Policy Board was created to meet and oversee the distribution of what was then, and will likely always be, very limited housing resources. The board was made up of members from three entities: the Laboratory (LASL), Zia Company, and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Each of these three entities had employees requiring housing. Each entity was eventually given an “allotment” of houses. Prior to the completion of Groups 11-15, it was a bit less organized. Each employee had points, but any houses coming available during the year were also allotted based on what entity needed to hire what employee. By the time construction had been completed on Group 15, each entity had a set number of dwellings to work with. This literally meant that they could only employ as many people as they could house. Stop for a moment and consider the implications of that. It’s a very different concept from the one we’re used to today.

At that time, if you weren’t directly employed by those three entities, you did not live in “town”. In a previous post, we talked about the Zia Company. LASL itself was science staff and some administrative or technical workers. The AEC was a bit more complex. They sponsored living quarters for school, church and hospital staff, people who staffed businesses in town (remember they were all managed by the Zia Company back then), and anyone else who might not fall into a typical category.

Residents applied for their housing points when they were hired to their jobs. Points were given for two things: 1 point per dollar of salary earned and 2 points per month of tenure that you had. The number of points was established when you were hired and recalculated each February 2. The rest of your housing desires were determined by which “list” you were on. Those lists were where you could make requests because of family size or any medical needs such as handicap needs or a desire for first floor housing. A resident could be on any list they qualified for. Newer housing, a particular area you wanted to live in, anything you might desire. Each time a new house came available on one of those lists, the employee with the highest number of points on that list got first dibs. If they didn’t want to move, the second highest number of points got a chance and so on down the line.

If there were dual income households, could you combine your points?

Not really. You just got more spots on the lists. Like buying more raffle tickets. If one spouse worked for LASL and another worked for Zia, they each had a point value. Zia and LASL both had their own housing lists because each entity had their own housing allotment. So if you were waiting for a two bedroom unit, you’d get the opportunity to be on both the Zia and LASL list for the house you wanted. But you couldn’t combine your points to try and bump your spot higher on the list.

The point system was meant to make things as “fair” as possible. But the reality was that it created some rather bizarre situations. Such as what would happen when someone retired. Housing Policy Board records suggest that retirees were encouraged to move out of Los Alamos “soon”. Let’s just say that there were no returning employees on “visiting scientist” status back then. Either you were in, or you were out.

And if one spouse retired and the other stayed on, your family might have to move into a different unit. If one partner worked for LASL and the other for Zia and your family was living in a Zia allotment housing unit, you wouldn’t be able to stay there once the Zia employee retired. You’d have to move into a LASL allotted housing unit. Unless, of course, you could get the employers to do a “swap”. Occasionally this would happen. But there were several notorious cases where it did not. The most notorious case on record was a widow with five children. Her husband, a Zia Company employee, was killed in a work related accident. She was employed by the Los Alamos County Commission. She made a request to her employer that she and her children be allowed to remain in their “premium” house in Western Area. Her request was denied after the Housing Policy Board determined it would be unfair to make even one exception to the rules. It sounds rather heartless, but that was literally how they kept the balance back in the day.

Most residents rather enjoyed the regular moves. More than a few residents were hired around the same time, married in the same general year, and subsequently had their kids around the same time as well. There are documented situations where families moved apartment buildings or neighborhoods together four to six times. Regular “musical houses” kept things fresh even if you didn’t get exactly what you wanted right then. After all, you’d earn more “points” and hope for a better allotted unit the following year. You made new friends, kept old ones, and all lived in the same town anyway. It isn’t unlike most communities today. Just because you move out of the “neighborhood” doesn’t mean you lose the friends you made there. It’s just an opportunity to meet new people to add to your group!

In the 1950s, playing musical houses kept Los Alamos feeling like one big neighborhood. But there are lots of reasons why life in Los Alamos is unique. And when you’re ready to be part of our small town unique, give me a call! I’d love to chat real estate with you.