Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham attended her first-ever meeting of the Mortgage Finance Authority board Wednesday, where she asked for more collaboration with the authority to address housing shortages and homelessness.
The governor’s visit comes after she made housing one of her priorities during the legislative session that wrapped up last week, one in which lawmakers approved about $200 million in various types of housing investments. She also pushed hard for the Legislature’s approval of an executive “Office of Housing,” a proposal that the MFA lobbied against and that ultimately died in the state Senate.
Lujan Grisham asked the MFA to appoint members to a committee who would work with counterparts from her administration to share data and ideas for addressing the housing shortage. She also proposed the two entities join forces to handle emergency calls from residents facing sudden housing crises.
“We’re circling around each other without clear insight about, ‘How much can we get done?’” the governor told the MFA board.
The state lacks at least 32,000 affordable housing units to meet demand, according to a recent MFA study. There’s been a sharp increase in homelessness across the state over the last few years. And the governor warned that new people moving into the state, including workers for three companies she said would announce openings soon, would exacerbate the housing shortage.
The MFA has been the state’s designated housing agency since 1998. It has a staff of 120 people who oversee more than 40 housing-related programs.
Executive Director Isidoro “Izzy” Hernandez told the board the authority in 2023 provided about $10.3 million to build 285 homes and oversaw $47 million to provide housing vouchers and homelessness services to about 12,000 people.
But the governor told the board that the size of the problem requires far more resources and coordination. She said that 285 homes built in a year is “fantastic,” but that making real headway would require thousands of new homes built annually.
Many of the people MFA helps, particularly those who shuffle in and out of shelters, are inefficiently served, bouncing between agencies, often at great cost to taxpayers, she said.
Board members who spoke said that more coordination could be useful, and chair Angel Reyes said he was open to the governor’s ideas.
“I look forward to whatever it means to follow up with your office and your staff to figure out how we start to make the steps to collaborate together,” he said.
This legislative session, lawmakers spent $125 million on loans for housing projects and infrastructure. They also gave the MFA’s Housing Trust Fund $50 million for the next fiscal year, on top of the roughly $37.5 million it gets each year via severance tax bond payments. Lawmakers also approved about $20 million for “statewide homelessness services.”
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