Sprouting New Houses

In Albuquerque, http://www.cabq.gov/ I live I a new house. We are the first to occupy the space of our home, and that has a special feel-clean and pristine but not as interesting as an older home with its imagined secrets and intrigues of the past.

Before arriving in New Mexico I had never lived in a new house. Every house, except the one in which I was born, had provided warmth, shelter and protection to previous owners.

Because of the surge in new homes construction in Albuquerque during the past three to five years,many current owners are the first-time occupants of their homes. Indeed, I heard it said that some established Northeast Area homeowners sold their older homes to buy new on the West Side where most of the new homes are being built.

Land for building is more readily available on the West Side and in nearby Rio Rancho, http://ci.rio-rancho.nm.us/, one of the fastest growing cities in the nation. In the older northeast area of Albuquerque, new homes are still being built, but construction is limited to infilling of areas bypassed in earlier phases of development.

Whether in the Northeast or on the West Side, it is impossible to drive around for long and not observe land being prepped for building or a home in the full phase of construction. It is fascinating to watch what I call the prepping of the land!

I used to think that to build houses, one simply lay down a foundation, put up supports, a roof, some walls, add finishing touches, and voilá. (It must be evident that I have little or no engineering skills.)

Driving around Albuquerque and Rio Rancho, I watch as day after day, wide open spaces get transformed. Virgin land, unchanged for millennia, is altered and will never be the same again. From my perspective, the developers dig up the earth, cart it away then bring it back, pile it up, pat it down, dig it up then build up again making low areas high and high areas low. They make the straight curved and the curved straight. By the time the builders pour the first slab, the contour of the land has been changed entirely.

After months of prepping, by the developers, the builders take over, and in a few weeks, instead of rabbitbrush, sage, salt cedar. and tumbleweed, new frame and stucco houses sprout and grow in xeriscaped gardens.