Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Santa Fe, New Mexico, has become a fertile ground for socioeconomic experiments. The capital city of turquoise jewelry and coyote sculptures, for instance, requires that sizable companies pay the country’s highest minimum wage — $9.50 an hour, scheduled to rise to $10.50 an hour in 2008.

Now Santa Fe’s city council considers a particularly assertive strategy on the housing issue. We all know the lament of real-estate prices propelled upward by investors and those wealthy enough to buy multiple homes for enjoyment. Those with ordinary incomes struggle to buy in. Communities make tiny efforts to provide affordable homes, typically by combining subsidies with charges on developers. The results are like droplets of water flung into a hot wind.

Santa Fe’s city councilors are using the T-word. Meaning, they’re talking about asking voters to approve a new — gasp! — tax. It would be a sales tax of 1 percent on real estate that goes for more than $319,000. A few other cities, such as Aspen, Colorado, do it. Like them, Santa Fe would funnel the money into programs to provide affordable housing.

Sounds pretty good to me, taxing those who can afford it and whose housing appetites help create the problem.

Just how bad is the housing issue in Santa Fe? The New Mexican reports, the city may structure the tax so that it does not apply to sales of cemetery plots. Guess that means, a home for a dead body in Santa Fe can run more than $319K?