In 2006, my husband
and I moved to a little town in New Mexico called Socorro where he
was starting his Ph.D. program. Socorro means help in Spanish. We
should have known we were in trouble, but how hard could it be to
find an energy-efficient house and a sensible way to live?
I was going to be working from home, so we started
looking for a two-bedroom house. Nearly everything we looked at,
though cheap, was falling apart. When we first set eyes on a
spacious, bright, three-bedroom house with very nice landlords, we
were smitten. So we failed to notice it was a manufactured home
until after we signed the lease. Maybe we were in denial. Maybe it
was the pink, adobe-looking plaster façade and the concrete
steps in front and back. Maybe we were just too afraid that it
wouldn’t get better.
I have nothing against manufactured
homes except this: They’re not well insulated. Because of
that, not to mention an air conditioner that wasn’t big enough for
the house, we were overheated all summer and racked up huge energy
bills. The windows were supposedly top-of-the-line, but perhaps
they weren’t sealed correctly or just couldn’t compete with the
rest of the house. It was hot. And we were helping to destroy the
environment.
The winter was worse. We were forced to
sleep in the guest room on our futon because the heat from the
furnace did not reach across the house to the master bedroom. It
was still routinely less than 60 degrees inside when we woke up in
the morning. And the energy bills did not subside. We lived in less
than one-third of the house for at least one-third of the year.
So when, after a year, we decided to hit the road to the
big town of Albuquerque, we had some priorities. We wanted a house
with a smaller footprint, real insulation, and no traditional New
Mexican single-pane windows. One thing we had enjoyed in Socorro
was our ability to walk all over town; we wanted to keep on walking
in a city.
We looked for well over a month. Our desire to
walk limited the area to downtown and Old Town, where prices are
higher. Homes are also much older and invariably, too small, too
rickety, too lacking in insulation. And nearly all had those cute
New Mexico windows.
Then we found the perfect house. For
$125 more than we had been paying each month in Socorro, we found a
house half the size with walls at least three times as thick. It
was an old adobe that had been lovingly restored by an architect,
with wood and brick floors, a traditional tin roof, inset bookcases
and gorgeous trim. It was also small, at 730 square feet.
A swamp cooler blows out of one vent, keeping the house cool on the
hottest days with some help from floor fans. A gas-powered, wood
burning stove is the only source of heat in winter. Skylights and
windows mean the lights are off most of the day. Our combined gas
and electric bills have been under $30 per month.
So we
lowered our energy use, which made us feel good about our pocket
books and our environment. We donated a lot of our stuff — perhaps
way too much — which made me feel less anxious, and we put our
faith in an area of town that is euphemistically called
“rebuilding.” My mother thinks it is still scary. But
then, she has always lived in the suburbs.
We traded a
bigger, cheaper house for a smaller, more expensive one that is
less than a mile from the Old Town Plaza Vieja. We can ride our
bikes less than two miles to the beautiful 16-mile Paseo del Bosque
Bike Path. We are half a mile from four museums and a beautiful
park. We are surrounded by local businesses and have a mix of
neighbors, from a 93-year-old Hispanic woman to a white lesbian
couple.
We can walk to the post office, the grocery
store, the movie theater and the Farmer’s Market downtown. We can
also take a bus nearly anywhere in the city. (Maybe eventually they
will run past 6 p.m.) We traded sprawl for infill, and we traded
gas expenses for exercise.
We would never have guessed
it, but we found sustainability in the biggest town in New Mexico.
Alison Williams is a contributor to Writers on
the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado
(hcn.org). She is a research analyst and writer in Albuquerque, New
Mexico.
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