A new kind of affordable housing is coming to Albuquerque, focused on making its residents healthier. The Aldea Del Rio community will be located on Rio Bravo Blvd. SW and 2nd St. SW. It is the first project of its kind in New Mexico to be built around an agricultural component. “That’s how this whole concept began, they called it agri-hoods,” Chris Baca said. “Agricultural neighborhoods, and this concept took off. There’s probably half dozen in the U.S., but this will be the first one here.”
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The 97-acre community will house about 1,000 people, with 400 townhomes and 500 apartments. The community was designed with a focus on healthy living with on-site farming, growers’ markets, greenhouses. It will also have easy access to nature such as the Alameda Trail, the bosque, and the Rio Grande, to help people in lower-income housing have better access to be healthy. “We’ll have what we call an aggregator facility where small farms bring produce to be processed,” Baca said. “We will also have in-ground growing acreage and greenhouses to grow year-round.”
The developer, Yes Housing Inc, partnered with a group of 74 small farms that need a place to produce their crops. “The closer the produce is grown, the less cost because you’re not shipping it,” Baca said…