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Comment by kkylin | Hacker News Reader

By all accounts it's very hard for grad students and postdocs at LANL (much less locals) to find affordable short-term housing near LANL due to (1) the very small amount of housing available and (2) enough people leaving the lab but continuing to live there while taking up remote work in tech. This is despite LANL paying relatively well (as you noted) to try to keep talent from moving into other industries (tech, finance).

Not to say that government investment can't make people move, but it creates problems too, not least for locals.

Source: mainly anecdotal, from talking to people at LANL at various career stages on a recent visit.

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Seems like this would be addressable by the government making affordable living facilities.

That sounds like an issue with local zoning, otherwise the market would fix that issue.

I haven't been there in a while, but last I recall, they sort of ran out of land. It's very hilly, the airport basically ends at a cliff. A lot of the land is government controlled and fenced off to provide buffer for secure areas.

A lot of land around that is national park/BLM land, and not accessible. So you've got like, white rock, espanola or Santa Fe to commute in from. I did know a guy who had a light plane and would commute from the east side of Albuquerque to Los alamos by plane.

So, sort of like local zoning, but more like DC. an act of congress to free up some of that land, not as straightforward as visiting some city council meetings.

why not increase density? it looks like single family home zoning. A denser core would surely be possible

Taking a look at some randomly selected roads in Google Street View [1], it looks like it's been built at extremely low density, by most standards.

I mean, if you've building a single-storey home, then putting a double garage on the side, then a gap between properties two cars wide, plus a driveway with parking for two cars, then on-road parking for 3 more cars? Of course you're going to run out of land fast.

I've no idea whether it's a zoning issue, though.

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/ZCtDFNsaoe5ePsp16 https://goo.gl/maps/tTRb7vzw5mVHskHHA etc

Los Alamos is on a mesa, with cliffs on one side and Jemez mountains on the other.

There were some local controversies related to zoning when I was there (namely, commercial real estate), but the issue is much broader and long-standing.

I used to work for a PI who, during his internship days in the ~1980s, lived in a tent in the mountains the whole summer (he was a delightfully quirky person though).

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