Despite New Mexico's abundance of beautiful scenery, sunshine, history, and cultural wealth it has never really exploded in growth like its neighboring states. Although the Albuquerque Metro Area experienced decent growth rates throughout the postwar era, it still lags behind the absolutely explosive growth found in other Sun Belt cities, and the state is of course best known as the setting of a famous crime drama, rather than something more positive. I love New Mexico, I've vacationed there several times, and it deserves better. With a POD after 1900, how can you give the Albuquerque Metro area a population of above 2 million people by 2020?
AHC: Make Albuquerque Grow Like Other Sun Belt Cities/New Mexico Wank
- Thread starter odieluck
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I'm not sure how farfetched this may be, but maybe in the New Deal or Great Society some investment in extra water infrastructure like desalination plants, dams and so forth and then hopefully if that works there could be some sort of interstate agreement on water usage negotiated? That's the closest thing to a solution to water in the southwest I can think of.
They did
Reverse osmosis only appeared in the 1970s, and before that, desalination was too expensive. The problem is that SoCal and Arizona will more benefit from desalination infrastructure. They are just closer to the sea
Maybe have Microsoft stay in New Mexico. Wasn’t it technically founded in ABQ before moving to Seattle? It might not help much but it will help some.
kholieken
Banned
Isnt New Mexico too "hispanic" ?? Sun belt cities growth seems come from migration from retiree, many whom are rather racist. In Arizona, growth from retiree cause grey-brown conflict.
For Sun Belt growth, Albuqurque need to develop reputation as "whites" city like Maricopa County in AZ. Perhaps flamboyant Sheriff ?? Or more migration of Hispanic to outside suburb ??
For Sun Belt growth, Albuqurque need to develop reputation as "whites" city like Maricopa County in AZ. Perhaps flamboyant Sheriff ?? Or more migration of Hispanic to outside suburb ??
You need it to be the center of something more people-attracting than the atomic programs in WW2. Phoenix, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, to name a few cities, all exploded in population in large part because of WW2 - LA had its aviation industry, Phoenix attracted a whole bunch of veterans who'd trained in Arizona, and Atlanta had multiple war industries.
I thought of the late 1920s and early 1930s, as main Hollywood studios build facilities within a new section of Albuquerque in response to the popularity of the Spanish-language versions of major talkie productions in both sides of the Atlantic.
Las Vegas, New Mexico was where many early westerns were filmed to include many starring Tom Mix.
You’re completely correct. I am stumped as to what industry could have possibly been based there. The best thing I can think of is probably taking the military industrial complex out of California. LA already has enough going for it, right?
That’s a good point, but one counterexample I can think of is San Antonio. To this day SA is a majority hispanic city and is known as that. It has high growth, so why the discrepancy?
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I mean, to a point this is already true—Albuquerque has more people now than New Mexico as a whole did in 1940. That’s a lot of growth! But I see what you mean. As far as new industries are concerned, the computer industry seems promising; besides Microsoft, you have the Intel facility in Rio Rancho (which is essentially part of Albuquerque, whatever the city government might say). Given all the Intel facilities in Arizona, it’s not crazy to think that it might be possible for them to put more in Albuquerque.
Use less. Albuquerque is actually quite inefficient with water, using about 120 gallons per day per person. Reduce that to a figure like 40 gallons per day (not impossible, that’s the same level as San Francisco), you can support triple the population with the same water withdrawals.
Oil. All the Texan cities got their base starting population coming out of the 1940s from the early-20th century oil boom. Houston benefited the most, and is naturally the biggest city involved, but DFW, San Antonio, and Austin all benefited tremendously.
Unfortunately, the computer firms put all those facilities in Arizona for a reason, and that reason is because so many WW2 veterans moved to Arizona to make a much larger labor pool compared to Albuquerque.
That's what makes this tricky, there's a critical mass of people you need coming out of the 40s to attract investment from companies looking to take advantage of the number of workers, which attracts more workers which attracts more business and thus creates the explosive population growth we've seen in the Sunbelt since the 40s. It's why I'm focusing on pre-WW2 changes - get enough people in there coming out of the war and the growth will take care of itself.
As far as industries to help this along, I think oil is the most viable. New Mexico contains a lot of oil in the San Juan and Permian fields. More focus on developing those fields in the 30s and 40s, as well as development of refining in Albuquerque, is the most viable path I can see.
There’s hardly any oil industry in San Antonio, though. DFW, sure, and Austin as state capital could benefit indirectly, but San Antonio? I think the plethora of military bases around there is a more likely explanation…
That explanation doesn’t make any sense, because Intel didn’t build its first fab in Arizona until 1980, over thirty years after World War II ended, and proceeded to build no further fabs there until the mid-2000s, sixty years after World War II (it had actually expanded the New Mexico site before that). Whatever the reason for building in Arizona, it definitely didn’t have anything to do with WWII vets. I personally suspect water was the issue, if anything.
The whole virtuous cycle of Phoenix’s population growth start with those vets and didn’t stop in the intervening years, is my point. Intel was tapping Into an existing deep, talented labor pool much larger than what Albuquerque could offer.
That’s a fair point. The issue for New Mexico, though, is that the federal government already employs a quarter of the state and that ratio was probably even higher in past decades. I’m not sure it’s practical to add more federal jobs, not in the numbers needed for Phoenix or Texas-tier population growth.
Again, though, this doesn't explain why they built one fab there in 1980 and then didn't built any others for over twenty years, while they actually built one fab in Albuquerque in 1980...and then another one in 1987...and then another one in 1995 (and another one at some point between 1987 and 1995). That looks very much more, to me, like they ran into some kind of resource problem at the Rio Rancho site (water or land, probably) and switched to Chandler as an alternate site, rather than preferring it because of some workforce advantage. I do concede that this seems to indicate that there is some kind of problem with Albuquerque, if Intel gave up on it after 1995. You would really need more than just Intel anyway so that you have a whole ecosystem of companies investing there (as you see in Chandler).
Maybe have New Mexico become more Mormon? Granted I don’t think they’d move to Albuquerque itself but maybe they start their own nearby community and take over local government.
This is a good option. Mormons have a presence in most other mountain states, and obviously provide a good source of population growth. It’s not implausible for a few of them to migrate to New Mexico.
In otl they have a somewhat decent presence near the four corners being it’s not far from Utah and Arizona. However, I don’t see them moving into the Rio Grande Valley unless they either do mission work, or maybe Brigham Young and other church elders ask them to move there to get rid of “Spaniard influence” but that’s awful far from Salt Lake, but they had colonies all up and down a line through Salt Lake from Canada to Mexico.
Another option might be having a southern railroad get a transcontinental route early and it brings more anglos to New Mexico.