Wilderness Gate: Sliding Downhill On Money.

It started with Wilderness Gate Home Owners Association bullying a $5,000 road assessment from each of the 50 members. The 5 grand was to pave the popular Santa Fe east-side private dirt road. The President of the Association, John McDermott, offered financing for members who voted for paving and no financing for those who voted against it. Some of residents of Wilderness Gate are gazillionaires and others, who like my wife and I, are struggling to just get by. John McDermott himself was appointed by Governor Martinez to be Chairman of the New Mexico Finance Authority, the government body that tells the State were to invest its billions.

There is so much money rolling out of this subdivision that it seems to be sliding downhill on that money. In Santa Fe it has always been 'water and Mexican domestics flows downhill ... money flows uphill' but the scale of erosion of community from that excess of money is sometimes more destructive than a natural disaster.

Take, for instant, my neighbor Laurent Hirsch who bought the largest house in Wilderness Gate, then purchased one of the last vacant lots left in subdivision and then bought out his next door neighbor's home just to tear it down. What was once Dr. Danny Cole's  (who was working with kids at the Indian School) ... what was a perfectly good $800,000 family home two weeks ago now looks like Gaza.

 

Santa Fe Gaza in the dark State of New.