After 35 years in cold, gray Michigan, Kathy Friedman can’t help but gush about the intense blue of a New Mexican sky. The daily drama of clouds and shadows, mountains and mesas, is a balm to this semiretired nurse who with her husband, Alan, moved into their new custom home in Placitas’ Anasazi Trails last February. In search of the sun, the couple explored states from Florida to Texas before making the move to New Mexico.

“No place is perfect, but this came as close as we could find,” she says.

Forty-five miles away in a two-story townhouse, Katy and Myles Fitzgerald are enjoying city life in Aldea de Santa Fe. In their 30s and expecting their first child, the couple opted to make its housing investment in a new mixed-use community development that holds the promise of diverse housing, businesses, and shops in a cluster that defies the concept of urban sprawl. Four miles from Santa Fe’s historic Plaza, the Fitzgeralds are “new urbanists” helping to define and reestablish a very old village concept in the City Different.

“We like to know our neighbors,” says Katy, a marketing manager in Santa Fe who previously lived in Colorado and Montana. “We do have our own little community.”

Both families have settled comfortably into new master-planned developments that expand New Mexicans’ perceptions of what an upscale residential community can be. Diversity is the key word. Whether it’s a two-acre lot tucked in a wooded mountain canyon or a casita on a golf course, the choices are varied when it comes to exclusive new communities near Santa Fe and Albuquerque. One thing is for certain: new home buyers have abundant lifestyle options. Will they choose bustle or solitude? City streetscapes or horse property? High desert isolation or a spa within walking distance?

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