“Now, there’s only a handful of us with cattle,” said Mascareñas, a Taos County commissioner who lives in Llano, a small community near Peñasco, as he walked the property that has been in his family for generations. “Like I said, things have changed.”

Concerns about gentrification in Northern New Mexico are hardly new, but some longtime residents say they feel particularly priced out these days. On the other hand, the real estate market is good for landowners who wish to sell in a region that has long struggled with high rates of unemployment, poverty and population loss.

Real estate signs can be spotted in three prominent communities perched along the scenic N.M. 76, a popular route to Taos for sightseers but a familiar route home for locals. Chimayó, Truchas and Peñasco have seen modest, two-bedroom homes sell for around $400,000 and luxury properties sell for over $1 million.

Up here, land is regularly listed at $20,000 to $30,000 an acre — a sharp rise from previous decades, before locals became “land rich, money poor,” as Mascareñas put it, noting property he purchased at $3,000 an acre in the mid-1990s would likely be priced around $30,000 an acre or more today.

Some longtime residents say prices like this, bringing newcomers with bigger pocketbooks, continue to change the feel of these distinctive villages, long synonymous with big heaps of firewood, hard labor, adobe churches, art studios at high elevations and free-flowing acequias.

“I’m concerned,” Mascareñas said. “My parents were concerned for us, and our generation did halfway decent. We were able to make a living. But it’s the next generation, our grandkids: Unless we are able to give them property to start something up, they’re probably not going to be able to stay in the area.”

Renting is seldom an option in rural Northern New Mexico.

Residents in Rio Arriba and Taos counties overwhelmingly own their homes, with just 22.2% of Rio Arriba County residents renting and 20.1% of Taos County residents renting, according to a 2023 study from the New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority.

The study found about 25% of Santa Fe County residents are renters.

This month, the most expensive house on the market in Peñasco — about 50 miles northeast of Santa Fe on N.M. 75, just south of the highway’s intersection with N.M. 76 — is listed at $3.5 million, according to the website Realtor.com, a digital real estate marketplace that aggregates listings. That property is an outlier in the community, home to some 500 souls not far from the stunning Jicarita and Trampas peaks.

Still, a modest, three-bedroom, two-bathroom home on 1.97 acres, built in 1998, is listed at $339,000 and a four-bedroom house on 0.46 acres is listed at $480,000.

That compares with an average home price in Santa Fe of $625,000 in the first quarter of 2026, according to data from the Santa Fe Association of Realtors. And statewide, the New Mexico Association of Realtors recently reported, the average home was priced at $350,000 in April.

Mascareñas said a majority of the people who are able to buy properties in isolated villages like Peñasco are coming from out of state, paying prices many locals could not conceive of affording. Traditionally, land in these communities — many of which were founded as Spanish land grants — is passed down through generations of families, but some heirs may elect to sell if they are unable to keep it or uninterested in moving back.

Not everyone agrees the current market is pricing locals out.

David Cordova, a real estate agent with Sotheby’s International Realty who has deep family ties to Truchas and was born and raised in Northern New Mexico, said rural communities remain much cheaper than places like Santa Fe and Taos. He noted “there’s a lot of affordable properties out there.”

Citing data collected by the Santa Fe Association of Realtors, Cordova said 12 properties have been listed and closed in Truchas in roughly the last five years ranging from $200,000 up to $673,000.

“I still think there’s an affordability for people,” Cordova said. “I’m all about having our families being able to live there, and you can routinely find properties between $200,000 and $300,000 and $400,000.”

He added, “I think people find themselves deeply rooted in coming back and feeling the soil, feeling the air and having a property in Northern New Mexico. Sales have been really good. The High Road to Taos is where it’s just absolutely stunning, you know.”

The old Chimayó post office along N.M. 76 is now about half an acre of concrete wiped clean of any structure; its status as the community’s post office ended in a 2023 Valentine’s Day inferno.

The property has a blue Sotheby’s International Realty sign out front, and an online listing shows it is up for sale for $200,000.

Pat Oviedo-Trujillo, 76, a lifelong resident of Chimayó who can trace her family roots back 12 generations in this region, likened the trends of rising prices in the local real estate market to the plight of characters in the 1974 novel The Milagro Beanfield War.

The Northern New Mexico classic, written by the late Taos County resident John Nichols, is about Hispanic farmers fighting the prospect of cultural and lifestyle loss against the backdrop of a water rights dispute.

“When John Nichols wrote that book, he was very prophetic, because that’s exactly what’s happening right now in these little towns,” Oviedo-Trujillo said.

“I’ll die here,” she said. “But all of a sudden, my property taxes have gone through the roof, and it’s hard to maintain even what you have.”

The five homes listed for sale last week on Realtor.com in the Chimayó area were priced at $1.1 million, $639,000, $439,000, $350,000 and, certainly the most affordable, $60,000.

A housing market analysis from Zillow, a prominent online real estate marketplace, shows a substantial increase in home values in Chimayó since 2018, with values rising from an average of about $222,000 in 2018 to about $335,000 now. Home values in an area generally correspond to home prices.

A 2015 Santa Fe County plan for Chimayó addresses how the residential makeup of the village — known for being home to one of the largest Catholic pilgrimage sites in North America, El Santuario de Chimayó, but also for a decadeslong struggle with addiction — has changed in recent decades, becoming more of a Santa Fe bedroom community.

Until the mid-1900s, land development patterns were largely small, clustered residential settlements on hills above the acequias to preserve large areas of “contiguous irrigated farmland on the gentle slopes and valley floor,” the county plan says.

“As the economy changed and the community became less dependent on farming to support their families,” the plan continues, “land development patterns evolved to accommodate scattered individual home-sites on parcels spread out across the valley.”

The only three homes listed for sale in Truchas last week on Realtor.com were priced at $800,000, $1.2 million and $599,000. A bare 1-acre lot in the scenic mountain village is listed at $39,500; 10-acre lots are listed at $339,000 and $225,000.

Truchas is approached by way of winding mountain roads — an idyllic village unfurling near cliff edges about 10 miles from the valley that cradles Chimayó and much higher in altitude — about 8,000 feet in elevation.

Dio Dominguez, an acequia mayordomo in Truchas, said he has seen properties, such as a 3-acre parcel with an old home on it, sell at prices that shock him. “They’re paying way, way over market, so it’s kind of messing everyone up,” Dominguez said, noting the tax burden this phenomenon can create is the hardest on locals.

These communities, particularly Truchas, have seen a migration of newcomers for some time.

“Not Another Taos — Yet,” read a 2002 headline in The New Mexican about Truchas and the influx of artists moving there as galleries opened along its main street.

“In a town legendary for its hostility toward outsiders, Truchas is a thriving little art town these days,” The New Mexican reported, underscoring changes in Truchas, which means trout in Spanish.

Randy Sahd, a lifelong resident of Peñasco, owns the local hardware store, where locals trickled in Thursday morning to banter a bit and decide which newspapers to purchase. He attributed the cost of land in this region to the “outside influence” and “people who have money” from out of state.

“Who in New Mexico has that kind of money?” said Sahd, the local volunteer fire chief, alluding to some high-priced local properties that have sold.

He suggested many people who own land in the area no longer live there.

“Everybody up here has ancestral properties, and they live in Utah or Colorado, and they have no interest in keeping their property anymore,” Sahd said. “So, when somebody offers them $20,000 an acre that a couple of years ago was only $4,000 an acre …”

Such an offer can be hard to resist.

“We’ve gone from being a rural community to a bedroom community,” Sahd said.

These communities, apart from the current real estate situation, have struggled for some time with population loss, particularly as young people migrate to more urban areas. Poverty and limited professional opportunities help drive the outmigration.

Some homes in the villages sit vacant in various states of disuse.

Truchas, at least historically, had a reputation as a community suspicious of outsiders moving in as locals move out.

But Cordova pointed out the parades of hippies in rainbow buses who arrived in places like Dixon and Truchas in the 1960s and ’70s.

“People thought at the time, ‘Were they going to clash with the Hispanic culture that was there?’ ” Cordova said. “To be honest with you, a lot of friendships and bonds were made, and people are still there from back in the ’70s.”

He added, “A lot of us here are people who embrace people coming from the outside. We’ve embraced the people who are working at Los Alamos National Labs. We’ve embraced the fact that many of us work our tractors and we work our livestock — and it’s a community that knows how to work hard and appreciates anybody that works hard.”

Still, life in these communities — with scarce jobs and rising home prices — is increasingly unattainable for young locals, and traditions are disappearing.

“We’re having a hard time keeping our kids local,” Mascareñas said. “If they leave to go get educated, they come back and it’s challenging for them because they can’t afford to buy something.”

He added, “We’re trying to keep these traditions and cultures alive. But if you don’t have the people to do it, you can’t keep them alive, and if you start chopping away at the properties” — subdividing for family members — “they get smaller and smaller. You can’t have cattle, you can’t have horses.”

This week, Mascareñas said the community of Llano no longer has an annual acequia cleaning because there were not enough participants.

Now, the spring cleaning is individualized, and parcientes are responsible for cleaning their own sections of ditch.

“That’s how we’ve had to change, right?” he said. “We no longer gather for ditch cleanings. Everybody does their own property because we can’t gather the amount of people it takes to do it. I remember, as a kid, there used to be 60 to 80 of us cleaning, and I’m talking from my grandpa to my dad to me.”