More than a few houses in Santa Fe don’t have -any- air conditioning at all. It sits at 7000 feet. And many of them are houses you would never expect to not have AC.
I don’t have experience on residential but I was involved with a number of AC upgrades in Santa Fe. Typical scenario was older building was built without ac, may even have real adobe walls in some cases. At some point a new owner decides he has to have AC. No pathway for central air ducts but you can run refrigerant and power lines and hide them through various means. This leads to a VVF system with one large compressor outside and a bunch of cassette style fan units inside, each with its own refrigerant feed. Fantastically efficient but the system is charged with a great deal of refrigerant. Commercially you will almost always have leak detectors on a system like that but residential it would be a crap shoot.