San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
The pioneer of city’s affordable housing
When DanMarkson hit S.A., the landscape changed
Around 2006, Dan Markson had an idea that seemed daring, even foolhardy, at the time — to build a large apartment complex in Southtown.
The site he had in mind was off Probandt Street, along one rail line and a quarter-mile north of another. The surrounding neighborhood, full of weedy lots and corrugated-metal warehouses, was described in the ExpressNews as a “ghost town.” The
King William District and its burgeoning restaurant scene were a half-mile walk to the east, across the river, over crumbling or nonexistent sidewalks.
“People didn’t believe that you could prove out the market in that part of town,” said Debra Guerrero, Markson’s friend and colleague. “Dan could see what others couldn’t.”
The area’s blank-slate quality appealed to Markson, who led the local office of national developer NRP Group. When he looked at empty lots and vacant buildings, Guerrero said, he saw a chance to jump-start an urban revival.
In the depths of the Great Recession, he met with financiers and elected officials and sold them on his vision, weaving together an intricate deal making use of six incentive programs from local, state and federal governments. One of them, the public finance corporation, had never been used in San Antonio and would come to change how affordable housing was built in the city.
NRP broke ground on the complex, Cevallos Lofts, in 2010. Today, it is one of many in the area, part of a vibrant urban patchwork that he’d imagined.
The story of San Antonio’s urban renaissance is often boiled down to then-Mayor Julián Castro’s announcement in 2010 of the “Decade of Downtown.” But Markson’s arrival in the city in the late ’90s should also be seen as pivotal moment.
In May of last year, he was found dead in his home from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 59.
With his frenetic work habits, his passion for deal-making, his talent for forging friendships with civic leaders and his deep knowledge of housing programs, Markson made NRP a pioneer in building affordable housing in San Antonio and in redeveloping the urban core. NRP was among the first to build apartment complexes in many of the neardowntown neighborhoods that developers had long neglected.
Along with Cevallos, the company built the trailblazing Tobin Lofts on the near North Side and the Baldwin at St. Paul Square complex near the Alamodome. It partnered with the San Antonio Housing Authority for the massive San Juan Homes redevelopment on the near West Side.
“Dan was kind of the oracle on how to make affordable housing projects really work,” Assistant City Manager Lori Houston said. “He took the hardest projects. He really did. If there was a project that was complicated, you knew that Dan and NRP would look into it to see what they could do. I think he liked the challenge.”
News of his death came as a shock to his friends. Though he’d been having health problems for years, requiring surgeries to his spine and vocal chords and difficult periods of rehabilitation, he showed no sign of major personal problems, and he’d been making plans to have friends over to use his pool for the first time that year. He left behind a 4-year-old son.
A year and a half after his death, his friends and colleagues still feel the loss. It takes four employees at NRP to do what he once did, Guerrero said. Yet she’s confident the company can build at the same pace as before, thanks to the relationships he formed and the formulas he taught them. The company has closed five deals during the pandemic and has a “slew of others” in the pipeline, she said.
Former Mayor Henry Cisneros predicted that Markson’s passing will slow the pace of construction of affordable housing in the Alamo City.
“It’s frequently said that one person can make a difference. Well, this was a case where one person carried on his back 40 percent of San Antonio’s affordable housing efforts,” said Cisneros, who served as U.S. housing secretary under President
Bill Clinton. “Dan was in a league of his own, and no matter who else he mentored or