End city tax exemptions for the rich
Reading about Weston Urban’s plans for a new 32-story tower in downtown San Antonio made us wonder why a real estate company, backed by one of the richest people in San Antonio, would need a 100 percent tax exemption for its nearby development on Houston Street via a public facility corporation?
Why should schoolchildren, teachers, janitors, the elderly, renters, essential workers, immigrants and others pay for Weston Urban’s tax exemption, worth likely more than $1 million a year?
Why, during a pandemic that is blowing a massive hole in our city budget, would we agree to give Weston Urban a 100 percent tax exemption it does not need? Why would our elected officials agree to effectively raise taxes on the rest of us?
The tired response is we’re desperate for “affordable” housing, but our community knows better. We’ve known for a long time the housing these deals provide isn’t the housing we need. The trade-offs aren’t worth it.
San Antonio is promoted as a low-wage town — and we are. We have the highest poverty rate of all major U.S. cities. Minimum wage workers earn $7.25 an hour, or around $15,600 per year. In 2018, 35 percent of all San Antonio households made less than $35,000 a year. Of those, 73 percent were Black and Latinx.
Weston Urban does not intend to rent to families desperately looking for low-cost housing, and it isn’t alone. In the last five years, San Antonio’s public facility corporations have given 100 percent property and sales tax exemptions to 12 developments that agreed to provide “affordable” rental units.
But a University of Texas Law School study documented that these apartments aren’t affordable and that developers avoid paying the city and other taxing entities $13.5 million a year on these 12 developments. With more of these developments coming, the researchers estimate this will grow to $44.8 million annually by 2026.
Who is picking up the bill for these developers? It’s the residents of the inner city who remained as people fled to the suburbs. Low-wage earners and senior citizens on fixed incomes stayed, paid our taxes and rents, and kept our communities alive. Now we are targets for gentrification because someone else wants the land we live on — and with that comes higher property taxes, pressure to sell and displacement of Black and brown workingclass communities. So it is especially galling that developers like Weston Urban and NRP unload their tax responsibilities onto us.
When developers use public facility corporations to build near downtown, the loss of property taxes is especially harmful to the San Antonio Independent School District. While thousands of well-to-do residents enjoy their lovely “affordable” downtown apartments, children living in nearby neighborhoods are deprived of much-needed money for their education.
Developers are very good at using the city to meet their needs. What about the rest of us?
The City Council, Mayor Ron Nirenberg and members of the city’s public facility corporations: You’re on notice, and we won’t accept the status quo anymore. Our North Star is permanent affordable housing — accessible to everyone — that puts community needs first. As we talk about how we recover from the pandemic, let’s make it clear that our city needs to end its addiction to giveaways to the wealthy.