San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
With gentrification lurking, residents have reason to fear
The idea of gentrification has become, for many of those in San Antonio’s older neighborhoods, scarier than El Cucuy.
Years ago, parents would warn kids about El Cucuy:
Come inside when it gets dark, because that’s when El Cucuy goes out. You better go to bed or El Cucuy will come get you. You know that little punk kid down the street is bad news, and if you hang out with him … well, El Cucuy is going to find you for sure.
Gentrification is a smoother boogeyman. He smells like freshly brewed Starbucks, brings a grocery store and new dining options into the area and — according to Yelp! — he makes every joint already in the neighborhood a couple of stars shinier — the beauty shop, the taqueria and the mechanic’s shop that fixes tires included. And it’s all good until, in the time it takes to switch your breakfast order from a taco de aguacate to avo toast, the poorest families on the block find that they will have to hang their tattered hats in another neighborhood.
This really happens; there is photographic evidence. And that’s what some people fear will happen if the San Antonio Housing Authority builds the Alazan Lofts, a $19 million project aimed at reshaping the way we do public housing.
According to reporting by
The San Antonio Heron’s Ben Olivo and reports in the San Antonio Express-News, the idea is to replace a large block of outdated units built in 1940, when everything was smaller and nobody had a dryer, with units that fit 2019 — some in a new, four-story building in the same neighborhood that would include housing earmarked for tenants of different incomes, and some that would give current tenants the option of moving to other parts of town, such as the Medical Center or the Northwest.
Last week, SAHA was awarded federal tax credits that would help forward this plan, a good one for the city and especially the residents struggling with aging, outdated public housing.
But a four-story building amid a West Side residential neighborhood takes away some of the area’s single-story charm, or so says a community petition that was presented to a zoning commission in mid-July in opposition to the project.
The Heron also reported worries about an increase in traffic in an area where many children still walk to school, and the effect on the neighborhood of the heat island that would result from the big parking lot the new development would require, not counting the heat coming off the nearby development of University of Texas at San Antonio’s downtown campus expansion.
All of those fears are valid, although not deal breakers. But what is really scary is the specter of climbing property taxes of the single-family homes in the area.
That this is an older neighborhood — the Alazan-Apache Courts community came to be in 1939 with a little help from first lady Eleanor Roosevelt — is significant, because many of the homes in the neighborhood are about that old, too. Some of these homes have seen the El Cucuy-fearing grandbabies of their original owners move back, and many others are in need of updates and repairs to make them safe. For people on fixed incomes, keeping up with increasing property taxes isn’t easy when the neighborhood around them changes and their incomes don’t, and that makes them easy pickings for predatory speculators, Cucuys who buy “ugly houses” for half of what they’re worth.
The city needs to provide help in the form of community outreach and improvement incentives because change is necessary; it’s been necessary for decades. San Antonio’s public housing has to come out of the postwar era and into the Wi-Fi era, and that shouldn’t create an issue for homeowners on the West Side. We need a light here to make everything a little less scary.
We’ve got the know-how to do this in a way that nobody has to fear progress.