San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
City aiming for more housing
Proposal allows S.A. to raise funds for affordable places
When Army veteran Larry McCoy’s apartment complex threatened to evict him in May 2019, he didn’t know where he would live.
He served nine years during Desert Storm and later became a sheriff’s deputy. McCoy now relies on Social Security income. To afford rent, he gets a housing voucher of about $800 a month from Veteran Affairs Supportive Housing.
In July 2019, after multiple apartment complexes told him it was their policy not to accept housing vouchers, McCoy became homeless. He slept in Haven for Hope’s courtyard until nonprofit My City Is My Home stepped in and found him the perfect spot, a onebedroom apartment on the Northwest Side.
McCoy feels at peace in his apartment, saying it is “exactly what I want.”
San Antonio hopes to create more affordable housing options for low-income residents through Proposition A on next Saturday’s election ballot. The proposition would change the city charter to allow the City Council to float bonds and raise millions of dollars for housing.
By any measure, San Antonio’s housing affordability plight is growing more acute. Wages haven’t kept up with rising housing costs for the past decade. Too many households spend too much of their income on their rent or mortgage, experts say. And high construction costs have driven homebuilders to focus on building pricier homes.
By one estimate, San Antonio needs to build or fix up 48,000 housing units within the next seven years to create more affordable housing.
Proposition A, proponents argue, would provide a much needed funding source to help accomplish that mission.
“It’s not a silver bullet,” said District 1 Councilman Roberto Treviño, who backs the measure. “But we need everything that we can get to help.”
If voters approve the proposition, the city could use bond money to buy
land, invest directly in the construction of houses and apartment complexes aimed at needier households and fix up existing run-down homes.
Voters will likely see a housing bond on the May 2022 ballot if Proposition A passes. How much the bond would cost and how many housing units it would pay for haven’t been hashed out.
A piece of the pie
Some see trouble ahead. Typically, the city — with voter approval — takes out bonds for infrastructure projects such as street improvements, flood control, parks and city buildings like fire and police stations.
Allowing the city to pursue bonds for housing means those other needs will have a smaller slice of the bond pie, District 10 Councilman Clayton Perry said. The city already has an estimated $3.6 billion in needed repairs on that front, he said.
“If we continue to whittle away on our infrastructure projects or the money that’s available for infrastructure projects, we’ll never get it done,” Perry said. “It’ll just continue to climb.”
The way the charter reads now, the city can use bond dollars for “public works.” The proposal before voters would make a subtle but substantial tweak — the city could take out bonds for “permanent public improvements or for another public purpose.”
Under that language, the city could use bonds to fund economic development incentives such as grants to companies or improvements to privately owned buildings.
“My fear is that economic development could squeeze out the importance of affordable housing through this process,” District 9 Councilman John Courage said during a February briefing on the proposal. “Conceptually, I think we do need to give ourselves more flexibility, but too much flexibility also I think can distract us.”
Bond proposals go through a rigorous vetting process before they land in front of the City Council and, ultimately, the voters, city officials have said. Austin, Arlington, Dallas and Fort Worth have nearly identical language in their city charters.
San Antonio can already put bonds toward housing, but there are limitations.
Voters gave their blessing to a $20 million housing bond in 2017, which aided a trio of housing developments that produced 500 units for households making less than the city’s median income. Those funds could pay only for costs such as surrounding infrastructure improvements and preliminary land development but not actual construction of the buildings.
“It’s been challenging,” said Verónica Soto, director of the city’s Neighborhood and Housing Services Department. “(Construction) hasn’t been as quick because of those limitations.”
The push for Proposition A came out of a set of recommendations from Mayor Ron Nirenberg’s Housing Policy Task Force nearly three years ago as housing costs soared.
The crisis has shown no signs of abating. The median value of a San Antonio home grew 35 percent over the last decade — from $108,600 in 2010 to $146,400 in 2019. The median rent grew at a similar rate in that time — to $992 in 2019 from $748 nine years earlier.
In that stretch, the median household income rose 22 percent. That figure stood at $52,455 in 2019, compared with $43,152 in 2010. In some years, incomes fell.
The most a family of four making the city’s median household income can afford to spend on renting a two-bedroom apartment is $1,344, according to a recent city analysis. But the current market average rental rate for a two-bedroom is $1,576.
That same family could afford to pay $200,000 for a home. The current average sale price is $311,604.
Subsidizing housing
For much of the past decade, San Antonio officials didn’t focus on creating less expensive housing and affordable apartments.
Instead, they subsidized market-rate housing in and around downtown — a policy born from former Mayor Julián Castro’s “Decade of Downtown” effort to bring residents, retailers and employers back to the urban core.
The city incentives helped build at least 6,500 downtown housing units. But the programs took heat from community activists and some council members for funding luxury housing developments such as the Cellars at Pearl complex.
That history drives some skepticism among housing advocates that bond dollars will go toward projects that are truly affordable.
“I would just hate to think that the pain that people have felt because of our housing crisis locally somehow translates into a windfall for more of our for-profit developers,” said Sofia Lopez, a former San Antonio Housing Authority commissioner.
Housing advocates Jessica Guerrero, Rebecca Flores and Monica Cruz are mainly concerned about displacement of residents when new developments come in. As members of the For Everyone Home initiative, they want to require an impact study for incoming developments to determine how they would affect existing neighborhoods.
“The city is still so slow to acknowledge the accountability,” said Guerrero, who chairs the city’s Housing Commission. One example was the rezoning and sale of Mission Trails mobile home park, which displaced 107 households.
Cruz said there is a disconnect between what officials have identified as the need and what is being built.
“What they’re building is not really addressing that need,” Cruz said. “We have a big gap and a need here, yet we continue to provide tax breaks to developers who are building market rate housing.”
Cruz and Flores feel they are being priced out of their homes with their rising property taxes. Additionally, they are constantly getting offers for their homes from developments that disproportionately target older neighborhoods with higher concentrations of poverty.
Hiring a housing czar
Since October 2019, city housing officials have been chipping away at a plan to implement the recommendations of the mayor’s task force — figuring out what kind of housing needs to be built or repaired and which income levels must be targeted, among other needs.
That plan, scheduled to be completed this summer, would form the backbone of any housing bond program, Soto said.
“Let’s say this does pass and we have a housing bond for affordable housing: That definition of affordability would be the guiding principle when it comes to this,” Soto said.
The task force estimated San Antonio needs more than 18,000 affordable housing units, a mix of apartments and houses, by 2028. That means either fixing up older homes or financing the construction of new homes targeted at those making lower incomes.
City officials say they’re on track to meet those numbers in the next two years, though they didn’t provide updated figures showing how many units have been produced or repaired.
Now, the city is eyeing loftier goals of nearly 48,000 units by 2028 — a figure arrived at after officials realized the need for affordable housing was greater than initially estimated. Some 40,000 people, for example, are on the San Antonio Housing Authority’s wait list for public housing.
The City Council has pumped more money into affordable housing in the past three years than it did previously. The council set $8 million aside for housing in 2017. Last year, it plugged $27.5 million into affordable housing.
The city also created an emergency fund to help people facing displacement from their homes — which during the pandemic became the city’s $133.5 million emergency housing assistance program.
Still, there are shortcomings.
The city hasn’t hired a chief housing officer to oversee the region’s disparate, acronym-laden agencies that deal with housing as part of one large coordinated system — three years after the task force made the recommendation.
Before the pandemic, the city had searched for someone to fit the bill, but it hasn’t found the right person, Soto said. City Manager Erik Walsh has said he wants someone in the job who can also tackle homelessness policy.
Christine Drennon, Trinity University urban studies professor, sees a continued “lack of a strategic approach” among the city’s housing entities.
“Do we need somebody who’s a great cheerleader to come in and make us do that?” Drennon said. “Or can we just pull up our little socks and do it with some decent leadership?”
For her part, Soto said city housing officials and leaders of the various housing entities — like the San Antonio Housing Authority and the San Antonio Housing Trust — are communicating more frequently than they did before, though a formal coordinate system doesn’t quite exist.
“If we don’t have it yet, we are very close,” Soto said.
Dropping barriers
Rich Acosta, president of My City Is My Home, a nonprofit that helps homeowners and renters, said “there’s plenty of money” for affordable housing but that policies have to catch up.
“The problem is discrimination,” he said. “We’ve got a bunch of housing barriers that are in the way.”
Acosta and other advocates have been working to pass the Source of Income Anti-Discrimination ordinance, which would prohibit future developments that get city funding from denying housing vouchers for rent.
Acosta applauded the San Antonio Housing Trust, which started a resident and tenant protection policy March 30. Now, any developments working with the Housing Trust need to have written selection policies and grievance procedures, protect tenants from income discrimination, and place less emphasis on an applicant’s past evictions.
“We need this,” Acosta said, but “fight just as hard to get good housing policy passed as well.”