San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Housing agency seeks a ‘happy medium’
Opportunity Home San Antonio, the quasi-governmental housing agency formerly known as the San Antonio Housing Authority, recently welcomed the first residents to 100 Labor, a brightly painted apartment complex just south of Hemisfair boasting a swimming pool, a roof terrace and a puppy park.
The 213-unit complex, which the agency built in partnership with local company Franklin Development, is mixed-income, with 80% of its units rented at market rate — two-bedroom apartments renting for upward of $2,000 a month, according to its website — and the rest reserved for people at lower income levels. It is part of the ongoing makeover of the former site of the Victoria Courts public housing project into a mixed-use neighborhood.
Less than 2 miles west, the agency plans to break ground this summer on the first phase of the redevelopment of another New Deal-era public housing community, Alazán Courts. It will be a very different project, with the agency rebuilding the community itself, preserving it as public housing.
The two projects illustrate the agency’s flexibility these days; it’s ready to work with developers on mostly market-rate complexes while building public housing on its own for those at the lowest income levels.
Gabe Lopez, who in September began a two-year term as chair of Opportunity Home’s board, says a project like 100 Labor is important because along with creating some low-income units, it earns revenue for the agency that it can use to build and maintain public housing.
“Our waitlist is over 100,000 right now. That’s 1 in 13 in San Antonio,” he said. “We have to be proactive about what are we going to do to impact that waitlist.”
Born in San Antonio, Lopez has had a long career in housing and development. Since 2012, he has been business development manager for Jordan Foster Construction; before that, he was a director of mortgage lending for Texas Dow Employees Credit Union. He was initially appointed to Opportunity Home’s board in 2019.
He recently sat with the Express-News to discuss the agency’s name change, the city’s support of the agency through its housing bond and the difficulties involved in building affordable housing in today’s economy. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: Do you feel that your career in construction gives you insights that you put to use here?
A:
Absolutely. I have the privilege of serving on the board with six other commissioners, and we have various backgrounds.
Two of the board members are residents, so they live within our communities. We have other members that have served on nonprofits. We have others that are in education, others that are in banking.
Q: Why did the agency change its name?
A:
To get away from that (sense of an) authoritarian governmental agency. It tracked nationally: Many of the newer — or what I like to think of as the more innovative — housing authorities were starting to change. That way, it would be more inviting. Opportunity Home is that; it’s “opportunity” in your living.
Q: What is the agency working on now that you’re proud of ?
A:
Alazán is one of the oldest public housing neighborhoods in the nation. Eleanor Roosevelt actually opened it. We’re going to be self-developing a brand-new site, and it’ll be the nation’s first groundup, net-zero project. It’s 100% public housing.
Some of the other innovative things that this organization has done is what we’re standing in. It’s looking for the right financing vehicle in today’s economy to make these deals work. In a rising interest rate, rising construction costs environment, it can’t just be one organization coming in to build. They have to have help. We’re no different.
Q: How is the agency coping with those challenges?
A:
There are state programs that we’ve already partnered with. They provide low-income tax credit financing. There’s all different types of nuances in the bond financing world, on how do we get projects like this up and running. When Opportunity Home is involved, it helps the developer with either those tax credits, tax phase-ins from the city. That helps them get their projects off
the ground.
Q: In recent years, many planned affordable housing developments never got off the ground because of those economic conditions. Is that still something you’re dealing with — projects blowing up?
A: Absolutely something we’re still dealing with. All these projects are based on a pro forma. “Can you make them pencil?” is always the big question. We’re doing our best to offset what we can, but like I said earlier, no one organization can do it. So we have to have these partnerships.
Q: It seems like Opportunity Home has shifted its model, especially with Alazán, right? Formerly, the thinking was that you should do public housing as mixed income. But now it seems like there’s more focus on getting that deep affordability.
A:
Well, the most vulnerable part of our community, we want to figure out the best way to serve that segment. But it takes balance. That pendulum did swing wildly one way at one point, and then wildly the other way. This board, this executive leadership team, we’re intent on figuring out where we can find that happy medium. A true partnership with our development partners — like this project
itself — earns us enough funds so that we can support and fund our public housing.
We’re looking for opportunities with our development partners and even our nonprofits so we can service the vulnerable parts of the communities. But those deals just don’t pencil. When you can’t do that, then you have to bring in the development partners, because they have access to the lending lines. Sometimes, they have their own equity partner or they have their own equity. So it makes those deals work.
Q: Is that waiting list set to keep growing?
A:
We’re working on trying to get it down. We actually have new developers that are bringing us deals; it’s trying to figure out which ones actually work. Do I think it’ll go down? With the support that we’ve had from the city — they passed a housing bond; they’re looking to do another one in a few years — it’s that type of leadership that we’re benefiting from.
Q: The newest phase of Victoria Commons will include townhomes selling for upward of $500,000. I saw that Opportunity Home was criticized on social media for that.
A:
If we’ve got another organization that’s going to
buy from us where they build those townhomes, it’s those monies that we earned from there that allow us to go to the public housing site and say, “These are the programs that need development.” We own over 70 communities in San Antonio. We control almost 12% of the rental market. We have maintenance requirements. There are many projects that we own where we had to figure out those funds so that we can keep them up to speed. It’s money that we earn when we sell those lots.
Q: I saw that Ed Hinojosa, Opportunity Home’s CEO, wrote an op-ed saying that the city should provide annual funding for the agency. What are your thoughts?
A:
We’ve had great partnerships with each council person, as well as this mayor. And they have been innovative. They’ve actually funded us more than $24 million over the past 3⁄2
1 years.
Q: Through the housing bond.
A:
Through the housing bond. The op-ed that Ed wrote was specific to having a line item in the annual budget, which we have one right now. We’ve been really lucky with this mayor.
Q: Do you keep a close eye on national politics? One president versus another can have a huge influence on your funding, right?
A:
Absolutely. Depending upon who gets into office, funding that we’ve received in the past could easily be turned off. That’s why this organization — with our size and as complex as we are — we have to have multiple streams of opportunities. You alluded to this focus more on the most vulnerable part of our community. We won’t lose that focus. It’s how do we pay for it? And that’s our partnership opportunities.
Q: Opportunity Home still does public facility corporation deals, right? It sounds like you consider them not only as a way to build workforce housing but also to make money to use elsewhere.
A:
Right. It tends to raise the eyebrow when Opportunity Home says, “We need to make money.” It’s not what we’re saying. Any time that we have any kind of partnership deal that benefits this organization, it benefits our residents. Those are the streams that we’re looking for. I am lucky that this board shares that view. With the knowledge that anything can happen in November, we have to be prepared. It’s incumbent upon this board to position this organization so that we have other streams of financing coming in.
Q: Is there any particular kind of affordable housing that’s most needed?
A:
Housing at all levels, across all segments. There are organizations like the San Antonio Housing Trust that can impact the higher AMI — i.e., area median income — workforce housing, (while) we’re uniquely suited to go after the deepest affordability. That being said, all of our residents, they can’t afford today’s rising rents. As much as the city promotes downtown, they have no places to live. Many of them can’t afford vehicles. So what can we do to impact? That’s why I’m looking toward our partnership deals. I would like to see more opportunities with those developers so we can impact that workforce housing.
Q: The city has a fiveyear bond cycle. Will the money that you got in the previous bond be enough to last five years?
A:
No. Our deferred maintenance is over $400 million. We have to prioritize what needs to go first. We benefited from the city manager and our mayor and the council allocating funds to us. We need to show them that we’re the best stewards of those funds. That way, in the next bond cycle, which is in 2027, we’re positioned well to get more funds.
Q: Are you already thinking of what you might do in that cycle?
A: Yeah. But we’re mayoral appointees. It’s not lost on me that there’ll be a new mayor in two years. I would love to be able to continue to serve on this board, and many of the commissioners that I serve with, I believe, have that same feeling. It’s difficult to be impactful in a twoyear run. That’s why we’re doing what we can today to position this organization so we can take advantage of that bond when it comes out.