Can housing crisis in S.A. be avoided?
Council to hear task force recommendations today
Homeownership is down. Incomes aren’t keeping up with mortgages and rent. A housing crisis is looming.
But Mayor Ron Nirenberg thinks San Antonio can reverse the negative trends and deflect a full-fledged crisis. Today, the task force he created nearly a year ago will brief City Council on some of the 300 recommendations it’s developed in 10 months of drilling down into every facet of housing issues San Antonians face.
The Mayor’s Housing Policy Task Force — a five-member body led by Lourdes Castro-Ramirez, former CEO of the
San Antonio Housing Authority who became principal deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Housing Department under former Secretary Julián Castro — will make sweeping recommendations targeting everything from disparate bureaucracies that make it harder to build
affordable housing to gentrification and displacement, and the lack of funding to systematically address the issues faced by residents here.
Nirenberg points to a number of other U.S. cities that are in a housing crisis and says one is headed here, but San Antonio can still prevent it.
“Skyrocketing rents and home prices in San Antonio drive up property taxes and have made it to where the average family can no longer afford the average home,” he said. “This issue impacts everyone and we can avoid becoming the next crisis city with these recommendations.”
The four other task force members are former Councilwoman María Antonietta Berriozábal, Pape-Dawson Engineering owner Gene Dawson, banker Noah Garcia and architect Jim Bailey.
Castro-Ramirez will brief the council today on a number of data that paint a stark portrait of the increasing pressure points around housing. Now, one-third of all residents are spending 30 percent or more of their income on rent or mortgage. The federal government and the housing task force define “affordable housing” as costing less than 30 percent of the household income, Castro-Ramirez said. Exceeding that threshold, she said, creates budget pressures on providing basic necessities, owning a vehicle or paying for other transportation, and taking care of basic health care needs.
Meanwhile, homeownership continues to trend down. In 2012, homeowners accounted for 61 percent of San Antonio’s residential population. By the end of 2017, that had dropped to 54 percent.
“We are losing homeowners, and we also know that as we create more jobs in our city, housing supply has not kept up, so families are choosing to buy or live outside the city limits,” Castro-Ramirez said. “And the effect of that is we’re losing economic power, or the economic investment of families choosing to stay in
San Antonio.”
Some of the task force recommendations will require public approval or a substantial outlay of political capital by the mayor and council. Among the recommendations are an amendment to the City Charter stripping away the current prohibition of using bonds for affordable housing, creating a dedicated revenue source, perhaps from the General Fund, and developing a 10-year financial plan for affordable housing in San Antonio.
The task force is also calling for a substantial recasting of policies that have increased the cost of development — and driven up the cost of housing. Recommendations include removing “regulatory barriers to affordable housing” from the city’s Unified Development Code, and exempting affordable-housing developments from impact fees assessed by the San Antonio Water System.
Nirenberg has long prioritized affordable housing in the foundation of his administration and scoffed at the notion that government has no place in addressing housing issues.
“It is absolutely a freemarket issue, and the housing market for better or for worse is stimulated, created, and sometimes obstructed by the regulatory forces at play between the public and the private sector,” he said. “One of the strongest areas of recommendations in the Mayor’s Housing Policy Task Force is how we can remove barriers to the production of homes affordable to San Antonians.”
There’s a “clear supply and demand problem” in San Antonio, he said, as there’s a limited supply of homes affordable to the average family here, and there’s a disproportionate number of families needing affordable housing.
The task force also will recommend the immediate implementation of tax-appraisal protection measures, such as tax exemptions and preservation districts. The body will suggest a number of ways to combat gentrification, including creating a fund to reduce the impacts of displacement driven by skyrocketing property values, which lead to ballooning tax bills.
“We need to act to remove those barriers. We also know that San Antonio is revitalizing,” the mayor said. “We’re making strategic improvements to our community … and in some cases, those various improvements, needed for years, are artificially raising people’s property values.”
The task force will recommend adding an executive-level position to the city manager’s office, creating a position dedicated to coordinating housing issues here. Within the push for a “coordinated housing system,” the task force will suggest the creation of a One-Stop Housing Center, where residents could seek help.
The potential for a major housing crisis in San Antonio should be something that everyone living here cares about, Nirenberg said.
“Because if we don’t have affordable housing, it influences everything else in our economy,” he said. “We need to have strong economic development, jobs being created, a transportation system that moves people sustainably — and a housing market that working families can actually afford.”