Apartments near La Villita are on the drawing board
An Austin developer is planning an eight-story apartment building near La Villita Historic Arts Village downtown.
The complex — to be developed by Austin-based Weal Development at Nueva and St. Mary’s streets — will go before the city Historic Design and Review Commission next week.
The residential tower, called St. John’s Square, is expected to have at least 200 units along with ground-floor retail, city documents indicate.
About 20 percent of the units will be set aside for households making 80 percent of the area median income or lower, which the city considers affordable housing, documents show.
The area median income for the San Antonio-New Braunfels metropolitan area is $66,800, according to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development figures.
Because of the project’s affordable component, the San Antonio Housing Authority has sought $50 million in tax-exempt bonds along with state housing tax credits to finance the project.
But SAHA “is still determining whether this project is economically viable,” agency spokesman Michael Reyes said in an email.
In 2017, the city awarded Weal Development $3.2 million in incentives, fee waivers and loans to build the complex.
Dennis McDaniel, who leads Weal Development, declined to comment.
Over the past decade, city officials have sought to encourage developers to build more housing units in the city center as part of a broader effort to revitalize downtown.
About 3,000 housing units are currently under construction in the downtown area with another 1,600 in the planning phase, according to figures provided by the city. The city is on track to meet its goal of adding 7,500 housing units to the downtown area by 2020.
Much of that growth in downtown housing was subsidized through a pair of city incentive programs that financed housing development through fee waivers, property tax rebates and construction loans.
The programs has
spurred at least $4.4 billion worth of investments, 10,000 housing units, 230,000 square feet of retail space and 28,000 square feet of office space from 2012 through 2017, according to city figures.
One program gave about $102 million to developers in that period.
City Council members voted in December to retool the programs — called
the Center City Housing Incentive Policy and Inner City Reinvestment and Infill Policy — to broaden their reach beyond downtown and to create affordable housing requirements for projects that receive incentives.
Although housing has grown downtown, apartment construction in the San Antonio region overall has slowed.
Apartment completions fell below 6,000 units last year for the first time since 2014, according to a report from commercial real estate firm Marcus & Millichap.
Developers also filed fewer building permits for apartment complexes with more than five units a piece in 2018 than in previous years, U.S. Census Bureau data shows.