City panel focused on renters is pushed
Critics say work should go to existing entities
A key City Council committee advanced a proposal Wednesday to form a new commission focused solely on renters’ concerns — chiefly rising rents and evictions — over the objections of critics who say it would be better to include those voices in San Antonio entities that include developers and landlords.
“There doesn’t need to be a separate commission,” said Marc Ross, a local Realtor who previously headed the San Antonio Apartment Association. “It should just be melded into the fabric of the city.”
For their part, officials told the council’s Governance Committee they already seek input from renters on housing issues.
But advocates for tenants and affordable housing said that approach isn’t working.
“We’re very involved,” said Graciela Sanchez, who heads the Esperanza Center for Peace and Justice, a community-based advocacy organization. “It’s not enough.”
In the end, the committee voted unanimously to send the proposal for a renters commission to the newly formed Culture & Neighborhood Services Committee, chaired by District 1 Councilman Roberto Treviño.
Treviño first floated the idea of a renters commission in June.
The panel — to be made up of renters from different backgrounds — would advise City Council members on affordable housing availability, tenants’ rights and transportation, among other issues.
Renters make up about half of the city’s households, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Rents in San Antonio have climbed at least 23 percent since 2010, even as local wages have fallen behind.
On top of that, eviction lawsuits have risen faster in San Antonio than in any other major Texas city.
Those factors are justification for forming a new body focused on renters' issues, Treviño told members of the council's Governance Committee at their Wednesday meeting.
“We've been waiting for quite some time now,” Treviño said. “We need to move this forward.”
The proposal had stalled for months among concerns that forming the commission would add yet another entity to the city's knotty ecosystem of agencies tasked with addressing housing policy.
That convolution was a key observation laid out in the Mayor's Housing Policy Task Force report in August 2018 — and what led the task force to recommend that the city develop a coordinated housing system and a chief housing officer. City Manager Erik Walsh told committee members he expects to hire that housing officer by April.
“A major challenge with our housing ecosystem is that there is just a lot of bureaucracy … involved in housing,” Mayor Ron Nirenberg said. “And coordinating them all becomes a first order concern.”
Nirenberg and council members pointed to an instance in which they say the city failed renters: a 2014 decision that displaced more than 100 low-income families from the Mission Trials mobile home park.
“If we had something like this (a renters' commission), we might have done a better job with Mission Trails,” District 7 Councilwoman Ana Sandoval said.
Officials raised questions about whether a renters commission would duplicate efforts by the Housing Commission. Two of the commission's eight members are renters.
That body has tackled issues pertaining to renters since it reformed last year, said Verónica Soto, who heads the city's Neighborhood and Housing Services Department.
That includes the city's “risk mitigation” fund, a $1 million pot of funds intended to give financial assistance to residents struggling to stay in their homes or who have already been forced out by residential development, dramatic rent increases or health and safety problems.
Soto urged council members to hold off on pushing the proposal forward until June, when the Housing Commission is expected to wrap its work on a plan to implement recommendations laid out in the Housing Policy Task Force report.
Instead, the Governance Committee voted to move the proposal to the services committee, which could decide to send the proposal to the full council for a final vote later this year.