Headed into last year’s city budget process, San Antonio spending priorities were rocked by a survey that named homelessness the top issue of residents in nearly every council district.
Even after the City Council interpreted that as a mandate to direct millions of dollars toward both encampment sweeps and housing services for people living on the streets, residents are still calling the issue a primary concern, according to the 2024-2025 budget survey.
Results were presented to the City Council on Thursday, and the budget must be approved in September.
“We’ve surpassed this year’s goals [on homelessness] … and it’s still a relatively high priority from the citizens’ standpoint,” City Manager Erik Walsh told reporters after the meeting.
It was unclear what new measures the city might take as a result.
Walsh said he’d only had a few days to review the survey results and would have more details when the council returns for budget discussions in August.
Last year’s budget invested roughly $17.4 million to support homelessness prevention programs, outreach workers, shelters and more cleanup operations at encampments across the city. That’s on top of $31 million in bond funding and other federal money recently allocated to house people experiencing chronic homelessness.
“I can’t imagine we would ease up on that at this point,” Walsh said.
San Antonio is in its second year of using a public opinion firm to survey residents about the problems they want addressed in the city budget.
The most recent survey ranked “streets” as the No. 1 priority for investment, with sidewalks, police services, affordable housing, code enforcement, street lighting and animal care services also high on the list.
Council members said the results largely matched up with what they hear from residents.
“I think that what I’m seeing on the slides is very much what I hear on the streets of San Antonio,” said Councilwoman Melissa Cabello Havrda (D6). “It’s pretty consistent.”
The survey included responses from 1,141 San Antonio residents, reached by mail, internet and phone in both English and Spanish.
An unusual focus on homelessness
San Antonio uses the national firm ETC Institute, which works with hundreds of cities and counties across the country, allowing municipal leaders to compare notes on the problems they face.
“We survey Austin, Dallas, El Paso and Fort Worth on a regular basis and have actual comparisons to some of their actual apples-to-apples questions,” Ryan Murray, ETC Institute’s assistant director of community research, told the City Council Thursday.
But San Antonio is the only Texas city that’s asked the firm to dig deep on homelessness, according to Murray, even though other cities certainly struggle with the issue.
“Not a lot of cities will ask about it, so we don’t have a lot of data there,” he said.
A point-in-time count conducted last month showed a 6.8% percent increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness in San Antonio compared to last year.
San Antonio’s leaders have been so perplexed by the issue that they tweaked this year’s survey to reveal more nuance on the approach residents want them to take.
Instead of asking residents where homelessness should rank among 20 potential issues, they asked residents to rank “homeless encampment cleanup” and “services to assist the homeless” as separate issues.
Both fell just below streets, coming in second and third places, respectively, in the survey’s priority ranking for funding. It’s unclear whether the same respondents were selecting both issues.
“I’m surprised it’s not on everybody else’s list [of survey questions],” Walsh told reporters. “Homelessness is an issue in a lot of other cities. Maybe they don’t want to know the answer.”
High overall satisfaction
Overall, San Antonio residents gave the city high marks in terms of satisfaction with the services they’re receiving. The city has been tracking that metric for much longer than it’s been tracking budget priorities.
Compared to Austin, Dallas, El Paso and Fort Worth, San Antonio had the highest customer satisfaction in 12 out of 14 categories that all five cities included in their surveys.
The survey indicated San Antonio was also beating its own records in terms of residents’ satisfaction, with 87% of respondents saying they were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the overall quality of city services.
“What we found is that their satisfaction increased with almost every single item except for animal care… that was a 3% decrease in satisfaction,” Murray told the council.
“But if we look at solid waste, the airport, public works, police, fire, EMS, code enforcement, 311 services, you’ve seen giant improvements,” he said.
San Antonio’s Animal Care Services also received a big funding boost in the last budget, after a deadly dog mauling caused the city to reevaluate its procedures at the department. It recently approved a new strategic plan, but its director, Shannon Sims, retired early this year.
