When San Antonio Water System shut off service at the Westwood Plaza Apartments in June, citing nonpayment by the property’s nonprofit ownership, residents of the complex adamantly defended its executive director — who argues that lingering effects from the COVID-19 pandemic are truly at fault.
Representing Los Angeles-based nonprofit Pico Union Housing Corporation, Gloria Farias acts as landlord and property manager of the 306-unit Westwood Plaza, as well as the nearby 44-unit Roselawn Apartments. Both complexes were temporarily disconnected from SAWS’ water service on June 18.
At the time of the water shutoffs, the owner of Westwood Plaza Apartments on the city’s West Side owed $144,092.32 in utility payments, according to data released by SAWS, and $98,916.74 in unpaid water bills at Roselawn, located near Lackland Air Force Base.
As of last week, the Pico Union Housing Corporation still owes SAWS more than $320,790 across its San Antonio properties, according to the water utility.
Residents at Westwood Plaza spoke easily with Farias, who lives at and has an office on the property, as they came by to grab a case or two of bottled water provided by employees from the City of San Antonio’s Human Services Department on that hot Tuesday.
She looked visibly stressed as she made phone calls between the chatter, taking occasional notes on a white legal pad.
“It really isn’t the owner’s fault,” said one Westwood Plaza Apartment resident who declined to give her name. “We’re not blaming her.”
But according to the city and SAWS, it’s individual choices that have led Farias and the Pico Union Housing Corporation to get behind on their payments — and it’s the tenants who suffer the most for it.
“Overall, it’s been a challenge” to work with Farias and the Pico Union Housing Corporation, said Michael Shannon, the city’s director for Development Services.
The board-operated nonprofit has 12 pending code violations filed against it, according to city records.
“These issues have been identified for quite some time, and they haven’t been addressed properly,” Shannon said of the code violations.
SAWS president and CEO Robert Puente echoed those sentiments.
“That’s one of the questions I asked their representatives: ‘Aren’t you getting paid on a regular basis?’ And: ‘Are you evicting tenants for nonpayment?'” Puente said. “And the answer was yes to both of them, so that’s telling me that they’re making choices on how to pay and who to pay, and unfortunately, we’re at the bottom of the list.”
Outliers
On June 18, SAWS made the rare decision to cut off water service to four apartment complexes affecting 628 units across San Antonio — in an attempt to recoup more than $292,000 in unpaid water bills at the time.
But across SAWS’ 2 million member customer base, the past-due accounts were outliers, even post-COVID, Puente said, leading to the utility’s action.
“The vast, vast majority of our residential and commercial customers, including affordable apartment complexes, didn’t let themselves get in a very deep hole, and if they did, they’re out of that hole,” Puente said. “So we’re talking about — comparatively speaking, to all of our customers — a small number, but a very identifiable number that tends to ignore our requests to pay their bill.”
While there is some evidence that nonprofits were hit exceptionally hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, SAWS and the city say most of the other nonprofits they work with locally have recovered enough to resume regular payments and keep their properties up to code.
“You have to treat them as you do any other business,” Puente said. “They’re non-profit for tax purposes … but oftentimes, these are just businesses and they choose to organize themselves in that manner. They still have a payroll, they still have things to do.”
Multiple requests for comment from Pico Union Housing Corporation’s board went unanswered.
According to the nonprofit’s website, the head of its board is Mario Morales, who has been president of the board since 1987. The website lists Rosa Novoa as secretary and Wilfredo Pineda as treasurer, both of whom had identical biographies on the site at the time of publication.
Farias was paid $781,250 for 55 hours of work per week according to the corporation’s 2022 tax filings — roughly $264,000 more per year than even the SAWS CEO’s 2022 annual base salary of $516,381.
In 2021, she was paid $616,590 for the year for 55 hours of work per week, according to the filings; in 2020 she was paid $465,000, and in 2019 she was paid more than $1 million for the same amount of hours.
According to the nonprofit’s tax forms, Farias’s annual salary has been decided by its three-member board of directors, which “reviewed the comparability data done by an independent persons/entity” and determined her compensation “to ensure competitiveness with external markets and for internal equity in relation to the employee wages and benefits,” also citing “organizational performance” and the “financial resources of Pico Union Housing Corp.”
When asked about her current salary, Farias said in a text message that she worked for free for three years when she joined the organization in the 1990s then later started getting paid about $1,000 a month.
In the years since, Farias credited her salary increases to profits from the organization’s developments.
“I get paid based upon the properties we buy and transform … ,” she wrote. “This is my passion to go to neighborhoods that are in desperate need.”
An untimely investment
Started in 1971, the corporation has been managing properties across California for five decades. According to the nonprofit’s website, the corporation owns and manages about 1,000 units of affordable housing in Los Angeles that were “self-developed” with tax-exempt bonds, tax credits, insured loans by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and loans from the California Housing Finance Agency.
Farias told the San Antonio Report she oversees 47 buildings, five of which are the properties here in San Antonio and the other 42 are in California.
“[We’ve] never had this trouble,” Farias said in a text message.
In 2019, Farias started the process of moving from Los Angeles to San Antonio after one of her investors told her that San Antonio needed help with low-income housing.
“We wanted to be part of the community,” Farias told the San Antonio Report. “We wanted to transform — not just the neighborhood, but we transform the communities we serve. We’ve been in business for 55 years. So we came over here to do that.”
The Pico Union Housing Corporation bought a small portfolio of five multifamily properties in San Antonio in 2020, hoping to put the properties on a better path, she said.
“Maybe the last management left them in a mess — I’m assuming that,” said Lynnrise Harris, who’s been a resident at the Westwood Plaza complex for 17 years. Harris noted the property has often struggled to succeed, and said different managers have “come and gone” in her time at the complex.
At this time, Pico Union Housing Corp. took out a loan for $43 million to buy and fix up the properties, which the nonprofit has not been able to pay back, Farias said.
When the corporation moved into San Antonio, Farias had already been leading the nonprofit for 26 years as its executive director.
Farias said she and her small team had been excited about the purchases — their first set of properties outside of California. But they could not have planned for what would come next: the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We started purchasing this property in December 2019. We got the keys on March 10, 2020,” she said, with a sad smile.
The next day, COVID-19 was officially declared a global pandemic.
San Antonio’s “Stay Home, Work Safe” order came just days later, followed shortly by the passage of the federal CARES Act which included a moratorium on pursuing eviction of tenants who couldn’t pay their rent.
While some accounts started to fall behind on their payments, both SAWS and CPS Energy stopped disconnecting services as the local economy ground to a halt.
Since March 2020, Farias says she has only received about half of the monthly rent payments from her nearly 400 San Antonio tenants, about half of whom receive housing assistance from the city, according to her records. She showed the San Antonio Report paper records detailing which accounts are still past due, adding up to more than $1.9 million.
She says more than half of the units across the five properties she manages in San Antonio are currently vacant.
The eviction moratorium was lifted for Texas in July 2023, but the damage was done. Those years put the nonprofit corporation in a difficult position when it came to paying their utility bills and other outstanding expenses on time — plus, crime was increasing in the area, Farias added.
“People couldn’t pay rent, so we have about $2 million worth of rent that we lost,” she said. “Nobody paid. The police and the city attorney got involved because we were calling the police so much, because this was [a hot spot].”
City police data shows more than 60 calls coming from Westward Plaza’s addresses just in the month of May this year for incidents including: criminal mischief, burglary, disturbance, lewd conduct, disturbance involving a gun, assault in progress, threats, shooting and suspicious person with a gun.
Farias showed the San Antonio Report photos of several apartment units at Westwood Plaza that have been severely burned in recent weeks, which she alleged are the result of recent acts of arson. She added that staff members have been threatened by people experiencing homelessness as well.
Harris noted that she and other residents have seen Farias around the property quite often and said she’s been “trying real hard.”
“When you have a lot of homeless — there were a lot of homeless that came in and just took over, because there [were] so many empty apartments, and around that time, people [weren’t] paying rent,” Harris said. “They just can’t seem to get it going. When they try to get it going, then there’s something bad.”
Farias said she and her business partners placed their San Antonio portfolio on the market in June, but said she is worried the new owners will try to price out many of the complex’s current residents, including those who do make their payments on time.
“They’ll just evict everybody and the rent will go up,” she said. “Our rents are very low.”
A one-bedroom apartment at the complex costs roughly $800 per month, while a three-bedroom is about $1,200 per month, Farias noted.
According to Apartments.com, as of July 2024, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Antonio is $1,088 per month. This is 29% lower than the national average rent of $1,534 per month.
Asking for aid
According to Pico Union Housing Corporation’s annual tax filings, the corporation has been in the red since purchasing the five San Antonio properties — averaging a net loss of about $4 million per year since 2019.
Prior to that, the company had been profiting year over year.
The nonprofit spent more than $22 million in 2022, 99% of which was spent on “program service expenses” — costs that an organization incurs while carrying out its tax-exempt activities and fulfilling its mission.
In its standards of accountability, the Better Business Bureau says a nonprofit organization should spend at least 65% of total expenses on programs — a line item that includes staff salaries.
The nonprofit spent $20 million in 2021, 99% of which was on program service expenses; $16 million in 2020, 98% of which was program service expenses; and $11 million in 2019, 99% of which was on program service expenses.
“I live here,” Farias said, gesturing to her surroundings as she sat in the Westwood Plaza Apartment complex’s main office. “I didn’t want to go live in a hotel and have a margarita — I wanted to — you see my tenants, they love me … But then the COVID stuff hit us and then that [moratorium] started hitting us.”
In the wake of COVID-19, multiple government-funded programs have popped up for property managers in similar positions, including a renters assistance program and utility assistance programs from the city.
Over the last four years, Farias said she has tried to work with the city to get some of her non-paying tenants assistance with their rent. It’s been successful to a degree, she noted.
“I went to the mayor’s office, and they did bring some rental assistance for the good people that are good renters and have children, so they are helping us with that,” she said.
Since 2020, the city has issued nearly $806,000 in rental assistance across Pico Union’s five local properties, according to city records.
According to the corporation’s annual tax filings, it received $5,137,387 in government grants in 2022 and $7,993,170 in grants, contributions and gifts in 2021. It received $0 in grants and contributions in 2020. Available records don’t show exactly from which government programs the grants come from.
IRS spokespeople said that if the organization doesn’t disclose it in their Form 990, there’s no way to find out whether Pico received Employee Retention Credits, a federal pandemic-era program that was designed to help businesses remain open and their staff employed during the height of the COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent economic recession.
Farias claims that many homeless people moved into vacant apartments during the pandemic, and have since refused to pay or leave. She’s been working with local police to evict them but it’s going slowly, she says.
“We have put $20 million of Pico Union’s money … into these [five] properties to keep them afloat since 2020,” Farias said.
During an interview in her Westwood Plaza office, Farias gestured to several tile, cabinet and flooring panel samples that her staff had planned to use in renovations at the five properties — upgrades that she said probably would have helped prevent the code violations.
“We were never able to do any of these,” she said.
Behind on the bills
Pico Union Housing Corporation is on a $35,000-a-month payment plan with SAWS, which it must pay on top of its regular monthly payments.
“We were doing our very best to keep paying it ’til last month,” Farias said.
Puente said the payment plan is in line with similar local nonprofits, however, the decision to shut off the water was the result of continued delinquency.
“Sometimes they would not pay anything at all,” Puente said of their monthly bill. “And then they’d do one big lump sum payment to make up for maybe two or three months, or partial payments instead of the full payment.”
The City of San Antonio has issued numerous code violations at the property since 2018 for “a variety of structural issues,” including failing stairwells and landings, deteriorated decking, water leaks, black mold in units, unsecured vacant units, broken windows and doors and unsanitary premises, the city said in an emailed statement to the San Antonio Report. It is unclear which of the violations cited by the city occurred since 2020, when Pico Union Housing Corporation took over management of the property.
However, “code violations have worsened in the last two years,” the statement said, despite negotiated compliance agreements between the City Attorney’s Office and the property owner. “The property owner never complied with these agreements and has refused to execute them,” the city said.
Last year, the city said it notified the corporation that it was required to register the properties in the city’s new Proactive Apartment Inspections program after Westwood Apartments received multiple citations within six months. The city started the inspections program last year to provide safer housing conditions by proactively inspecting complexes with a history of violations, it said.
Shannon says nearly 97% of the apartments in this program are doing well.
What’s next?
Farias is scheduled to respond on Pico Union Housing Corporation’s behalf to five of the pending code violations at a court appearance on Aug. 14, and to the other seven on Aug. 20.
For Farias, who has been struggling to keep her head above water, the code violations and water shutoff are not a fair measure of her organization’s work.
“[The city] wants me to plead guilty to four counts,” Farias said. “But I really believe that having four counts of bad properties would harm me because I’m very proficient, is what I think.”
Farias cited many of the community awards she’s received in Los Angeles for her work with the nonprofit, and spoke of the many community events, programs and projects launched by Pico Union Housing successfully in Los Angeles.
Swiping through photo after photo on an iPad, she showcased the many community resource fairs she had helped put on in Los Angeles and San Antonio over her tenure.
Farias said she hopes SAWS can lower the monthly payment plans, and added she is hoping for more help from the city in order to protect the affordable housing her buildings provide.
“I would hope the police and the city would step up to the plate and help me … ” she said. “It’s San Antonio that’s going to lose 770 units of affordable housing.”
