Once considered somewhat insulated from the housing market’s volatility, San Antonio is grappling with the same affordability and accessibility issues seen in other large cities like Austin.

While San Antonio is still more affordable than most, housing costs are on a steep incline and wages aren’t keeping up.

Families and individuals are struggling to hold onto their homes; with many overflowing homeless shelters. While about 113,000 households sit on a waitlist for public housing or vouchers, some neighbors protest affordable housing projects and call the city to clean up homeless encampments. Meanwhile, new apartment complexes have landlords offering discounts to fill vacancies.

Nearly half of renters in all City Council districts are cost-burdened, meaning they pay more than 30% of their income on rent. And their landlords are increasingly property managers working for investor owners, not residents.

Housing affordability impacts everyone — not just those who can’t afford housing or who are spending too much on rent right now, said Jim Bailey, senior principal at Alamo Architects who chairs the city’s Removing Barriers to Affordable Housing Subcommittee.

“Creating a city where everyone has the opportunity to thrive ultimately builds an economy that helps everyone,” Bailey said. “If we want to get good teachers in San Antonio, we’ve got to provide lifestyles and housing opportunities that are affordable.

“… Unless we’re providing opportunities for the middle and lower middle class, we’re really shooting ourselves in the foot as an economy,” he said.

How San Antonio ended up in this crisis and how we can dig ourselves out — or at least find light at the end of the tunnel — will be at the core of a panel discussion hosted by the San Antonio Report and the H. E. Butt Foundation’s “Know Your Neighbor” initiative at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 11.

“Decoding San Antonio’s Looming Housing Crisis” will feature Mayor Ron Nirenberg, Housing Commissioner Nikki Johnson, Michael Reyes, acting president and CEO of Opportunity Home; and Christine Drennon, associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Trinity University.

Setting the stage

The housing crisis in San Antonio and across the U.S., which some attribute to basic supply and demand, is also influenced by the financialization of the real estate industry, Drennon said.

“Housing is not just for shelter anymore, it’s now an investment strategy,” Drennon said.

San Antonio is experiencing overdevelopment and gentrification in some areas and underdevelopment in others, reflecting broader national trends that are reshaping housing markets across the country, she said.

Drennon’s and other experts’ research regarding the city’s history of racist real estate practices (redlining) and severe economic segregation has permeated throughout local government and housing circles.

“We now have a better understanding of why we look like we do,” Drennon said.

And while we’re about four years into the city’s 10-year housing affordability plan and two years into a $150 million housing bond, building or preserving homes for the lowest-income population remains a challenge.

It’s a challenge that’s going to require buy-in from a broader coalition of stakeholders, said Patton Dodd, executive director of media and communications for the H. E. Butt Foundation.

The Foundation’s Know Your Neighbor initiative is aimed at growing the number of people who are “aware of San Antonio’s systemic struggles with poverty and economic segregation,” Dodd said. “We’re trying to build the cultural conditions for structural change. … We have a unique role to play, which is to focus on the hearts and minds piece.”

Know Your Neighbor produced and recently released a 40-minute documentary, “Everyone Needs a Home,” that talks to people across San Antonio about the increasing challenges of finding affordable, sustainable housing.

The film is free on its website and YouTube.

“Our real goal is for the resources that we develop to find their way into institutions that use them for the long term,” Dodd said, including churches and schools.

The framing around so-called “affordable housing” also needs to change, said Mark Carmona, the city’s chief housing officer.

“I think people have this frame in their mind when they think of an affordable housing development as a high-rise slum that they saw in Detroit on TV,” Carmona said. “But when I speak in terms of ‘housing affordability,’ the whole conversation changes.”

What is needed is housing accessibility and housing availability across the continuum, from shelters and permanent supportive housing to luxury condos, he said.

Through its film and events like the panel, Dodd hopes that conversations around housing affordability will continue around dinner tables and around water coolers and encourage people to engage with policy and project discussions in the future.

It’s similar to an awareness campaign, he said, but “it’s more of a habituation campaign. How do we make thinking about who our neighbors who are across town [or just a few blocks away] part of the San Antonio habit?”