With less than a year left as mayor, Ron Nirenberg is hoping his successor will be patient with the progress he believes San Antonio is making on addressing generational poverty, housing shortages and sustainability.

Speaking on a housing panel hosted by the San Antonio Report and H.E. Butt Foundation on Wednesday night, Nirenberg said that what keeps him up at night these days is the idea of a next mayor coming in and changing direction on initiatives that have been years in the works, but won’t be completed by the time he leaves office.

For example, he pointed to VIA Metropolitan Transit’s advanced Rapid Transit routes, the first of which is expected to break ground this year, and a series of affordable housing initiatives that were made possible by the 2022 bond.

“There’s going to be a temptation in this community to say, ‘You know what? I’ve got a new plan and a new vision, and this is where we need to go as a city,'” Nirenberg said.

“The community has already directed us where we need to go,” he said, referring to the voter-approved mass transit, workforce development and housing projects. “What I want to see as these [2025 mayoral] campaigns continue to unfold is, tell me how you’re going to take where we’re going and accelerate that momentum.”

Nirenberg, who was a District 8 councilman before he was elected mayor in 2017, is term-limited from seeking reelection.

“I didn’t come into office saying I wanted to solve generational poverty, but it became plainly evident to me that that was the issue,” Nirenberg said on Wednesday. “Regardless of any of the other things that we were talking about, the headwaters of the challenges that we’re dealing with, one way or another, went back to poverty.”

So far the race to replace him has already drawn a dozen contenders, including roughly a third of City Council.

The field also includes several outside candidates, including former Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos and tech entrepreneur Beto Altamirano, who blame incumbent council members for the lack of progress on improving economic prosperity, and have vowed to take the city in a different direction.

“I’m the first one to say that our poverty numbers are still tremendously high and unacceptable, but if you look at what’s happening under the hood, things are beginning to move in the right direction,” Nirenberg said Wednesday. “Now would be a terrible time to change direction.”

In his final term, mayoral candidates from the council have grown increasingly willing to criticize some aspects of Nirenberg’s legacy, in particular an expensive workforce development program that’s faced many setbacks.

But Nirenberg said at The Texas Tribune Festival on Saturday that he still trusts them to understand the issues over outside candidates.

“All of the colleagues that I know that are running right now are part of the decision making and the record that we’ve put in place… which is making significant generational difference in San Antonio,” Nirenberg said. “I think they have an advantage because they can own that record.”