Bexar County, home to some of the nation’s leading voices in housing policy, is exploring a host of ideas county leaders hope will help it avoid the housing crisis crushing its neighbors to the north.
Speaking on a Texas Tribune Festival panel presented by the San Antonio Report at St. David’s Episcopal Church in Austin Friday, Henry Cisneros, former San Antonio mayor and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development secretary under President Bill Clinton, said San Antonio has an opportunity to address its housing issues before it reaches Austin-level problems.
Rent in Austin rose 40% from 2021 to 2022, while single-family homes rose in value by roughly 20%.
“The reason is straightforward and simple, there is more demand for housing with the fantastic growth of jobs and companies that are coming [to Austin] … but the production of housing is not keeping pace,” Cisneros said.
San Antonio hasn’t yet experienced the same boom in job growth and corporate relocations. When it does, the panelists told the San Antonio Report’s Editor-in-Chief Leigh Munsil, the city and county face an even bigger deficit of quality housing and an even more financially vulnerable population.
In 2022, San Antonio dropped from No. 1 to No. 7 on the list of most impoverished large cities in the United States. Bexar County’s overall poverty rate in 2022 was 15.7%, compared to a nationwide rate of about 11.5%.
“We have a shortfall of 150,000 units of reasonably priced decent housing, and the inner-city neighborhoods of San Antonio look like third-world countries in many places,” said Cisneros, who blamed San Antonio Independent School District’s plans to close as many as 19 schools on residents fleeing dilapidated downtown housing.
To address the issue, he said, local leaders are “looking now at things that have never been tried in San Antonio, or for that matter in Texas.”
Among the ideas they’re exploring, Cisneros said, is a program Atlanta uses that combines public and private funds to help freeze the taxes of people who’ve lived in their homes for a long time and are at risk of displacement due to new development.
Friday’s panel also included Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai, Commissioner Rebeca Clay-Flores (Pct. 1) and state Sen. José Menéndez, who all stressed the importance of affordable housing for their most vulnerable constituents.
Sakai said he’s working with Councilwoman Teri Castillo (D5) on her plans to “land bank” abandoned property that could be acquired inexpensively and turned into affordable housing.
Castillo, a housing organizer, said the city of Houston is already doing something similar. Though San Antonio had 489 properties deemed vacant in the past month alone, she said, taking over the properties requires significant coordination among government officials.
Sakai said the city and county could work together to “create incentives to the developers to come into the inner-city to promote affordable housing.”
Clay-Flores described her own challenges finding housing when she moved back after completing a master’s degree at Harvard. Though she wanted to live in SAISD, she said real estate agents told her there was no quality housing there and pushed her buy on the North Side instead.
“Affordable housing means different things to different people,” said Clay-Flores. “There are these notions and these stereotypes about what it means to live in a certain part of town, who’s gonna live there, and therefore what kind of poor quality of homes they’re building for us.”
