Les Tschirhart’s ancestors arrived in Texas in 1845, and today he lives on the land near Castroville that has been in his family for 135 years. The home his great grandfather built is now the local chamber of commerce office.
At age 83, he and wife Patsy still speak the language of those early pioneers from Alsace. If they could see Castroville now, “they would think it’s something,” Tschirhart said laughing.
In the next three years, more homes and businesses will be built in Castroville and the surrounding farmlands — in six active developments with at least 2,500 homes and another 200 acres of commercial development — than in the 178 years since the town’s founding.
That concerns Darrin Schroeder, the first-term mayor of the picturesque town west of San Antonio, as the boundary between Castroville and the fast-growing far West Side of San Antonio becomes blurred.
He revealed those construction numbers at a recent town hall meeting, inviting area residents with a letter stating that these structures will be the “visual backdrop of our lives and will outlast us by many generations.”
Already, islands of asphalt-shingled roofs are spreading across what was once fertile farmland to supply an ever-increasing demand for housing. At least 15 suburban neighborhoods are in various stages of development to the north and south of U.S. Highway 90 West. Multifamily complexes are also growing.
Commercial and retail development has followed. A Walmart Supercenter opened in 2017 and a national hotel chain is planning to build nearby.
The problem of urban sprawl is nothing new to bedroom communities in Bexar County, along Interstate 10 toward Boerne and along Interstate 35 heading north to New Braunfels and Austin — one of the fastest-growing corridors in the nation.
As more and more developers acquire land around Castroville, Schroeder and council members feel a sense of urgency to get ahead of the sprawl by knowing what to require from developers. “We have a small window to take charge of our destiny,” he wrote in a recent letter to residents.
Shaping a future
At one of four lectures hosted recently by the City of Castroville and the Castroville Conservation Society, Schroeder told the 100 or so people gathered at the historic Elsass Hall that it was possible for them to manage development, preserve the city’s heritage and shape its future.
In the process, they would ensure not just the historical nature and charm of the built environment but also the sense of community it fosters.
“We need your participation,” he told residents, “because this is something that you’re going to be doing together.”
The City of Castroville has embarked on an effort to amend its comprehensive plan, create a city character and design guide, update its Unified Development Code and use development agreements to encourage better planning. The city has contracted with Bryce Cox, a city planner with an Austin-based firm, to help lead those initiatives.
Still, Schroeder wants the council and its constituents to get smart about development in general, and recently invited a host of experts to town for a lecture series on planning, architecture and preservation.
Keeping the essence of Castroville
During a talk in August, urban planner and architect Steve Oubre heaped praise on Castroville’s historic town center and its 19th-century founder Henri Castro of France.
The classical grid of homes and mix of land uses Castro designed in 1844 imitates a European village. It stands in sharp contrast to modern-day city plans created under the prevalent Euclidian zoning that divides up land by specific uses and leads to socioeconomic segregation and car-centric development.
“Henri Castro was not a planner, but he was someone who had come from Europe and had lived the success of a plan like this,” Oubre said. “So when you say, ‘I want to keep Castroville, Castroville,’ you need to understand the impact that this plan has on your lives.”
Castroville resident William Nicoll said he grew up living in the Netherlands, England, France and Spain, and he was attracted to the town 30 miles west of San Antonio because of its walkability.
“I don’t drive much. I actually work next to my house,” said the master carpenter. “I walk to the coffee shop. I really didn’t like living in the city before this.”
The center of old town Castroville can be duplicated in future development, said Oubre, who in addition to his work with the city is on the development team for the transit-oriented Vicinia under development in far Northwest San Antonio. He’s an acolyte of Andres Duany, a pioneer of the New Urbanism concept.
“If we are successful … this will be a model that a lot of smaller towns in and around Texas can utilize,” Oubre said. “There are a lot of places [that] really don’t want to become the suburban places of San Antonio or Dallas. They want to stay where they are … ‘place-wise,’ and this is that opportunity.”
Architectural gems
The unique architectural styles in Castroville, where the whitewashed walls and pitched roofs of almost 100 historical structures remain standing, should also be replicated, said architectural historian Kathryn O’Rourke, a professor of art history at Trinity University.
Appreciation for how the architecture fits into its landscape goes back to Castroville’s earliest days, she said. In 1854, Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of landscape architecture and designer of New York City’s Central Park, visited Castroville and wrote that “the cottages are scattered prettily,” much like a village in France’s upper Rhone Valley.
Noted midcentury architect O’Neil Ford also was impressed with what he saw, noting the beauty and simplicity of German vernacular architecture in Castroville and how it was adapted to Texas. Ford would be so inspired by the style that it can be found repeated in some of his later designs.
A group of residents even banded together in 2021 to preserve what they could of the architecture by forming a private investment fund to redevelop the downtown.
So far, they have bought or leased several historic buildings, including a former meat market, an old saloon and a 1940s-era movie theater, with plans to restore the structures and house food and beverage and other tenants that will serve Castroville residents and visitors.
Housing and highways
In the public program series that Schroeder coined as the “Journey Forward,” Oubre and O’Rourke were followed by two others — Vincent Michael, executive director of the Conservation Society of San Antonio, and John Anderson, a town planner and small-scale developer.
Michael explained how the City of San Antonio has applied zoning ordinances to help preserve historic structures by establishing historic districts.
The Castroville Historic District, which includes a dozen properties, is recognized as such by the National Park Service and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970. The area roughly bounded on three sides by the Medina River is also protected as a state-recognized historic district.
Preservation isn’t just about rules and standards, Michael said. “It’s a process. And you right now are in the middle of the process. It’s a process whereby a community determines what elements of its past it wants in its future.”
As for the future, Anderson warned that one significant element absent from today’s development patterns, in both San Antonio and Castroville, is midscale housing. He calls it the “missing middle.”
Duplexes, fourplexes, cottage courts and courtyard apartments are becoming harder to build due to zoning limitations and financing hurdles. Anderson encouraged citizens to support new zoning laws and development within Castroville that would address the gap and reflect changing demographics.
Anderson also pointed to the increasingly congested Highway 90 West as “a corridor of crap” that runs through the middle of town, suggesting that Castroville — and its property values — could be better served by a pedestrian-friendly, tree-lined boulevard.
The highway corridor — which has become home to chain stores, fast-food restaurants and gas stations — emerged as one of the biggest problems the mayor hopes to solve by reducing its visual impact on the city.
‘Preserve what we have’
A similar effort to preserve the unique character of Castroville emerged 20 years ago when the Texas Historical Commission (THC) developed a plan with community input.
Priscilla Garrett, a Castroville resident for 27 years, serves on the historic landmark commission and was involved in that planning process. “It kind of got shoved back,” she said of the plan. “It wasn’t because people didn’t want to preserve what we have, but there’s always been [this opinion]: Don’t tell me what to do with my property.”
What’s different this time around, she said, is that the six-member City Council seems more united to make things happen. “What I think is waking some people up now is what’s coming at us.”
What the THC and community produced in 2002 was a “solid plan,” in Schroeder’s view, but with six goals and 42 sub-goals, was trying to accomplish too much. “We’ve narrowed it down to three things,” he said.
The first two will have the city focus on managing both infill development and development on land where no previous structures exist through form-based zoning — regulating land development to achieve a specific urban form. They also want to promote a mix of housing types and develop a set of architectural design standards and requirements.
The third goal is “dealing with Highway 90 and fixing the scar” that runs through town, said Schroeder.
The city already has partnered with Medina County through an interlocal agreement to engineer and design a bypass that would redirect traffic from Highway 90 to a roadway north of town.
The project will be completed in phases, starting with a three-mile portion to be built between the highway and FM 471 North that is expected to be finished in 2023, said City Manager Scott Dixon. Future phases would continue the bypass west to Hondo.
In the meantime, Oubre is designing a proposed system of thoroughfares that would connect the suburban islands of development to one another and to the city center as Castroville grows. “Those are very important pieces and so we’re trying to get to that point, [and the council is] ready to do it,” he said.
Redesigning plans for the long term
A teacher in nearby LaCoste, Nadine Kempf regularly gets caught in traffic traveling to work, the grocery store and her home in Castroville. The lecturers gave Kempf something to think about, she said.
A lifelong resident of the area, Kempf sees similarities between what downtown Castroville has and the mixed-use density of the Pearl in San Antonio, and how that builds a sense of community.
“To see the past and how it can create our future is pretty amazing for me — it’s nothing that I ever thought about before,” she said.
City leaders are already working on the goal to manage and shape how neighborhoods are developed, meeting with real estate developers — some of whom attended the recent lecture series alongside local residents — and redesigning plans to satisfy the community’s wishes.
“We wanted them to understand what it means to us as a community for them to do things right, not to take shortcuts, not to think in terms of short-term gains, because we have to live with whatever they build,” Schroeder said. “Once they put that down, it’s going to be with us for the rest of my life and for generations.”
Merit Commercial Real Estate began in 2009 assembling large tracts of land in Castroville and broke ground on a mixed-use development and neighborhood last year.
“We saw the potential of Castroville and think its character and unique charm will set it apart from other master-planned communities,” stated Will Collins, CEO of Merit, in an email. At full buildout, Alsatian Oaks will have about 950 homes and 375,000 square feet of commercial retail.
When the project was first proposed, the developer planned to build those homes on 12,000-square-foot lots but has since recognized that this “one-size-fits-all approach” would not be acceptable to city leaders, he said.
“Current city leadership has taken this several steps further with their proactive approach to learning best practices for development,” Collins stated. If the city makes changes in its ordinances that allow for higher density, then the developer could incorporate more housing within a single, perhaps larger, lot.
Another housing developer is making plans to build on 285 acres near the Castroville airport, calling the development of single-family homes Cobblestone Village.
After recent meetings with the city, the developers have agreed to revise 70 acres of the original grid from a conventional suburban neighborhood layout to one that incorporates shorter blocks, multifamily housing with storefronts at street level, and alley-loaded home designs built to match vernacular architecture, Oubre said.
Walkability and farmland
“To me, the biggest threat to the loss of Castroville,” Schroeder said, is the type of community that would result from conventional planning where privacy fences and long streets separate neighbors.
For four years, Dallas native David Merz has lived just off Highway 90 in a fairly conventional neighborhood less than a mile from the center of town.
“My wife and I go on a walk every night around our neighborhood,” he said. “And there’s basically one way to take a walk around our neighborhood, and there’s hardly ever anyone else out there because it’s not very pedestrian. It has sidewalks but that’s about all that can be said for it.”
Bryan Persyn, a realtor who works in Castroville and has family in town, thinks the traditional concept with a variety of housing types is easier to sell to prospective residents. He said it’s becoming more difficult for people who grew up in Castroville to return to their hometown because there’s a shortage of midscale housing.
But still unanswered is the question of how to actually preserve some of the agricultural land that was once a buffer to the town but that is steadily being eroded by residential and commercial development.
From 1997 to 2017, approximately 2.2 million acres of working lands in Texas were converted to nonagricultural uses, according to the Texas A&M National Resources Institute’s Land Trends Report.
Bradford Boehme, who farms and ranches on land that has been in his family for generations, suggested Castroville-area landowners learn more about conservation easements.
Garrett said she thinks the lecture series helped the community understand there’s a lot they can do to control development. “I think we’ve had the mindset, there’s not anything we can do about it,” she said. “Look what happened to Boerne, look what happened to New Braunfels. [Maybe] there’s just not anything we can do about it.”
“I hope to see it happen,” said Les Tschirhart of the mayor’s vision and the coming development.
“They want to keep Castroville as it is without excluding the other people coming in. That’s wonderful. I hope it can happen.”
