Progressive elected officials, teacher and transit unions and housing advocates gathered on the steps of San Antonio’s City Hall Wednesday to support two policies aimed at increasing and expediting affordable housing opportunities in the city.
Last month, Councilwoman Teri Castillo (D5) formally submitted two policy consideration requests; the Community Land Trust Tiered Affordability Policy, which would distribute unused city-owned land to community land trusts, and Stay SA: Affordable Housing Bonus Programs to Support Equitable Construction, which would incentivize construction of affordable housing.
The latter would resemble the controversial Affordability Unlocked Development Bonus Program in Austin that removes some building restrictions in exchange for larger, more affordable housing projects.
“If we want to get a hold of our local housing crisis, our city must act boldly in preserving our current affordable housing stock while also creating more accessible and affordable housing that our families can rely on for generations,” Castillo said during the press conference.
Mayor Ron Nirenberg, U.S. Rep. Greg Casar (D-Austin), who authored Austin’s “unlocked” policy as a council member in 2019, and Harlandale Independent School District Superintendent Gerardo Soto joined Castillo at City Hall to highlight the need for more affordable housing in San Antonio.
In recent years, leaders in Austin have worked to get thousands of families back into city limits after ballooning housing prices pushed them out, Casar said — an outcome San Antonio still has time to avoid. “That’s not the position you want to be in,” he said. “In San Antonio, before people get pushed out, it’d be so much better to just keep people here. So let’s learn from the mistakes in San Francisco and in Austin. Let’s do it right first here in San Antonio.”
Affordability Unlocked survived a legal challenge last year.
As of September 2023, about 6,100 homes were built or slated to be built for people who make less than the area median income (AMI), according to a KUT analysis. At the time, Austin’s AMI for an individual was $85,000. San Antonio’s AMI for an individual is $62,000 this year.
Castillo’s two housing-related policies must first be reviewed by council’s Governance Committee, which will likely assign them to another committee and the city’s Housing Commission for further analysis and discussion. It’s a process that typically takes several months before a vote takes place.
Nirenberg, who controls most council agendas, praised Castillo’s proposals.
Since being elected in 2021, Castillo has “looked around every corner to find innovative ways that we can amplify our affordable housing efforts,” Nirenberg said.
“In the last two years, the affordable housing bond and by extension, the [Strategic Housing Implementation Plan] has helped support the creation and preservation of over 4,000 homes in the City of San Antonio,” he said. “Despite these investments, there is more to be done. Year over year, our residents continue to identify housing affordability and homelessness as the top issues deserving our attention and investment. We cannot lose focus.”
Castillo and others want that focus aimed at “deeply” affordable housing — meaning housing that people who earn far less than they need to cover the basics. In Bexar County, according to the nonprofit ALICE, a “survival budget” for an individual is $29,520 (roughly 50% AMI).
While the city has already met its goals for rental housing that’s affordable for people earning more than half of the area median income ($31,000 for an individual), rental housing for people earning less than half AMI lags behind, according to the city’s dashboard.
Homeownership opportunities for people at the 60% AMI level or below have also struggled to gain traction. As construction costs increase, it’s difficult to profit from housing for very low-income residents.
“The developers don’t seem to know how to make the math work” for deeply affordable housing, said Graciela Sanchez, executive director of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, a housing affordability activist with expertise in housing approaches on the city’s West Side. “And we’re tired of hearing that they don’t know how to make the math work.”
Esperanza started a community land trust initiative in 2021, which maintains several affordable West Side casitas, focusing on households that earn up to 30% AMI ($18,600 for an individual).
“For us, the community land trust is not about any profit, it’s just to continue to find more housing,” she told the San Antonio Report after standing behind the elected officials during the press conference.
Housing costs have also affected local school districts, whose staff, students and families struggle to find homes close to schools.
“When our families have a safe, stable and affordable place to live, our families worry less about meeting daily needs, students perform better academically and our neighborhood public schools and the communities around them thrive,” Soto said.
Castillo’s press conference comes one day after the White House released several policy proposals aimed at reducing housing costs across the nation, including a rent increase cap, repurposing public land for housing and a housing preservation initiative.
Affordable housing should be a priority across local, state and federal levels of government, Casar said, and while Texas has shown little appetite for reform, city policies can make a difference.
In Austin, Affordability Unlocked essentially “eliminated our red tape around density and parking and permitting for all of the projects that were affordable housing projects … mostly aimed at working-class people,” Casar said “For every dollar, we were now getting lots more affordable housing.”
Casar is also advocating for a repeal of the 1998 Faircloth Amendment, which limits the amount of public housing units federally funded housing authorities can build.
The local housing authority Opportunity Home San Antonio estimates that there are about 113,000 individuals and families on the local public housing waitlist.
“We need to recommit to public housing,” Casar said.
Correction: This story has been updated to correctly refer to the progress of Austin’s Affordability Unlocked policy.
