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The headlines detailing San Antonio’s persistent poverty are numbingly familiar. Yet they must not breed complacency — they must serve as a reckoning and a call to action.
We know poverty is a tangled web of inadequate transportation, underfunded education and historical discrimination. But at its root lies a deeper crisis: the lack of stable, affordable housing.
In a landmark study, Harvard economist Raj Chetty and fellow researchers found that “economic connectedness” is one of the clearest predictors of upward mobility. Children who grow up in economically diverse communities — rather than pockets of concentrated poverty — are successfully breaking the cycle of generational poverty across the country. Chetty’s research shows that this form of “social capital” can shape a child’s future in ways that extend beyond traditional measures of community support.
In San Antonio, however, the architecture of segregation still stands and is the bedrock of our persistent poverty.
One need only look at our near West Side — the most economically distressed neighborhood in our city, and one of the most impoverished in the nation. It is home to three legacy public housing communities built in the 1930s. For eight decades, these communities have inadvertently locked segregation into our urban landscape. As someone born in one of these legacy communities, I know firsthand that this cycle did not happen by accident. It was built by design.
The federal redlining of the last century drew rigid lines around our communities, cementing the racial and economic segregation we see today. To its credit, federal housing policy has evolved significantly since that era, replacing discriminatory practices with a genuine commitment to progress. At the same time, acknowledging how far national policy has come also requires recognizing how far we still have to go to address the lasting legacy of those early decisions.
Today, more than 30,000 San Antonians live in income-based units built for the conditions of the 1930s, not the 2020s. Many of these homes lack basic insulation and
central air conditioning, leaving our city’s most vulnerable residents physically isolated in areas of concentrated poverty.
Spread across nearly every City Council district, these units represent the backbone of our local workforce. These aren’t abstract statistics; they are the homes of the early childhood educators teaching our children, the medical assistants caring for our seniors and the service workers who keep our local businesses thriving. Ensuring our workforce can afford to live near the communities they serve isn’t just a housing initiative; it’s essential to a healthy, resilient San Antonio. But decades of federal neglect have placed this critical safety net at catastrophic risk.
Nationwide, the public housing capital repair backlog exceeds $90 billion. Opportunity Home San Antonio faces more than $550 million in deferred maintenance. Consider the math: while it costs roughly $941 per month to operate a single public housing unit, the federal government provides $440. This massive shortfall triggers an annual operating loss nearing $17 million — before a single dollar is even applied to long-overdue repairs.
This status quo is entirely unsustainable. Without immediate intervention, units will inevitably be taken offline for health and safety reasons, permanently shrinking San Antonio’s already scarce supply of deeply affordable housing.
We must break down these economic walls — both figuratively and literally — for the sake of preserving our affordable housing stock and for the economic vitality of our city.
To do so, Opportunity Home is investing more than $2.5 billion into Strategy 2037: A Centennial Vision. Named for the organization’s upcoming 100th anniversary, this roadmap is designed to add or preserve nearly 15,000 affordable housing units across the city. It marks the single largest investment in affordable housing in San Antonio since the New Deal.
Crucially, Strategy 2037 flips the script on the traditional housing financing model. By securing a national Standard & Poor’s (S&P) credit rating, Opportunity Home can now independently finance long-overdue preservation needs and new construction rather than waiting on volatile federal funding. This physical infrastructure investment will complement ongoing dedicated community partnerships to provide holistic resident support services like digital connectivity, education resources and training to help residents reach financial independence.
Beginning this year, we are transitioning 6,000 traditional public housing units into a more stable, federally subsidized model. This bipartisan, Congress-supported framework will inject hundreds of millions of dollars into our neighborhoods while modernizing aging infrastructure and strictly protecting affordability.
Let’s be clear: reimagining this housing does not mean abandoning its intended purpose in serving our city’s most vulnerable, including children, older adults, homeless veterans and youth aging out of foster care. This transition explicitly guarantees that rents remain capped at 30% of household income, safeguards tenant rights and ensures long-term public stewardship. Above all, it allows us to rebuild housing communities to modern living standards, expand access to opportunity, reinvest in neighborhoods and finally dismantle our city’s economic silos.
Modernizing these homes is not just a housing strategy; it is a moral obligation to the 30,000 of our neighbors living in them. Every resident should have access to housing with central heating and air conditioning, proper insulation and safe, dignified conditions.
San Antonio’s future cannot be built on a crumbling foundation. San Antonio cannot truly thrive as a 21st-century city when thousands of our neighbors are left behind.
Building a globally competitive, economically thriving, modern city must start with providing access to quality, financially sustainable, affordable housing.
We now have a plan, the financing tools and the political will. It is time to act.
Read more: Strategy 2037: A Centennial Vision.
