Jesus Rendon grew up in a vibrant Quintana neighborhood and his uncle worked nearby at Kelly Air Force Base. Though the base always felt “closed off, military style,” he said, the base jobs provided good pay and stability.
After graduating from college in Austin, Rendon moved back and eventually went to work at Port San Antonio. He runs a nonprofit with the help of the Port and joined the neighborhood association board led by Al Rocha.
More than 15 years after Port San Antonio’s beginnings, some positive activity surrounding the reinvented military base is slowly returning, Rocha said.
“It’s starting to remind me of the old Kelly Air Force Base that I used to know,” he said.
In the next decade, Port SA officials are planning for more of the kind of development and infrastructure that they say Port workers, tenants and the Southside community need and want.
“Over the coming seven to 10 years, we plan on adding 12,000 to 18,000 jobs for the campus,” said Jim Perschbach, president and CEO of Port San Antonio. “In doing so we’re going to have to build a true environment with amenities down there.”
Perschbach told members of the San Antonio City Council’s Economic and Workforce Development Committee recently that in the past six years, Port SA has grown by 8,000 jobs, for a total of 18,000, and built 750,000 square feet of new facilities, including the $73 million Boeing Center at Tech Port.
Plans are also in motion for an ultramodern office tower at Port SA that Perschbach described as “shockingly expensive and a shockingly crazy building” that will showcase San Antonio. Marketing to potential tenants and a financing package in the works.
In addition to the tower, the exact cost of which is still unknown, Perschbach envisions a future campus layout that also includes hotels, restaurants, fitness centers, a day care center and access into the surrounding neighborhoods.
“We want to have groceries available on and off the campus so the neighborhoods can walk over, and all of this part of what should be the ultimate vision for this city — not creating just little nodes that we invest in — but truly making the entire city economically participating,” he said.
Port officials have already launched an effort to build a child care center with a capacity for 700 to 900 infants and children. The center would be open to Port workers, military members and the general public, Perschbach said.
Though the military operates a child care center at the Port, there’s a shortage of space there and across the city. No timeline for the proposed new facility has been established.
“What we’re trying to figure out right now is finding a sweet spot in terms of scalability, size, location and requirements that allows us to have a really top-quality child development center without the prices becoming so rapacious that it limits big segments of the population out,” he told the San Antonio Report.
While the successes at the Port have made it “the envy of a lot of places around the country,” Perschbach said, there are challenges that need to be overcome. The first one he asked council members for help with is infrastructure.
The roads in and out of the Port need upgrading to accommodate the level of traffic in the area and to create better access for the community, he said. Port leaders have been working on some ideas with Councilwoman Teri Castillo and the District 5 office on issues like improving South Gen. McMullen Drive.
Rocha and the neighborhood association also have ideas that range from creating more parks, green space and science or tech-themed trails in the area to a pedestrian bridge and more residential options so that people could both live and work at Port SA.
Having grown up in the area, Rocha recalled how the military base was self-sustaining in that it had housing and other amenities for the families who lived there.
“I think that kind of accommodation would make sense [today] and of course we would benefit from that … especially a grocery store or gas station,” he said. “I do think that’s a long-term wish.”
In a June interview with Perschbach, he said on-campus housing like that at Brooks, another former military base on the Southeast Side that closed in 2011, is not a priority for the Port. Instead, it focuses on attracting new business.
In some ways, the two former military installations, closed and then privatized, are similar. But there are some major differences, he said.
Not only did big retailers like H-E-B settle in nearby, but Brooks sells its property or provides long-term ground leases to businesses; the Port does not because of the kind of operations it houses.
The Port also maintains a great deal of its own infrastructure, Perschbach added, including streets, a historic district and aviation and real estate assets — which also make it a natural fit for defense industrial work and not as suitable for a live-work-play kind of development.
“It is difficult to build a bunch of housing right next to a runway where you’re doing F-16 training, for example,” he said.
Nevertheless, already Rocha is seeing what he calls residual benefits of the growth at Port SA, and it comes in the form of new faces passing through, such as a recreational cyclist he spotted recently.
Perschbach also urged council members to continue investing in the area.
“Investment corridors the same way that were developed around Southtown and the Pearl would be absolutely wonderful to see so that the wealth and the opportunities can grow into the communities beyond Port San Antonio as well,” he said.
But better roads and other infrastructure around an “inland port” like Port SA is a multifaceted challenge, Perschbach told the San Antonio Report.
Coordinating infrastructure upgrades requires input from not just the city, Bexar County and local utilities, but also Union Pacific railroad, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Texas Department of Transportation.
“The big takeaway is we really want to see a campus that is better integrated, first with the communities around us, and then with the city as a whole,” Perschbach said. “But when you start with a campus that was designed not to be integrated, we are redesigning those connection points.”
