Mayor Ivy Taylor’s signature comprehensive planning initiative, SA Tomorrow, could become a transformative action plan by the time it is completed next year if elected officials summon the political strength to do two things: Stop incentivizing sprawl and dramatically increase incentives for urban core and downtown development.
Such a dramatic shift in San Antonio’s tectonic plates would herald a new era, one even more ambitious than former Mayor Julían Castro’s Decade of Downtown. Such a visible pivot would generate considerable positive media and attention outside the city, something San Antonio’s recent deal with GM Financial for back office jobs here will not do.
More importantly, it would align all other initiatives with the goal of slowing sprawl and speeding up development of a national-class downtown. That would include the priorities set for the 2017 City Bond, and it might even generate enough public interest and pressure to grow the bond’s current anticipated size from $750 million to something closer to $1 billion.
Such a move might risk the City’s AAA Bond rating, but the increased interest payments that would come with a slight downgrade would be dwarfed by the economic activity sparked by an extra $250 million in inner city infrastructure investment.
A city and its leadership so hyper focused on such a major downtown initiative inevitably would turn its attention to the state of public schools and the role that school districts and higher education can play in building a better city or acting as a drag on progress.
Right now public education remains an Achilles’ heel for San Antonio, but the initial success of Pre-K 4 SA, the significant growth and improvement at UTSA and the Alamo Colleges over the last decade, and the arrival of an ambitious and visionary superintendent to head the San Antonio Independent School District, are all factors that make profound change possible if the political will and the financial resources can be mustered.
Cynics might snicker at the notion that San Antonio’s inner city public schools can be dramatically improved under Martinez, but there is only one 2015 National Blue Ribbon School in Bexar County recognized by the Department of Education and that is SAISD’s Young Women’s Leadership Academy.
The district also has a good story to tell about its other in-district charter school and magnet schools. While Martinez is challenging every principal at every campus to elevate education outcomes, what SAISD most obviously lacks is a destination high school, a Bronx High School of Science, a Boston Latin School, or a Michael DeBakey High School for Health Professionals in the Houston ISD. All three of those nationally ranked inner city campuses serve large, mostly minority student bodies.
Who would pay for such a high school here? It’s in our shared interests for all of us to pay. New approaches to community investment in education would have to occur, and that won’t be easy, but it did happen with Pre-K 4 SA, and if elected officials will stress that the health and vitality of downtown is key to prospects for the entire city, such investment will be an easier sell.
Bexar County used tax dollars to pay for $85 million of the $111 million in recent upgrades to the AT&T Arena, and there was hardly a peep of protest, even though the upgrades benefitted primarily the team and its season ticket holders. No one pretends such investment generates a significant return on investment or spurs other economic activity. The only explanation is that the Spurs unite people in San Antonio in a way that perhaps only the military can match. We did it because it was feasible.
If public officials can find that kind of money to invest in a 13-year-old sports arena, surely they can navigate the legalities and politics of joining with the City and other tax-supported bodies to declare an all-out push to elevate our public schools and build a high performance high school downtown.
The same kind of push needs to occur to elevate UTSA to Tier One status. A major city without a Tier One public university is not a first tier city. This observation takes away nothing from what the city’s four private universities contribute to society, but the overwhelming size of UTSA versus the private schools make it an imperative to make it a destination university.
Even if San Antonio makes a super-human push to improve its schools, it still will have to redefine economic development. The City Council has to find ways to invest more aggressively in infrastructure to make the city a better place to live and work.
By the City staff’s own reckoning, we have a $1.1 billion deficit in sidewalk construction and maintenance. As badly maintained as the inner city’s sidewalks are, most of that deficit stems from the number of neighborhoods with streets where there are no sidewalks.
The deficit for street repair and maintenance is even higher at $1.7 billion.
There you have 2.7 billion reasons why every arriving company should pay its fair share of taxes. Every tax break means the rest of us are paying a disproportionately higher tax bill. And when we incentivize companies that want to build in the suburbs rather than the core city, it means the rest of us are paying higher taxes to support sprawl. Money that should be invested in the city is instead spent supporting distant new development and all its attendant costs.
The demand for project inclusion in the 2017 City Bond will probably be five times the stated $750 million target. One reason we cannot meet all our city’s basic needs now is that our tax base is too small to cover all the streets, sidewalks and other pubic works projects in our general operating budget. We simply do not have the bond capacity to make up for that and match the ever-accumulating needs.
That’s another reason not to spread the money over a city artificially expanded by new annexation. We all know the city is going to grow by one million people by 2040 if projections hold. Are we simply going to map future sprawl, or are we going to act on that information and take control of our own destiny?
All economic development strategies should include investment in education outcomes. We can’t import all the educated workers we need. We have to grow them, and after we do, we have give them a livable city, a compelling reason to stay here.
Last week’s announcement that the Department of Housing & Urban Development, led by Secretary Julián Castro, will provide the San Antonio Housing Authority with $7 million over the next four years to enroll public housing project residents in job training programs is a noble endeavor. Unfortunately, the history of such federal job training programs is not good. Individuals who lack a high school diploma and the basic math and literacy skills that are supposed to come along with that achievement, show a very low return on such investment.
It will take 16-20 years to show dramatic results if we start now with our pre-K population and give the next generation of San Antonians tye education options and support not available to the generations who have come before them. Everyone in San Antonio should see a good education as a human right, like the right to ample food and good nutrition.
When we start to see it that way, and show a willingness to make education spending a priority, San Antonio will become a different city, one that doesn’t have to pay companies to bring hourly wage jobs here. We will be too busy creating better social and economic opportunities for our population. Companies will then want to move here or expand here for all the right reasons.
*Top image: Students participate in The Hour of Code pop-up classroom as team member Andrew McCurdy supervises during STEM Week in San Antonio, Nov. 17, 2015. Photo by Scott Ball.
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There is a lot of potential for urban growth, mixing the idea with education needs is interesting. Though I often worry about a young millennial group moving downtown with hopes of having a family and them having an opportunity to raise a family downtown, only to be priced out 10 years from now, much like what has happened in Austin, where AISD has actually shrunk and surrounding towns ISD’s are booming due to the urban core being full. Finding a balance will be an interesting task…
Yes, it takes a super human push to get any public college to Tier 1. Maybe what the city should do create a livable city first? Doing so may get those San Antonians who have already graduated from a Tier 1 school to consider moving home.
Having taught at the elementary level and personally struggled to get my college degrees due to my lack of interest in my high school curriculum, I realize that solving the education issue is difficult. I’ve known teachers who can motivate and control the most apathetic students, but many, if not most, teachers struggle with trying to educate an unruly and inattentive classroom with little support from administration and even less parental support. To me, the parental involvement and support in their kid’s education is the answer to our education woes.
Regarding the city, I have thought of taking my video camera and filming the trash and debris on the city’s roads and medians. It is disgraceful. Where is the leadership to clean the city up and create a reserve of funds to fix all the problems with our sidewalks and roadways. In my opinion, the reason that deferred maintenance does not get funded or funded enough each year is that it provides no immediate benefits to the elected leaders.
It will take committed city leadership, support from businesses, and support from San Antonio citizens to develop a downtown destination where people want to live instead of move away from.
Spot on Ken.
I teach elementary and majority of the time it’s like you’re trying to teach the parents how to be a parent! I tell parents their child didn’t have their homework, no reading log filled out and signed by a parent, behavior calendar not signed, they were disrupting class and/or did little to no classroom work all day, and parents just shrug their shoulders. I had many students miss school to go Christmas shopping with mom and miss the whole last week before Christmas break to go on vacation early.
You have to change the culture and mind set of families within the boundaries of SAISD.
I can keep on going, but I’d just be wasting my time.
Sir Nigel,
To be fair, yes, many parents can do better, but many teachers can too. Ihave two in elementary and its a night and day experience when a teacher does a good job of letting parents know what’s going on. I’ve seen many teachers that have no discernible communication system with parents, lose turned in homework, don’t check their school email or return calls, don’t follow up with parents, give kids excessive home work, frequently rely on the kid to tell their parents whats going on, don’t stick to their lesson plan…..I could go on.
Mel, I taught elementary special ed and fourth grade. Special ed was not too difficult because my classes were small and I was not the student’s primary teacher. When I took over a fourth grade class (one year) it was the hardest job I have had in my long working life. I worked in SAISD and I may have received one or two inquiries from parents about their child’s education and it was very difficult to schedule a conference with the parents. I only worked as a teacher for three years and quickly departed that career. I agree there are no excuses for not responding to emails, but teachers no longer receive the support they used to due to budgetary cuts and administrators generally turn a blind eye to discipline issues. Without classroom aides, the student to teacher ratio needs to be reduced. Most teachers, in my opinion, do the best they can with the resources given, and if I had the involvement, such as yours, from the parents of the kids I taught, my job would have been much easier and the kids more successful.
There is already a revolution in K-12 education underway through the growth of open enrollment public charter schools. Improvements in San Antonio ISD schools would be a welcome complement to that development.
Would be interesting to start a San Antonio Good Neighbor Next Door program to incentivize teachers to move down to these downtown areas. Right now the HUD federal program is pretty limited
Why are we so hellbent on being a “tier one city”?
I left Houston and chose to live in San Antonio over Austin and Dallas/FtW, precisely because of what San Antonio is now. Sure SA can be improved (namely all facets of transportation, obesity, and public schools), but “tier one cities” have more crime, traffic, high prices, less affordable housing, ridiculous crowds everywhere, and partying and drunken college kids taking over the nightlife. The day SA becomes Austin, Houston, or Dallas is the day I leave SA for a big “small town”.
Urban core living for families sucks in general everywhere, not just SA. It’s only the very wealthy, very poor, or college kids that live in urban cores of most major cities.
Sorry, but I hate the idea of tax incentives for pretty much any company. And I also believe that public schools can do much better with the dollars they already have, such as getting rid of educators that suck or coast and incentivizing performance and cost efficiencies.
The ideas brought forth are noble but I am skeptical that a change is even politically feasible. Trying to convince the majority of San Antonians that live outside of SAISD’s boundaries that raising taxes to rehab the district would be a really hard sell. If we find ways to locate large employers into the inner city than those tax dollars will automatically flow to SAISD. It should be noted that large companies move to the suburbs not because they necessarily want to avoid inner city locations but rather are not able to find large tracts of easily accessible real estate to house 500 employees. If the city wants to incentivize large developments in the inner city than it needs to find ways to find them the real estate they need downtown and help them make it easy to develop. Unfortunately every time such a plan is introduced it is defeated because no one wants to offer tax incentives and give up the potential property tax base and take funds away from SAISD’s coffers and/or it is defeated because locals are concerned about gentrification. Not sure how you overcome these two historical objections in a fractured political climate.
No amount of money will compensate for the fact that bad parents and bad parenting (my all-encompassing term for those that don’t care, don’t know, can’t and won’t) foster bad outcomes in education.
You don’t need new buildings, ipads, special programs and the like to get a good education. First and foremost, you have to care. Stop looking for the easy-button of feel-good spending and realize the actual problems are far more nuanced, far harder to solve and a lot uglier at their root cause.
These articles are starting to all feel the same….maybe someone needs a vacation!
Ryan, I agree with your points of view. We blame teachers and administrators for not providing a good education and implement “reforms” to ensure no child is left behind. The American education system created some pretty smart people prior to “no child left behind” who helped create the industrial revolution, the nuclear bomb, and put a man on the moon. I strongly believe the problem is not the teachers, administrators, or the American educational system but the students and the parents. I understand the ideal of wanting everyone to obtain a good education. The problem is we are focusing resources and “solutions” towards the system (which is not the problem) and little towards holding parents and students accountable for obtaining a good education (which is the problem).
Mel, I don’t think San Antonio should necessarily try to be Austin, Dallas, Houston, or San Francisco. But there are quite a few other cities in the US such as Salt Lake City, Raleigh/Durham, Kansas City, Boulder, Columbus, Tampa, and Nashville that have vibrant entrepreneurial scenes and livable downtowns. In a knowledge-based economy, those are some of the cities that San Antonio can’t afford to fall behind.
These comments make me wonder what San Antonio leadership has been focusing on for past 20 years. Has it just been tourism? I also wonder what major companies have come to San Antonio (not those created in San Antonio) and left S.A. over the past 20 years. I know AT&T left but not sure why.
Our downtown is half vacant…with mostly 1 and 2 story buildings. If we built UP an UNDERGROUND, like in Europe…we too could see families being raised in high rises without needing a car. Only in America has “raising a family” become synonymous with “suburbs.”
“we too could see families being raised in high rises without needing a car”
Maybe that’s the world that you want to live in, but putting my family in a high-rise is a hell I want to avoid. Note: I don’t live in the “suburbs” either.
Taking the “underground” is largely a requirement of many, not a choice of the few, due to the costs associated with having and parking a car. Those with means don’t always dispense with car ownership, even though they could…because they don’t want to.
I don’t view mass-transit as a litmus test of progress in our city. Lets fill downtown with workers first, make the traffic worse, and then solve a real problem, rather than building a mee-too public transit system useful to few.