The City of San Antonio has selected another 14 affordable housing projects to receive $32.1 million from the local housing bond and some federal grants.
If approved, the funding would be used toward building or rehabilitating more than 2,100 housing units in the coming years. The projects were presented to City Council on Wednesday.
“I would argue there’s only one thing that supersedes excitement of the Spurs getting the No. 1 draft pick — and it’s this presentation,” Councilwoman Teri Castillo (D5) said. “Everyone deserves access to quality, safe, affordable housing.”
City Council is slated to vote on the latest batch of projects on June 8.
They were selected through a competitive bidding process and include six new “shovel-ready” affordable housing apartment projects, five apartment rehabilitation projects and three homeownership projects.
A citizen-led committee last year developed spending guidelines for the housing bond to prioritize San Antonio’s most vulnerable, cost-burdened and low-income populations.
Nearly 20% of the housing units to be built or preserved with this batch are considered affordable to someone earning 30% of the area median income (AMI). For an individual, that’s about $17,500; for a family of three, it’s about $25,000. Households earning 80% of AMI, which for an individual is about $46,700, would be eligible for the homeownership opportunities.
All units that receive city funding or incentives are required to accept housing vouchers.
The voter-approved $150 million housing bond was crafted to address the needs and strategies included in the city’s 2021 housing plan, which identified the need to build or preserve over 28,000 affordable housing units over the next 10 years.
The bulk of the funding for the batch City Council reviewed on Wednesday comes from the housing bond, which voters approved in May last year. Nearly $4.7 million comes from various federal housing programs.
This is the third batch of housing bond money and federal funding to be allocated. The first $44 million batch, which also included apartment construction and homeownership opportunities, was awarded in December. The second was approved last month and partially funded three different permanent supportive housing projects for people experiencing homelessness.
In all, the bond will leverage an estimated $808 million in public and private funding, said Veronica Garcia, director of the city’s housing department.
“Each project also had a nonprofit partner involved and they’re all leveraging their own private funding sources,” Garcia said.
One of the renovation projects reviewed Wednesday has a component that’s rarely implemented in San Antonio.
If approved by the council, Riverside Terrace Manufactured Home Community would represent the first time the city has directly invested in a project where residents have shared ownership of the land through a limited equity co-op.
Instead of owning both the home and the property it is built on, co-op owners, who live onsite, would own the property collectively while individuals own only their home. The structure is similar to that of a community land trust, ensuring decisions about the property are made by the residents and providing long term affordability through income restrictions.
Riverside Terrace, located on the South Side near the Mission Reach of the San Antonio River, has 46 occupied mobile homes and eight vacant lots for future home sites.
Resident Owned Communities USA, a New Hampshire-based organization, plans to purchase Riverside, working with current residents to set up a co-op entity that would own the land, making infrastructure improvements and assisting with ongoing technical assistance and maintenance.
The organization, which has helped establish more than 300 resident corporations in 21 states, helps residents set up the legal structure and a board of directors, said Garcia. “They really provide all the technical assistance they need so they truly know how to be owners of the property,” she said.
The city will invest more than $3 million in the project through the housing bond to help pay for infrastructure and renovation costs and provide fee waivers. About half of that comes from a special category of bond funding that was set aside for more “creative” uses to further the goals of the 10-year affordable housing plan, Garcia said.
Those creative strategies could be other land trusts or an incentive package for homeowners to build accessory dwelling units, Garcia said. Council also could decide to use that money — more than $15 million — to implement a city program or go through another competitive bidding process.
“We’d go through a community input process to design any new programs or policies and then funding recommendations for those will be brought to council for separate consideration,” Garcia said.
Correction: Garcia initially described the Riverside Terrace project as a community land trust. This article has been updated to correctly refer to the project as a limited equity co-op.
