Officials on Wednesday made headway in decoding San Antonio’s looming housing crisis, through a robust panel discussion about the lack of affordable housing for families and displacement.
Hosted by the San Antonio Report and H.E. Butt Foundation, the live news event featured Mayor Ron Nirenberg, San Antonio Housing Commissioner Nikki Johnson, CEO of Opportunity Home Michael Reyes and Christine Drennon, associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Trinity University, who dissected the various housing challenges San Antonio faces at the Whitley Event Center.
The H.E. Butt Foundation presented a clip from a documentary, “Everyone Needs a Home,” which highlighted how San Antonio got to where it is today — with families evicted due to foreclosure on their homes or companies buying up large swaths of the housing stock to make a profit.
“There are forces at play that are taking stock out of our affordable housing space that really are not serving its purpose to actually put people in homes, that are creating cost pressures,” Nirenberg said. “There’s a supply issue at all levels of affordability.”
Panelists agreed that San Antonio’s housing issue leads to economic insecurity within families. Addressing the crisis would be expensive, they said, and it will take efforts like working together to reframe the narrative surrounding public housing and implementing more transit-based development to allow workers to travel into the inner city.
“The reality is, here in San Antonio, we have a crisis level of housing insecurity, but we also have a community that’s committed and aligned, and a housing framework that we got started ahead of the pandemic that we’ve been able to resource with all of the federal legislation that’s come down as a result of this terrible event,” Nirenberg said.
The panel happened days after plans to relocate residents from the Soap Factory apartments near a planned $160 million minor league baseball stadium drew public backlash. City Council will vote on the development Thursday.
Removing the stigma surrounding affordable housing, combatting the “not in my backyard” mentality and realizing that housing affordability affects everyone is essential to San Antonio’s development, panelists said.
“It’s your distant cousin who lost their job and can’t pay their rent. It’s your aunt who is deciding to pay groceries or her rent or her mortgage,” Johnson said. “They could be you at any given moment.
… I promise you, we need to really reframe how we’re thinking about affordable housing and who it’s for. It’s for the person you really don’t think it’s for.”
