Early last week, it was unclear if a long-awaited, large affordable housing project slated for San Antonio’s South Side would survive a tight federal deadline to close its financials.

The deadline to finalize the project’s financing contract was 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, said Pete Alanis, executive director of the San Antonio Housing Trust, a public agency that funds affordable housing projects. “We ended up closing the deal at 3:24 p.m.”

That just so happened to be the same week that the Trump administration issued a series of sweeping directives that froze and then unfroze federal funding. Over the roughly 48 hours that Acequia Trails’ future was in jeopardy, a network of individuals and agencies including the local housing authority rushed to rescue it.

The embattled plan to build The Commons at Acequia Trails — a 200-unit apartment complex for people who have experienced chronic homelessness — underwent a gauntlet of administrative and political challenges in recent years.

But after clearing its latest hurdle, construction can begin.

“This project is too important to the city of San Antonio, our homeless response system and all that we’re trying to do for this to die,” Alanis said this week. “Now it just needs to be built. … The easy part is building it.”

Acequia Trails, located in the Hot Wells Mission Reach neighborhood near the intersection of South Presa Street and Old Corpus Christi Road, is expected to open in about two years and be at full capacity by the end of 2027.

Financial packages for low-income housing projects are often complex and involve federal funding, which come with a host of red tape and deadlines, Alanis said.

Critics of the project, including Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Calvert (Pct. 4), successfully delayed both funding from Bexar County as well as a panel’s zoning change vote for the project in December 2023. When opposing the apartment complex, they often cited the area’s saturation of affordable housing projects and a lack of information about the project, which had been under development for years and approved in April 2023 as part of the City of San Antonio’s $150 million 2022 housing bond program.

Ultimately, the project’s zoning and Bexar County’s portion of funding was approved in March last year.

Acequia Trails would be the third single-site “permanent supportive housing” project in San Antonio, following Towne Twin Village on the East Side and Hudson Apartments on the North Side. This homelessness mitigation approach combines services like meals, addiction recovery and other counseling with housing for people who are chronically homeless and have a disabling physical or mental condition.

This kind of housing is aimed at providing sustainable housing for the community’s most vulnerable population — while relieving the pressure on overcrowded shelters and other resource providers in the city, said Nikisha Baker, SAMMinistries president and CEO.

“It has a significant impact on the people who will find housing and supportive services through The Commons of Acequia Trails, but it also has an impact on the system as a whole, and our ability to have all types of housing to meet the needs of everyone in our community,” said Baker, whose nonprofit owns and operates Hudson Apartments as well as Acequia Trails.

The nearly 7 acres that SAMMinistries purchased from Brooks Development Authority for Acequia Trails is a portion of a 55-acre tract of land that the nonprofit aims to acquire over the next decade or so. The master plan for the remaining property is nowhere near finalized, Baker said, but it could include a public park, human services additional housing and employment opportunities for Acequia Trail residents.

“For the community to continue to support something like this, we will need to demonstrate positive outcomes,” she said, adding that once the community gets familiar with what permanent supportive housing is and does, SAMMinistries can build out the vision for the rest of the property.

So, about last week

The construction of Acequia Trails is expected to cost about $47.8 million, coming from loans, bonds, tax credits and city pandemic recovery funds as well as contributions from Bexar County and the Housing Trust, according to Alanis.

Even before the federal funding freeze was announced last Monday, which sent many agencies and nonprofits into a panic, the project’s financial closing was dependent on an subsidy approval from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for 80 project-based vouchers.

That approval wasn’t expected to come until February, so Alanis worked with Opportunity Home San Antonio, the local HUD-funded housing authority, to essentially promise that the vouchers would come through and that the Housing Trust would be on the hook for that funding in the meantime.

But then came the funding freeze.

The freeze placed the project’s $7.5 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding into question — just two days before the deadline. The Housing Trust could take responsibility for the vouchers or the ARPA funding, but not both, Alanis said.

“There’s no guarantee that $7.5 million is going to be there … to pay the contractors,” he said. So the bank and tax credit equity investors pulled out of the Acequia Trails deal.

“We had to scramble to find a way to keep the project moving forward,” he said.

After a flurry of phone calls between the Housing Trust, city officials, Opportunity Home and the local HUD office, HUD ultimately approved the vouchers by the closing deadline so that the Trust could instead guarantee the $7.5 million. That satisfied the bank and investors, who came back on board.

“Everybody turned heaven and earth amidst all of this chaos that was happening” to get the funding contract finalized, Alanis said.

Hours before the deadline, the federal freeze was rescinded on Wednesday and Alanis said he was able to switch the financial package back to include the ARPA dollars before signing on the dotted line.

“It was probably the most stressful day I’ve ever had,” he said.

When it was over, it was “time for a nice glass of wine.”