The videos — or reels, in Instagram parlance — feature small businesses along North St. Mary’s Street, with close-ups of their food and drink offerings mixed with interior shots of each location.
Some have a musical soundtrack, others feature the voiceover of local social media influencer Chris Flores of Eatmigos Creations, who waxes poetic about each bite he takes. Video shots of North St. Mary’s Street show nary an orange cone in site.
“Don’t be scared, construction is over!” Flores says in one reel. “I’m inviting you take part in the Strip revival!” he says in another. Each post is tagged with the hashtag #striprevivalkickoff.
The social media campaign is the work of District 1 Councilwoman Sukh Kaur’s office, which is trying to let residents know that the St. Mary’s Strip is open, that street and sidewalk construction is truly complete.
“So many people, when they think of St. Mary’s they just cringe, thinking of the construction,” said Kaur on Tuesday afternoon at the Paper Tiger, a live music venue on the Strip. Her office had organized a National Night Out party there.
Today, everything is open, and traffic is returning. “The fact that we can just drive to Strip, park on the street, go get lunch and leave in 45 minutes is awesome,” she said.
Yet as one business district works to emerge from more than two years of torn-up streets and barricades another, just a few miles to the south, is now grappling with the city’s latest disruptive construction project, and some proprietors are wary.
Communication is hard
Kaur rode a wave of discontent into office from small businesses and residents who believed the city had not communicated the delays or acknowledged the impacts of the almost $12 million Strip project, which began in spring 2021. It was supposed to wrap up the following October, but dragged on until this summer, crippling many businesses already hard hit by pandemic closures.
“The biggest thing I heard on the campaign trail was how difficult it was for the community to learn what was happening with these infrastructure projects,” Kaur said. She hired two staffers with expertise in infrastructure and construction who meet regularly with the city’s Public Works Department, and her office has worked to make communication about the many construction projects in her district a centerpiece of her constituent services.
Even still, her office was initially caught off guard by the reaction of some small businesses in Southtown to the news that two blocks of South Alamo Street would be closed to through traffic for several weeks.
On Sept. 21, her office — along with hundreds of others in and around the impacted area — received an email from the city’s Public Works Department alerting them that two intersections along César Chávez Boulevard would be closed for construction, at Santa Rosa and at South Alamo streets. Both areas have been under construction for months, and in each case, the intersection closures were the latest phase of larger projects.
The next day, Kaur’s two construction-focused staffers attended their standing virtual meeting with Public Works, during which city officials say the closures were discussed. The following Monday, the city put out a press release, which resulted in local media coverage.
But it wasn’t until three Southtown business owners took to social media to complain about the project that Kaur’s phone began to ring with panicked calls. Some had spoken to a city official who went door-to-door in the area on Sept. 18 to share information about the project; others had received informational flyers the city distributed, but told the San Antonio Report they didn’t understand the extent of the potential disruption.
One of those who posted on the website formerly known as Twitter was Aaron Peña, who lived the St. Mary’s Strip nightmare first-hand. He closed Squeezebox, his once-successful nightclub, over the summer, citing insurmountable losses.
Peña decamped to Southtown, opening two new bars on South St. Mary’s Street, which will pick up the traffic detoured from South Alamo. Learning of the construction just last week, he broadcast his mistrust, accusing the city of lying about its communication efforts and suggesting the construction would last far longer than officials have estimated.
And while several businesses along South Alamo said they received the city’s communications and had their questions answered, the social media posts heightened the tension and confusion for others.
“Everybody’s afraid that what happened to St. Mary’s is going to be the same situation here,” said Efren Moreno, owner of Blush Restaurant and Bakery, which opened six months ago.
Lingering trauma
Kaur said she wasn’t surprised by the reaction.
“I’m an educator, right? And when a student experiences a traumatic incident, it colors everything that happens after that. So if I’m traumatized by whatever thing happens around me, I’m going to be triggered so much easier,” she said. “We need to know these businesses have faced real trauma.”
The restaurant and bar business is a precarious one, operating on thin margins in the best of times. San Antonio’s restaurants and bars are just now staggering out of the second hottest summer on record, battered by the ongoing labor shortage, an increase in costs and customers not always willing to cut them slack.
Rod Sanchez, the assistant city manager who oversees Public Works, acknowledged the duress many establishments remain under.
“It’s a tough time, and a lot of the folks we’re communicating with are some of the hardest hit by the pandemic,” he said. “So I understand where they’re coming from. All we can do is communicate — communicate early, communicate often.”
Public Works, which in May announced improvements to the ways it communicates bond and construction projects to the public and the City Council, had tried to over-communicate on this project, another city official said.
Three weeks before the César Chávez intersection work was to begin, the department launched a communications and traffic plan that began with the Sept. 8 “downtown safety and construction update” meeting, where residents and business get updates on the many downtown construction projects underway.
The plan included a combination of in-person visits to small businesses, emails, media outreach and paid social media. The intersection work was broken into two phases, in an attempt to keep some traffic flowing into Southtown on South Alamo. Public works even tweaked the timing of traffic lights in an effort to move traffic more quickly to the detour routes.
What the city could not do, Sanchez said, was delay the work. That request was made by several business owners, who pointed out that fall is their busiest season, and this year offers an opportunity to make up for crushing losses over the summer.
Their biggest fear is that the disruption and detours will keep people away from the very events they are counting on to bring traffic and business to the area, such as Luminaria, MuertosFest and UTSA football games.
But the intersection work is part of the larger, $43 million South Alamo 2017 bond project, which will create a multimodal parkway with new lighting and landscaping, plus drainage and utilities work. That work must be completed before the NCAA Men’s Final Four comes to town in April 2025, Sanchez said.
Kaur praised the city’s communication efforts while also acknowledging that more can be done. For example, she suggested segmenting the in-person outreach to different times of the day, to catch businesses that don’t open until later in the day.
And she said her office is now doing the kind of work she set it up to do. Staffers will be visiting the neighborhood and talking to businesses. They’re creating a large sign with businesses’ logos that will go on César Chávez to let residents and visitors know the area remains open for business. They’re creating an FAQ “to make sure our community knows what is happening even as the project progresses,” she said.
The only way to rebuild trust, Kaur said, “is slowly. Every time we do a project, we’ve got to do what we say we’re going to do in the time we say we’re going to do it. And then they’ll start to believe us, a little bit more each time.”
