Commentaries at the San Antonio Report provide space for our community to share perspectives and offer solutions to pressing local issues. The views expressed in this commentary belong to the author alone.
You can almost set your clock to these stories. With uncanny regularity, some editor from a big publication reaches out to a reporter in Texas with a story idea: The city of San Antonio is booming. But it’s still really poor. Why is that? Let’s cover it!
And off the reporter goes. They talk to the current mayor, and the one before that, and the one before that, sometimes reaching all the way back to Henry Cisneros. They talk to longtime activists and local academics. They visit the historic West Side, which has one of the highest poverty rates in the state. They admire the taquerias and the murals. They talk to new residents who moved here for relative affordability. Then they talk to longtime residents who are not making ends meet even as they work two or three jobs.
They publish a story like this, which came out in The New York Times a couple weeks ago.
Or a story like this, which the Texas Monthly published 18 months ago.
As those almost-identical headlines indicate, these stories basically tell the same story about San Antonio. So does this New York Times story on affordable housing from 2023, and this other 2021 New York Times story on downtown development. So does this viral 2020 photo capturing the day 10,000 cars showed up to the San Antonio Food Bank in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
The local press here issues their own fresh takes on poverty every now and then. I still remember one of the first San Antonio Express-News headlines I noticed upon moving to town a decade ago: “Once again, San Antonio leads on inequality.”
All this coverage is the same big story: San Antonio has old money pockets and new money pockets, but also lots of little-to-no-money pockets. Why hasn’t all our economic uplift actually lifted people up?
Old timers in San Antonio — and one of the resources San Antonio is very rich in is elders — will tell you that we’ve come a long way over the course of their lifetimes. I talked to a bunch of them when I first moved here and was reporting on poverty myself, and I got to know some of their stories. Within their living memory, their urban core neighborhoods did not have running water or electricity. Massive imbalances in public school funding between affluent and low-income districts were both normal and legal. They could not vote for representatives of their own districts. Many sections of the West Side, East SIde, and South Side did not have paved streets or sidewalks. One East Side resident told me the city did not see fit to improve the roads in her neighborhood until the San Antonio Spurs built their stadium nearby in 2002. (Note: that’s this century.)
None of this progress — or rather, basic justice — happened on its own. No natural economic tide saw to the rising of all boats. The elders who say we’ve come a long way can say that because they made it happen. They brought the city’s attention to the conditions they were living in. San Antonio has an incredible history of community action — regular folks joining their voices to demand that the public investment always flowing northward into the new and affluent Anglo neighborhoods also flow in their direction. They organized and planned and built coalitions and got laws passed and policies changed.
They are still at work. And their work is the work of economic and neighborhood development. Development does not just look like cranes in the sky and big businesses moving to town. It looks like people calling on their city to invest in the places where it’s under-invested.
I was at a public event recently where some bright young people were on a stage talking about the ongoing problems of economic and racial segregation in San Antonio. An elder stood up at one point and started making the point I’m describing above — that in recent decades we’ve made some headway in addressing poverty and inequality. He was one of the people who participated in the community organizing movements of the 1960s, 70s, 80s that led to structural improvements across town.
A few people began to boo him — assuming, I suppose, that he was trying to tell the young folks to stop complaining. But as he continued, it was clear that he wasn’t saying that our problems are behind us. He was agreeing that they are very much still with us — but also telling the bright young people that we know how to address them. We have to do what the elders did. We have to be both visionary and strategic. We have to work across lines of race and class and perspective to sustain and strengthen neighborhoods.
That man is holding a different story about San Antonio. The one the media is telling by looking at the big economic picture is pretty similar to the one that the bright young people were telling that night: San Antonio has enormous wealth and opportunity combined with enormous poverty, and the economic divides run along racial lines. And that story is true. But it’s also true that the very people who have been pushed down have long been pushing back, building up, finding ways to preserve what they have and improve upon it.
From time to time, they’ve made big surges, had significant victories, raised both the floor and the ceiling of San Antonio — reshaping what is and what is possible.
You can dive into some of their stories by visiting places like American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions, Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, the Mexican American Civil Rights Institute, and the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum. I’ve only lived here a decade. I can’t lay much claim to San Antonio’s story myself. I’m plenty sober about how hard it is to create real and lasting change — to cultivate a new story. But I’m also plenty sick of seeing the same headlines about San Antonio. I want to align with our elders in helping people see how far we’ve come while also building imagination about how much farther we can go together.
