In a wide-ranging discussion about the future of downtown San Antonio on Monday, a powerhouse panel of leaders agreed the city has emerged from both the “Decade of Downtown” and a global pandemic with a positive outlook.
“There are very few big cities in this country that are doing it as well as San Antonio so we’re at a really important moment,” said City Manager Erik Walsh, at a CityFest panel hosted by the San Antonio Report at Texas Public Radio.
The first event of CityFest San Antonio 2024, the panel was moderated by Robert Rivard, co-founder of the Report and host of the bigcitysmalltown podcast. “It’s, in my opinion, a very exciting inflection point in our city’s downtown history,” Rivard said.
A new ballpark is on the table and talk of a new basketball arena is growing louder. Thousands of new residential units have been built or are in the works. Transit options are set to grow.
The University of Texas at San Antonio is expanding downtown, constructing new buildings and acquiring many others while working toward its goal of bringing 10,000 students to the urban core by 2028.
A member of the university leadership team participating in the panel said Monday that it could move the UTSA School of Architecture into a River Walk office building that USAA vacated and sold post-Covid.
“We can imagine that happening very soon,” said Veronica Salazar, executive vice president for business affairs and chief enterprise development officer at UTSA. She added that architectural firms could share the space allowing students to get workforce experience.
In fact, there’s a lot to imagine about downtown with much of it already in motion and evident in roadwork and construction cranes and opportunities the size of acres to grow and develop.
Here’s what the panel had to say.
‘We are at a tipping point.’
Centro San Antonio President and CEO Trish DeBerry said San Antonio is poised to recover in ways other major metropolitan areas are not because the city’s leaders are collaborating.
“I have never seen, as long as I’ve worked in downtown, the kind of partnership that we have with all entities, creating an energy ecosystem to, excuse my French, get shit done,” she said, adding good things are happening. “That is what we needed to have done for a very long time.
“We are at a tipping point the likes of which I’ve never seen,” DeBerry said.
DeBerry said working together is resulting in development that will bookend downtown, with a ballpark on one side and potentially a new Spurs arena on the near East Side, and stimulate more vibrancy across the city.
“We are never again going to see the kind of renaissance for downtown that I think we are about to witness,” she said.
DeBerry also pointed to UTSA’s pending merger with UT Health San Antonio and its strategic moves in downtown, with San Pedro I and II, the Southwest School of Art and, recently, the acquisition of an office building also as impactful on the city’s core.
UTSA is now working with a master planning firm to think through development surrounding its San Antonio campuses, including student housing, Salazar said.
“The opportunities are endless for us,” Salazar said, the merger with UT Health San Antonio making UTSA the third-largest institution in the state.
Rivard introduced David Robinson Jr., development manager at Weston Urban, by saying, “if UTSA is the most important public player in the future of downtown, Weston Urban is the most important private player.”
The developer has hundreds of residential units under development in the urban core, with a goal of 10,000 units in the next 10 years, in addition to its downtown office buildings, including the Rand Building and Frost Tower.
“All the construction that happens in downtown is a good thing,” especially in terms of growing a tax base, said Robinson, who holds a master’s degree in urban and regional planning. San Antonio is in a unique position in that its population is growing.
“So the question is, how do we capitalize that environment where the city can continue to grow and thrive,” he said. “I think that starts with our residents and our residential housing base, particularly in the urban core. We’re thinking hard about activation and activators, but the larger goal is [building] as much housing as possible over the next decade.”
‘Remember, nothing’s free.’
Andres Andujar, president and CEO of Hemisfair, said he’s optimistic about downtown San Antonio and Hemisfair, a center-city park project that’s been under development through public and private dollars since before the first phase opened in 2015.
But big ideas require big funding. “Architects learn in school that form follows function,” he said. “We have learned that form follows funding.”
More residents in the area who eat and shop there help contribute to Hemisfair’s bottom line, which, in turn, allows the organization to host free events, like last weekend’s Muertos Fest, that “activate” downtown for everyone who lives in San Antonio.
“Remember, nothing’s free — in fact, beware of the high cost of free things,” Andujar said.
In addition to the hotel and multifamily projects underway at Hemisfair’s Civic Park, in the coming months, it expects to open Source Plaza, an entry point for foot traffic designed to connect the park to Alamo Plaza.
Another similar but more complex link could be created on the park’s eastern quadrant, he said, where some say a new Spurs arena could be built if the hulking and vacant building that formerly housed the UTSA Institute of Texan Cultures is razed.
Everyone is ‘leaning in.’
But Walsh focused his talk more directly on improving the city’s convention center and the proposed minor league baseball venue than on the details of a future new home for the Spurs.
He is especially proud of the deal that could result in a new ballpark and new residential development in the northwest quadrant of downtown — and the dealmakers: “Everyone wants to be part of the winning team,” Walsh said, adding, the developer Weston Urban, “put their money where their mouth’s at.”
“Everyone up here, and those that aren’t here, are all leaning in and managing their own risk and being involved and leaning on other entities,” he said. “It was a good exercise to go through and I think it’s a good template that we can use more.”
As for the Alamodome, there needs to be a broader vision for the aging arena, but also investment in the Henry B. González Convention Center and hotel rooms for meeting visitors, he said.
“We’re competing with newer facilities, and so we’re going to have to make an investment that — we know that,” Walsh said. “So we’re going through the feasibility to lay out to the council, what are the options.”
That plan will be presented in the next couple of weeks, he said. “I’ll tell you right now … there isn’t enough money to do everything that needs to be done.”
But if it works out, and property and private equity is leveraged, then “you get two new corners of downtown 10 years from now,” he said. “That’s huge.”
