By far the best thing about Vivian Childress’ renovated apartment is the central air conditioning, she said, fanning herself while she sat in the bustling lobby of the Victoria Plaza Apartments on Wednesday.
“Before, we had one window unit to cool the whole apartment. … It wasn’t enough,” said Childress, 61, who finally got to move back to Victoria Plaza this summer with her 14-year-old chihuahua Gingersnap. The balcony at her front door provides a frameable view of the Tower of the Americas and downtown San Antonio.
Every resident and their dogs in the 185-unit, nine-story tower were temporarily relocated in 2018 — using spaces in other public housing projects and housing vouchers — while the historic structure underwent a nearly $21 million renovation.
Thirty of the former residents have now returned to live at the tower. As a public housing project, Victoria Plaza houses very low-income seniors and people living with disabilities. The housing is subsidized by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development through the local housing authority, known as Opportunity Home.
Childress and Gingersnap are happy to be back home, she said. “I’m loving it.”
She’s looking forward to checking out the new, in-house clinic that offers psychosocial rehabilitative services, case management and life skills training like benefit navigation and resume writing.
“I’m dying to check it out and find out what’s going on,” said Childress, who is disabled and does not have a car. “It will be very helpful, because a lot of us — we can’t get around.”
The clinic, operated by the Center for Health Care Services (CHCS), will be open Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. It’s located on the ground floor of the tower in what was once an apartment.
Anthony Arismendez, 66, first moved to Victoria Plaza with his service dog Cheyenne in July. He has already been receiving care from CHCS for nine years related to post-traumatic stress disorder and is relieved that he can now receive mental health care by walking less than 100 feet from the front door.
“It’s my first time living in one of these affordable [housing projects],” he said as Cheyenne curled up at his feet. “And I’ll tell you what, it’s made life a lot easier.”
The clinic will serve tenants by appointment or they can just walk in, said Sergio Ramirez, a CHCS in-house clinic supervisor.
It’s the first time a public housing authority and a local mental health authority in Texas have come together to create a housing model for residents to have on-site access to mental health care, Ramirez said.
While the clinic likely only has enough space and capacity for the tenants, Ramirez said neighbors are welcome to stop by. “We want to give them the correct [phone] numbers, as well as the correct addresses to start receiving services.”
The lobby of Victoria Plaza is not typically warm, Childress said. But a steady stream of visitors were coming in and out of the building all morning to celebrate the grand reopening on Wednesday.
“[Seniors have] worked all their lives and they just deserve to live in a good place,” said Zuleika Morales-Romero, field office director for HUD’s San Antonio field office. “Not only do they deserve it, but they’ve earned it.”
A complete overhaul
Victoria Plaza was built in 1959 as one of the nation’s first public housing apartment towers for elderly and disabled residents. Nestled in the Lavaca Historic District, it’s surrounded by historic and modern new single-family homes to the west and mixed-income housing apartment complexes to the north and east.
Two vacant buildings — SAISD’s Burnet Learning Center and the last remnant of what was Opportunity Home’s Victoria Courts — flank the tower to the south.
Arismendez, who previously lived on the West Side and retired from working at a motorcycle shop, said he enjoys walking through the neighborhood to the nearby shops and restaurants of Southtown.
“And they’re all dog-friendly,” he said before giving Cheyenne a pet.
A 2014 fire in the Wedgewood Senior Living Apartments that killed six and injured at least 18 people prompted San Antonio’s mandate for fire sprinklers to be installed in all high-rise buildings. The 2015 ordinance gave building owners and managers 12 years to comply because of the cost and time it takes to retrofit older buildings with sprinklers.
Historic buildings are even trickier, said Hector Martinez, director of Opportunity Home’s construction services and sustainability.
Victoria Plaza was contaminated with lead paint and asbestos, “so we literally draped the entire elevation of the building [with plastic] to contain it,” he said. Once it was remediated, construction began in early 2019.
“We had to be careful [with] what we did, because we had to restore the building and bring it back to its original, mid-century modern glory,” Martinez said.
Each unit now has a fire sprinkler, central air conditioning, new flooring, updated kitchen and bathroom cabinetry, energy- and water-efficient appliances and windows and a fresh coat of paint, he said. The “guts” of the building — plumbing, electric and mechanical — also got an update.
As part of the city’s 2022 housing bond, Opportunity Home was allocated $8.3 million to improve Victoria Plaza’s roof and install solar panels.
“The roof project is also going to provide brand new gutters and downspouts, which are going to feed rain catchment cisterns to provide irrigation” for landscaping and, ultimately, a butterfly garden, he said.
Mental health issues ‘not a defect’
Seniors are often neglected in our modern society, State Sen. José Menéndez (D-San Antonio) said during the reopening ceremony. “What I see today is respect for our senior citizens.”
He praised Opportunity Home for both producing and preserving the existing public housing stock in San Antonio.
“You could have easily fallen into the trap that we see so often where people say: ‘but it’s such a valuable property so close to downtown, we could sell it and make so much more money,'” Menéndez said. “Thank you for not doing that. Thank you for standing up for our seniors [and] letting them live in their neighborhood.”
Initially, Opportunity Home — then known as the San Antonio Housing Authority —considered developing a public-private partnership similar to those that produced the adjacent Refugio Place and 100 Labor Apartments, said Ed Hinojosa Jr., president and CEO of Opportunity Home.
But in recent years, some of the community began to push back against the diminishing supply of public housing.
San Antonio has lost 1,700 public housing units since the mid-1990s, Hinojosa has said.
Instead, Opportunity Home decided to preserve the tower as 100% housing for seniors and people living with disabilities.
“We are very committed to maintaining deeply affordable income-based housing in this community,” Hinojosa said. “So it took us a while to get the cash together to be able to do that.”
Residents at Victoria Plaza pay 30% of their gross income, which is often disability or social security checks — toward rent. The rest is subsidized by HUD.
Air conditioning, high-speed internet and access to mental health services should all be part of a minimum standard for housing elderly and disabled individuals, Menéndez said.
“When we were growing up … you didn’t talk about mental health, it was seen as a defect — and it is not a defect,” he said. “We can all benefit from having a little checkup and check-in because everyone is on the spectrum of mental health.”
Back in her apartment, Childress said the renovation and “return to normal” for Victoria Plaza isn’t yet complete.
She still needs a hood for her oven — so the fire alarm doesn’t go off every time she cooks, she said. The elevators are still prone to malfunction, and she said she misses the frequent on-site events and get-togethers for tenants that existed before the uprooting.
“It’s gonna take a little time to get it to where they want it to be,” Childress said. “I understand all that, you know, they’re moving as fast as humanly possible.”
