San Antonio’s affordable housing crisis plays out time and time again

When we launched the San Antonio Lights project a year ago, the starting point had to be food insecurity and poverty.

These issues have plagued San Antonio for generations. Think of the 1968 CBS News documentary “Hunger in America” that introduced millions of viewers to the faces of food insecurity and poverty in San Antonio’s West Side.

In April 2020, Express-News photographer William Luther again crystallized economic insecurity and hunger here, shocking the world with an aerial photograph of thousands of vehicles lined up for a San Antonio Food Bank distribution at Traders Village on the far Southwest Side.

Looking deeper, we can see how Luther’s photo and “Hunger in America” also revealed a persistent lack of generational wealth; an inability for thousands of people to weather a job loss, economic shutdown or a disaster like Winter Storm Uri in 2021; an inability to make the mortgage or pay the rent; and an economic uncertainty that extends much further than the next meal.

These dynamics have only become more strained since that day at Traders Village. While jobs are abundant amid an uneven economic recovery, inflation is sky high, a recession is possible and the Food Bank is serving some 90,000 people a week. Add a surge in housing prices, and San Antonio finds itself on the precipice of an accelerating affordability crisis that plays out home by home, family by family, and is felt in rising rents, increased property taxes, tear downs and gentrification.

The numbers speak for themselves.

In March 2020, the median sales price of a home in San Antonio was $205,500, according to the Texas A&M Real Estate Research Center. This past March, it was $274,074. For the San Antonio-New Braunfels region, the median sales price jumped from $236,000 to $318,999. Incomes have not kept pace.

Yes, housing prices have zoomed even higher in Austin, Houston and Dallas. But as Henry Cisneros, former San Antonio mayor and Housing and Urban Development secretary, told me, San Antonio differs because of its endemic poverty and lack of quality affordable housing.

“The problem we have always had is we have just had a surfeit of substandard housing,” he said. “Our neighborhoods of the poor just go on for miles.”

We were talking as voters were deciding the fate of the city’s $150 million affordable housing bond — we went to press before Election Day — and Cisneros expressed mayoral optimism. The housing bond could mark a new era. The narrative on housing could change here, he said, but it would require “a continuous effort” and “would be defying everything about our history.”

In 1988, as mayor, Cisneros issued a remarkably prescient housing proposal, writing that urban renewal had contributed to the loss of thousands of homes. Much of what remained in the central city was “built on inadequately sized lots and intended to be marginal shelter at best by absentee landlords or property owners.”

Suburban housing was “beyond the financial reach of central city residents,” he wrote.

These days, growth continues on the North Side and outer suburbs as advocates push for the rehabilitation of existing inner-city homes while gentrification and infill development often eliminate affordable housing. A 2019 city study, “Opportunity at Risk,” noted that “every week for the last ten years, San Antonio has lost more than three units of pre-1960 housing.”

It is far cheaper to preserve homes like these than to build new ones.

Likewise, the city’s 2018 Housing Policy Framework revealed that between 2005 and 2016, among renter households earning 30 to 60 percent of the area’s median income, “an excess of 14,000 available units dropped to a deficit of 2,400 units.”

Inadequate housing is a San Antonio origin story.

Pomona College professor Char Miller’s book “West Side Rising,” published by Trinity University Press, chronicles the devastation of the 1921 flood on the West Side and how it sparked a Latino justice movement. But the book is also about inadequate housing — before and after the flood.

Miller describes pre-flood housing on the West Side, as “shedlike, one-story, thin-framed homes” often sheltering multiple families.

The flood’s aftermath offered an opportunity for change, but it was not to be.

“For the city’s Anglo elite, who were the central contributors to and volunteers for the Red Cross, it was essential to aid the city’s poor in the brutal aftermath of the flood, but they had little interest in changing the conditions of the impoverished West Side,” Miller writes. “Relief had its limits.”

A neighborhood can dictate one’s future, research has shown, and a related lesson from Miller’s book is how policy choices can be felt for generations.

Failing to meaningfully invest in the infrastructure and people of the West Side in the 1920s can impact the built landscape and people of the West Side in the 2020s. Failing to bridge the affordability gap now could have consequences for generations to come.

At higher income levels, the housing affordability crisis could mean the nuisance of increased property taxes, or young couples having a hard time purchasing a home, and gaining equity and wealth. It could eventually keep people from moving here if wages don’t match housing prices, although at the moment, our housing prices are attractive to Californians and residents of other high-priced markets.

At lower income levels, it means not only being locked out from potential wealth associated with homeownership, but also higher rents, fewer housing options and potential displacement.

In researching this essay, I was struck by a graphic about the “affordability gap” — the difference between the median sales price for a home and what someone earning the median household income can afford — in the city’s Housing Policy Framework.

In 2005, when the median sales price was $120,000, this gap was $18,900. In 2016, when the median sales price was $180,000, the gap was $26,300. The graphic projects an affordability gap of $77,700 by 2030 when the median sales price is $235,000 — but it’s 2022 and the median sales price is roughly $275,000 in the city.

“If you are a young person, a couple coming out of college thinking you are going to start a life by buying a house, that’s off the table these days,” Christine Drennon, a sociology and anthropology professor at Trinity University, told me.

People who can’t buy homes, rent, of course, which leads to fewer options across income levels. Local Housing Solutions has reported the monthly median rent in San Antonio rose from $549 in 2000 to $992 in 2019. Nearly 47 percent of renters were either moderately or severely cost burdened by their housing.

To get a sense of the complexity, I visited a home in April listed for sale in the 78207 ZIP code on the West Side.

The median income in 78207 was $26,915 in 2020, and the poverty rate was 39.1 percent. The three-bedroom home — sharply remodeled, but since taken off the market — was listed for $255,000.

Johnnie Fritz, the owner, told me he bought the home five years ago at auction, living there and fixing it up. A recent graduate from University of Texas at San Antonio’s cybersecurity program, he said he was moving to Dallas, where wages are higher.

I asked him about the listing price given the area’s poverty.

“I hate to say this, but $250,000 is affordable housing, is it not?” he said. “Is the pricing audacious for the neighborhood? Not really.”

His answer captured the moment. He was leaving town to make a higher wage, listing a remodeled home below the median sales price, yet out of reach for the neighborhood.

“I really don’t know how we are going to respond to this,” Graciela Sanchez, director of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, said.

Sanchez grew up in the 78207 area and has returned there. As we talked, she raised a number of pointed questions: “Who are these homes for? Who is buying them? Who will be able to buy them?”

“I am scared that we lost the battle, the war, whatever it is” for affordable housing, she said.

When I raised these concerns — that housing prices will continue to accelerate ahead of incomes, local policies and best intentions — with Mayor Ron Nirenberg, he said the community is at an “inflection point.”

“I am concerned,” he said. “It’s one of the reasons why I ran for mayor, and that’s why the focus of the work is how we break those cycles.”

He spoke about the city’s housing bond, its potential to spur affordable development and preserve existing housing, and the need for more federal dollars. Nirenberg may prove to be one of the most consequential mayors of our modern era because of his ability to see the big picture. He has boosted funding for public transit, launched the SA: Ready to Work program and brought a focus to affordable housing.

One can see how each of these efforts complements the other — workforce development could translate to higher wages, allowing access to better housing, supplemented by better public transit to jobs. Just perhaps, to invoke Cisneros, we are at the starting point of a continuous effort to defy our history.

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