Since the 2007 housing crash, the U.S. has dug itself a hole of about 5 million housing units. San Antonio is one city that appears to be digging itself out.
Despite being America’s fastest-growing city and having a red-hot job market, home prices and rents there have leveled off. A Redfin Analysis found that middle-income residents in San Antonio can afford 87 percent of the homes listed for sale. Compare that to 10 percent in Las Vegas, 3 percent in Boston, and 0 percent in most of California’s big cities.
San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg planted seeds for this success in 2017 when he set up a Housing Policy Task Force. The goal was to align the dozens of public, private and nonprofit players involved in housing around a common strategy. That strategy eventually became codified in a 10-year housing plan. “We needed to develop an ecosystem in which everybody was talking together and moving in the same direction,” Nirenberg says.
They aligned around several key steps. City leaders went to voters twice — first to change the city charter to allow bond funds to pay for affordable housing, then again to issue a $150 million housing bond. Both measures passed by big margins. Although ballot measures can yield unpredictable results, Nirenberg believes asking voters to weigh in was a critical move. “To be successful, we have to make sure the public owns the plan,” he says.
The housing bond is financing a range of projects, from producing new rentals to fixing up aging homes and keeping them viable. Nearly 10,000 out of 28,000 units planned over 10 years are complete or in the pipeline. Meanwhile, San Antonio leaders are trying nearly every strategy in the municipal housing playbook. They changed zoning to encourage construction of small backyard dwellings. Permitting rules have been streamlined. Builders get density bonuses for including affordable units in multifamily projects. The city is experimenting with community land trust models that prevent home values from skyrocketing.
To keep these and other initiatives moving, San Antonio hired its first chief housing officer — a “maestro of the orchestra” as Nirenberg puts it. The person hired for that role, Mark Carmona, says that a lot of what he does is make connections between the traditional housing players and other entities. That came into play in writing new zoning rules aimed at building affordable housing around bus rapid transit lines planned to open in a few years. These changes alone are expected to add thousands of units of new housing. “Housing isn’t an island,” Carmona says. “It really has to connect to other systems like transportation, workforce and health.”
Challenges remain in San Antonio, like anywhere else. In December, opponents killed plans for an apartment complex for seniors with low incomes, forgoing $20 million in state tax credits that had been lined up for the deal. Financing new units for people with very low incomes, meanwhile, remains a very expensive challenge. However, the results in San Antonio show that local leaders can make change if they keep at it. “There’s an enormous amount we can do,” Nirenberg says. “We can have a big impact in a relatively short period of time by focusing on the tools we have at our disposal.”
