Given the rare opportunity to bargain with one the city’s most prolific downtown developers, San Antonio Independent School District had an unusual request: Affordable housing.
The district happens to own a dusty parking lot northwest of downtown that became much more valuable this year, when owners of the San Antonio Missions announced plans to construct a new Minor League Baseball stadium nearby.
But rather than just leverage the property for as much cash as possible — which the district desperately needed after public school funding was held up in the last state legislative session — the list of “terms” SAISD requested focused heavily on housing for more families with school-aged children.
The agreement the board approved with developer Weston Urban, the Designated Bidders LLC, the City of San Antonio and Bexar County on Monday includes a promise of 1,250 new affordable, family housing units within the district’s boundaries over the next five years.
Further, it calls for the district to get a seat on the City of San Antonio’s Housing Trust Board, which oversees affordable housing policy. (SAISD’s initial ask did include some direct compensation, but it will instead receive land for a new campus and $432,000 per year worth of free parking.)
Even a member of the school board acknowledged the rarity of such an ask this week.
“This is not our mission. Our mission is education,” SAISD trustee Ed Garza, a former San Antonio mayor, said of the affordable housing focus at Monday’s meeting. “However, we know that having family affordable housing is the fuel for our future growth as a district, so we’re going to have to step up and keep this issue important for everybody involved.”
The move comes as SAISD spent the past year painfully debating whether to close some of its campuses. Though the idea of “rightsizing” was widely unpopular among staff, teachers and parents, it reflected a stark reality that the population of school-age children living downtown is shrinking.
The downward trend of enrollment — in a state that funds schools based on attendance — has compounded the district’s already fraught finances, which included large-scale layoffs this year to pay for staff raises.
Against that backdrop, SAISD Board President Christina Martinez concluded in a November statement that the stadium plan “works against SAISD’s interests.”
“Student enrollment directly impacts school funding, making the availability of affordable housing a vital factor in the district’s financial health and mission to serve the community,” Martinez said.
Getting to a deal
The Missions’ ownership includes local developer Weston Urban’s co-founders CEO Randy Smith and Graham Weston, who in addition to the baseball stadium, plan to construct roughly 1,500 new apartments in the surrounding northwest downtown area.
At the same time, the stadium plans call for demolishing one of the last naturally occurring inexpensive housing complexes downtown — the Soap Factory — displacing hundreds of people who say they’ll have a hard time finding another such complex in their budgets.
When SAISD became a player in the stadium deal, residents of the soon-to-be-razed apartment complex quickly turned to the trustees for help, packing their meetings asking them reject the deal.
“We have a clear idea of who Randy Smith wants to live downtown. We know that it’s not us,” said Megan Navarro, a resident of the Robert E. Lee apartments, which Weston Urban has also sought to purchase.
At least one trustee, Sarah Sorensen, seemed sympathetic to the residents’ case and voted no to Monday’s deal.
But while SAISD is expected to benefit some from an increased tax base spurred by the stadium district, with more property than it needs for a shrinking student population, most trustees were still in the market to get to a deal.
“We are cash-strapped, but we’re property rich, and so we have to use every piece of property in this process of repurposing, selling whenever it is. How can we maximize the return so it can go back to the school district?” Garza said.
The idea of the district needing more affordable family housing, he said, came up during the school closure process.
“We just went through a process of closing schools because of under-enrollment, and one of the issues that the demographer cited was a lack of affordable housing in a lot of the core areas of the city,” he said. “It’s not the only piece of the puzzle, but it certainly is one of the big pieces.”
Growing the surrounding development is critical to the Missions owners’ overall plan and agreement with the city, because property taxes paid on the increased values will be used to repay the bonds for stadium construction.
It’s unclear whether Weston Urban, which is currently working on an building with affordable units new San Pedro Creek, is expected to play a major role in the goal of 1,250 new affordable units. The company’s representatives did not attend Monday’s meeting and did not respond to a request for comment.
But Garza said the developer seemed to have come away with an understanding of the interconnectedness of economic development, quality of life and the health of the public school system.
“They came and apologized after a couple of our meetings, saying, ‘We’re sorry we didn’t get you at the table sooner,’” he said.
Also unclear is how the district will hold local government officials accountable for the agreement’s affordable housing goals, as several trustees and speakers pointed out ahead of the vote.
But SAISD leaders said that after the city and county’s agreements failed to address the issue, their work to secure affordable housing promises righted a wrong that should never have fallen on them in the first place.
“This has been a big value for us, the affordable housing for our community,” SAISD Superintendent Jaime Aquino said. “I think we’re getting the attention of the city and the county on this very important issue that maybe has been neglected.”
