The New Braunfels Food Bank’s long planned Apple Seed Apartments are finally coming to fruition, but the housing project is unlikely to expand to San Antonio.
“I would never say never, but I don’t think it’s on the target for us right now,” said San Antonio Food Bank CEO Eric Cooper.
The New Braunfels extension of the San Antonio Food Bank connects the food bank’s most populated counties behind Bexar County: Comal and Guadalupe County. Local nonprofit the McKenna Foundation identified housing insecurity as a high need in the area, Cooper said.
In households across the U.S., “rent eats first,” Cooper said.
Data from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies released in January found that 22.4 million renter households — or half of renters nationwide — spent more than 30% of their income on rent in 2022. According to the McKenna Foundation, the number of affordable units — with monthly rental costs under $600 — also dropped to 7.2 million that year, 2.1 million fewer than a decade earlier.
“Rent eats first in every household, it just tends to eat everything up, where there’s nothing left over,” Cooper said. “Housing costs can cause food insecurity. People don’t know where their next meal is coming from because they spend their resources on housing.”
The New Braunfels Food Bank was hesitant to accept the invitation to lead the housing project; In recent years, costs of construction have skyrocketed, contributing to the challenges of keeping housing affordable.
But nonprofits, the McKenna Foundation and NB Housing Partners, couldn’t find an organization to take the project on for eight years, including housing nonprofits in San Antonio. The food bank Board of Directors eventually decided to accept its request to take on the project. MB Housing Partners donated two acres for the housing project.
“We listened, but I think skeptically,” Cooper said. “We do food, we don’t do housing. … [But] what the San Antonio Food Bank does well is people.”
The $12 million Apple Seed Apartments will open 51 units of transitional, temporary housing for people making a minimum wage. The New Braunfels Food Bank will manage the complex and its residents, working families who will also be enrolled in programs the food bank offers.
Engineering and permitting aspects of the project delayed construction, but the delays are coming to a close: approval from one more local utility company and then the general contractor can get started on construction, expected to take a year.
The goal is to make rent more affordable, discounted from market roughly 80% of the area median income or below for working families on the edge and struggling to make ends meet, Cooper said.
“A profile could be a nursing student at the nursing school in New Braunfels who just needs a few more years ‘till they graduate, and then they’ll have the salary to live and work in the community,” he said.
The average hourly wage in New Braunfels is $18 an hour, which is not enough that housing costs requires, he said. In San Antonio, it’s $22 an hour.
But even as the need in San Antonio is high, a project like the Apple Seed Apartments is unlikely to occur in Bexar County.
There would be a need for major donors, Cooper said, and the land around the San Antonio Food Bank wouldn’t be an option due to it not being zoned for housing because its in the flight path of the Lackland Air Force Base.
Even when there is free or donated land available, infrastructure costs less than the cost of the apartments themselves, he said.
“I’d be hesitant to take the lead in San Antonio, I think that’s really where I would push or work alongside the great nonprofits and public entities here in our city and figure out how the food bank can help them and their residents in a more holistic approach, rather than the food bank having to take the lead to manage the apartments,” Cooper said.
Applications for housing at the Apple Seed Apartments will open in the spring of 2025.
