The City of San Antonio will explore policy and program options that incentivize teachers to buy homes within city limits.
City Council’s Governance Committee, often the first step for council member-initiated programs, unanimously agreed to forward the idea to the Planning and Community Development Committee and have city staff review the structure and funding options.
Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2), who is also a teacher, submitted the policy review request in July. It calls for the city to expand its current down payment and homeowner assistance programs to include one that “early childhood instructors, K-12 teachers in public schools and other public school support personnel” would qualify for.
“I proposed this [program] as an opportunity to lend support to public schools that are facing massive teacher shortages,” said McKee-Rodriguez, who would not qualify for the program because he has already purchased a home.
McKee-Rodriguez envisions a program requiring teachers to keep teaching to earn forgiveness for incremental portions of the no-interest loan over time.
Existing programs
Currently, many teachers seeking to purchase their first homes earn too much income to qualify for the city’s other offerings that cover the down payment and other purchasing costs for residents who earn 80% or 120% of the area median income (AMI), McKee-Rodriguez said.
According to a San Antonio Express-News wage analysis for the 2023-2024 school year, new teachers in Bexar County earned on average nearly $54,000 a year. Teachers with 30 or more years of experience earned an average of about $70,000.
Those incomes would allow them to qualify for at least one existing AMI-based program, but some teachers earn beyond the income threshold depending on their credentials and school district.
The city already has homebuying incentive programs for its employees and first responders.
Councilwoman Melissa Cabello Havrda (D6) said the program could be “pretty compelling.” When she and her husband, a teacher at that time, purchased their home, they didn’t have an incentive. “But I do know that [this] would have made it a lot easier for us.”
Assessing the cost
Regardless of the parameters, such a program will cost money, Assistant City Manager Lori Houston said. “We need to have this discussion in a future budget workshop” for the city’s fiscal year 2025 budget.
Mayor Ron Nirenberg supported the continued exploration of such a program but said a more impactful course of action to help teachers would be to start paying all of them more.
“The reality is that teachers’ wages have not kept up with the cost of living, primarily because we’ve had state leadership systematically defunding our public education system,” Nirenberg said.
He expressed concern that the program can’t address the full scale of the problem and would “set up a false expectation that [the city will] be able to help teachers.”
Nirenberg said he wants to keep city spending focused on “the basics” — such as public safety, workforce development and infrastructure — that have citywide impacts.
Councilman John Courage (D9), who is campaigning to become mayor next year, cautioned against spending too much on programs that impact relatively few residents — especially those that address an issue outside those basics.
The Governance Committee reviewed and supported several policy proposals Wednesday that could fall into that outside category, Courage said, including teacher homeownership assistance, criminal record expunction assistance and crisis nursery programs.
“Some of these may have far more reaching, economic challenges for the city to take on,” he said, suggesting that the voters should be asked directly “if they support these kinds of potentially, very-large expenditures.”
Councilman Manny Pelaez (D8), who has all but formally announced he will be running for mayor as well, took issue with Courage’s hesitancy to spend on social safety net programs.
“It’s like the ghost of Clayton Perry is sitting next to me,” Pelaez said, referencing the conservative former District 10 councilman who consistently cautioned against overspending public dollars.
Asked after the meeting about that remark from his likely opponent in the mayoral race, Courage laughed.
“I didn’t ask, ‘What is going to be the [return on investment] to the city?’ That was Clayton’s favorite line,” he said. “But do I think it is our responsibility to look at these things collectively … we’ve still got another dozen proposals to come before the council [and] almost every one of them has an additional price that goes with it.”
McKee-Rodriguez said he doesn’t expect the teacher assistance program will bankrupt the city.
“We’re never going to have enough resources to solve a problem or to solve every problem or to do everything that we want to do,” he said. “But there is an expectation in our community that we do as much as we can.”
Residents can track policy proposals that have been submitted by council members on the city’s website.
