Kash Carrington pays $160 a month to park at the One Alamo Center downtown, where he works across the street as a cook.
During 12-hour shifts four days a week, Tangela Robinson said she paid up to $35 a day at the Rand Garage on Soledad Street until her employer began to take parking costs out of her paycheck for a parking permit.
At a fast food chain restaurant on East Commerce Street, a woman in her twenties said she asks her neighbor for a ride to work every day because parking is too expensive.
They’re just a few of the many downtown workers who pay to park when they go to work.
“Parking plays a big part to get to work,” Robinson said. “We have to work here, we have to make a living.”
In San Antonio, one of the most impoverished major cities in the U.S., many who live in inner-city neighborhoods choose to work in downtown to make a livable wage in the tourism and hospitality industry. But those jobs — at the heart of downtown, where parking spaces are at a premium — often don’t come with parking benefits included.
“The distribution of wages in San Antonio is one of the worst in the U.S.,” explained Johnny Walker, a bartender at Acenar who lives downtown and walks to work. “In the downtown area, most of the income is based on tourism. They come here and plan to spend money, so that’s how you have to make money. … There’s a few places on the North Side where you can make money, but [on the] West Side, South Side, it’s harder.”
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, people in serving related positions at restaurants make a median wage of $12.85 an hour. Cooks make about $14.23 an hour, and bartenders make $11.26 an hour.
On a rainy Tuesday afternoon, workers in uniforms from nearby hotels and restaurants walked to the nearest bus station. Many said they lived a few minutes away, so parking wasn’t an issue for them. Others said they walked or biked to work.
That’s not the case for Carrington, who lives at The Rim and commutes by car about 30 minutes to work for his 8-hour shifts. He pays his daily parking costs out-of-pocket, and prefers to pay more to park in the garage instead of surface lots, which can be cheaper.
“Usually it’s like $25 [to park] for 12 hours, so if you add it up, it’s not too bad,” Carrington said. “It’s safer to park in the parking garage. They have cameras.”
At the same restaurant where Carrington is a cook, locally owned hospitality company Spot On Hospitality pays for sous chef Orlando Martinez’s parking, since he’s a salary-based employee and not hourly, like Carrington.
Before he got his salaried position, Martinez said he worked five days a week as a server at the same restaurant last fall and paid between $8 and $15 a day to park, adding up to about $100 a week — a quarter of his paycheck at the time, he said.
“I felt essentially I was paying to go to work,” Martinez said.
While he has moved up in the company and no longer has to pay for parking, he witnesses his coworkers who still have to pay for parking.
“A lot of them actually park outside of downtown and then they will either take a scooter or take a bus that will take them closer to work so they don’t have to pay for parking. It’s cheaper for them,” Martinez said.
Some workers at the Drury Plaza Hotel, Starbucks and the Holiday Inn said their employers pay for their parking for work. It is unclear if those employers pay for all employees’ parking, or if the company deducts some of that parking fee from their paycheck.
There’s no state or local requirement for employers to offer their staff free parking, but some businesses, like Bunz Handcrafted Burgers, take a parking fee out of employees’ checks for $50 a month.
Robinson, who works at Bunz, said the automatic withdrawal for parking helps, because it’s cheaper than paying for parking every day.
Bartenders and servers at Elsewhere Garden Bar & Kitchen on E. Jones Avenue also have to pay out-of-pocket to park near work, said owner Terrin Fuhrmann, who has paid for employee’s parking tickets if they get a ticket while at work.
“There is street parking available that most of them snag,” he said. “To the same point of paying for their parking — which now that I say that out loud, I probably should do … — if the meter runs out and the city or the private lot decides to drive by and ding them, that’s not really fair to them. They’re busy doing their jobs.”
Downtown San Antonio has more than 35,000 parking spaces, but the city only manages about 20% of downtown parking— about 7,000 parking spaces total — across seven parking lots including the Houston Street, St. Mary’s and City Tower garages, and about 2,100 metered parking spaces.
The rest are owned by private entities, even though they say “public” parking.
The city knew service workers needed help paying for parking to go to work during the COVID-19 pandemic. From June to August of 2020, the city implemented free parking for service industry workers in any of the city’s parking facilities.
Taxpayer dollars don’t go into the city’s parking program, but the city’s enterprise fund is made up of revenue generated from city parking facilities and covers maintenance and operation of the parking program. The city does not make a profit form its parking program, said Kelly Saunders, public relations manager for the Center City Development & Operations Department.
“The City recognizes that finding affordable parking can sometimes be a challenge for downtown workers; therefore, we encourage people to take advantage of our free parking options when available,” Saunders said in a statement.
While the city does not have designated parking areas for hospitality workers, Saunders said many workers take advantage of free parking options when available, like free parking after 5 p.m. on Tuesdays usually aimed toward tourists, free parking on Sundays at the City Tower Garage and free parking at on-street meters after 6 p.m. and all day on Sundays.
But some service industry workers said street parking isn’t usually an option because the maximum time they can pay for at once doesn’t cover a full shift, requiring them to continue adding more time to the parking meter.
“It is digital, so you can go online and do it, but when you’re working, you don’t have time to do that,” Robinson said. In only a few months working downtown, she has racked up five parking citations, she added.
Martinez said he would often forget to add more time to meters when he parked on the street, resulting in a few tickets.
Martinez said the city’s parking garages often aren’t an option because they’re farther away. During busy tourist seasons, parking for employees gets harder and makes it difficult for downtown hotels and restaurants to retain employees.
“A lot of the times, they’ll be late to work or they’ll come in so flustered because there’s so much traffic and there’s nowhere to park,” he said. “The city should offer discounted parking or have some sort of parking lot designated to hospitality workers downtown. I don’t think they have any programs right now at all.”
Fuhrmann said parking costs aren’t a dealbreaker for staff at Elsewhere, but limited parking spaces makes it more difficult for staff to arrive on time and to get back to their cars safely at night.
“One of the biggest issues I have is when [the city] redid Avenue B,” Fuhrmann said. About 10 nose-in parking spots were removed and replaced with three parallel parking spaces to make the street more bike- and pedestrian-friendly.
“That’s great, but it took limited parking down there to even more limited,” he said, creating even fewer parking spaces for his staff. Fuhrmann said parking was also removed on the Jones Avenue Bridge.
Ultimately, the responsibility to cover downtown service industry workers’ parking should be a compromise between employers and the city, Fuhrmann said, and suggested creating a visual marker like a windshield sticker an employer could pay for that shows parking enforcement that the car belongs to a downtown employee.
If that sticker came with “a discount at city garages or city lots, or they could park down the street with no meter, I think that would be a good compromise for COSA and the business community,” he said.
At the Esquire Tavern on E. Commerce Street, managed by Spot On Hospitality, Jason Pieplow, the front-of-store manager, said paying for parking is not an issue. Some employees park in the Houston Street garage, he said, and others Uber in.
Pieplow, a salaried employee, does not have to pay for his own parking, he said.
“I wouldn’t feel that it’s not fair,” Pieplow said about paying for parking to go to work. “If I want this job, then yeah, that’s what it takes to keep the job.”
Fuhrmann, who is the chair of the Visit San Antonio River Walk Advisory Committee and for the Visit San Antonio Operators Meeting, said many hospitality business owners downtown have brought the issue up with the city before.
“It is an issue that definitely needs to be addressed with the city and the hospitality industry,” he said. “The tourism industry accounts for so much of our economy downtown, [and] these kind of road bumps are barriers to entry to some of these people.
“It’s a deterrent for some people looking for jobs downtown.”
But the city suggested there may be some changes on the horizon.
The Center City Development and Operations Department plans to file a request for proposal in the coming months to get “new parking technology” that will allow the city to offer more discounted programs and expanded parking options, Saunders said.
For now, downtown workers can contact the City’s Parking Division for more information about discounted monthly parking options, she added.
Correction: This story has been updated to remove an inaccurate reference to parking costs at the Weston Centre garage.
