Opportunity Home San Antonio, formerly known as the San Antonio Housing Authority (SAHA), and its partners will soon build 88 new units in the first phase of its redevelopment of the historic Alazán Courts public housing project on the city’s Westside.
At $24 million, the average unit will cost $272,727 for demolition, design and construction.
“Construction costs have risen dramatically, plus we have committed to building the first phase as close to carbon neutral as possible, which has raised costs slightly,” said Ed Hinojosa Jr., who was named president and CEO of Opportunity Home last year after serving for 12 years as chief financial officer.
This week, Opportunity Home issued a press release announcing plans for Snowden Apartments, its first multi-family apartment project, with more than 50% affordable units set aside for seniors whose income is 30% or less of the city’s average median income (AMI).
“This is the first project in the city to accomplish such a high number of affordable units,” he added.
At $34 million, the Medical Center’s 135 apartments will come at an average cost of $251,851 for design and construction.
The cost to live in the new apartments, of course, remains income-based. Most Alazán residents earn less than $10,000 a year, according to Opportunity Home, while seniors will pay rent based on income and unit size.
With Hinojosa’s new leadership at Opportunity Home has come a new business model, one being adopted elsewhere nationally that moves away from decades of tax credit-driven housing development by for-profit developers to public housing authorities taking the lead on projects.
The affordable housing deficit here and across the nation is only growing worse, but is the new model a sustainable one?
San Antonio, cited by the U.S. Census as one of the nation’s most poverty-stricken cities, faces a daunting housing crisis. The city’s Strategic Housing Implementation Plan estimates 95,000 low-income households need affordable housing that is not available today. The plan calls for preserving or building 28,000 affordable units over the next 10 years, which will leave more than two out of three families without affordable housing.
The city plans to fill the rest of the gap by raising incomes with its SA Ready to Work jobs program.
With an annual budget of $185 million, 556 employees and 57,000 clients currently receiving housing vouchers or living in public and subsidized mixed-used housing, Opportunity Home on its own does not have the financial muscle to tackle the city’s housing crisis.
For the first time in 2021, San Antonio voters approved $150 million in the 2022 bond to preserve or add to San Antonio’s affordable housing stock. Opportunity Home has asked City Council for $8 million of those funds to pay for one-third of Alazán Courts’ first phase, with its request for other projects totaling about $50 million.
The city of San Antonio and Bexar County do not fund Opportunity Home either in their annual operating budgets, and until the city’s 2022 bond, in their capital budgets. Public housing advocates want that to change and there is precedent. The city relied heavily on federal grants to fund Metro Health until the pandemic, which led to ramped-up staffing and budget. That needs to happen to address the scale of the housing crisis.
“I would say the city, the county, the state and the nation all need to address the situation,” Hinojsa said.
In the 1990s, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, then led by Secretary Henry Cisneros under President Bill Clinton, enacted policies to move away from policies that led to the creation of the nation’s inner city public housing projects built after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the 1937 U.S. Housing Act. The Clinton-era policy evolved into the Choice Neighborhood program during the Obama administration.
As a result, more than 200,000 public housing units were eliminated in the United States over several decades, replaced only in small part by mixed-cost housing built by for-profit developers using tax credits.
“Tax credits and the current system we’ve been using for decades are not solving the problem, because we are only creating a few hundred affordable units each year in San Antonio,” Hinojosa said.
The 1937 law provided local communities with 90% of the cost to build segregated public housing projects. Cities like San Antonio that had long ignored the housing needs of Mexican American and Black families only had to pass bonds to cover 10% of the costs.
In San Antonio, five segregated pubic housing projects were built at a total cost of $10 million: The 501-unit Alazán and 600-unit Apache Courts were built for Mexican Americans on the Westside; 383-unit Lincoln Heights Courts and 250-unit Wheatley Courts were built for African Americans on the Eastside; and 660-unit Victoria Courts were built for whites on the southern flank of downtown.
The Clinton-era policy called for demolition of the inner city, pre-World II projects that were widely seen as crime-ridden and perpetuating poverty, with for-profit developers building multifamily projects offering both market rate and affordable housing units in return for tax credits.
In 2000, San Antonio saw the demolition of the 660-unit Victoria Courts public housing project south of Hemisfair, which has since been slowly repopulated with such housing. More than two decades later, it remains a work in progress.
The 250-unit Wheatley Courts public housing project was demolished in 2014 and replaced with the East Meadows development. Both projects resulted in substantial displacement of longtime residents, many of whom did not return.
God knows San Antonio’s Westside deserves significant public investment after a century and more of neglect by the city’s ruling white elites.
Two deeply researched books document the white power structure’s deliberate disinvestment in the city’s minority communities: Former UTSA history professor emeritus David Johnson’s In the Loop: A Political and Economic History of San Antonio (Trinity University Press, 2020) and Pomona College Professor of Environmental Analysis and History Char Miller’s West Side Rising: How San Antonio’s 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Movement (Trinity University Press, 2021.)
The question remains: Is Opportunity Home’s current policy of taking the lead on projects the right approach?
“That is a good question, one that the whole industry is facing across the country,” said Michael Reyes, Opportunity Home’s public affairs officer whose first home was Alazán Courts.
To make the case for his approach, Hinojosa is counting on the general public’s heightened awareness of the worsening housing crisis.
“The conversation about housing has changed, and the situation is not going to get better without a different approach,” he said. “If you look back pre-pandemic, no one would have imagined an eviction moratorium, much less a heightened focus on affordable housing, a term I hate to use because our population is way below that 30% AMI level. Our average family earns about $10K a year.”
Thousands of those families have been unable to pay any rent since the pandemic, Reyes, said, resulting in $4 million in arrears.
“Homelessness has increased dramatically, rents have increased dramatically, and home prices have increased dramatically through the pandemic,” Hinojosa said. “We have to try something different.”
