Letter from San Antonio
Boom With A View
The peril and promise of being one of the fastest-growing cities in Texas.
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But not everyone is thrilled with what is going on in San Antonio. Much of the environmental community is aghast at the extent of the construction on the city’s north side, the location of a political hot potato known as the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone. San Antonio gets nearly 100 percent of its drinking water from wells drilled into the aquifer, which you can think of as a huge slab of extremely porous limestone. But unlike most underground reservoirs, this one—a type known as a karst aquifer—does not filter water that runs down into it. So any pollutants that go in (as they did last summer when a sewage line near the intersection of U.S. 281 and Loop 1604 ruptured and leaked for a month in the heart of the recharge zone) go directly into the city’s drinking water.
Concern for water quality was at the core of a bitter, years-long battle over a development now being built near 281 known locally as PGA Village—a 1,000-room Marriott resort featuring two PGA golf courses and more than 1,500 luxury homes. Environmentalists lost, and the project is now being marketed as “Cibolo Canyons.” The city is moving so aggressively northward with such developments, in fact, that Boerne, Bulverde, and New Braunfels have maneuvered to block it, annexing land and asserting their extraterritorial jurisdiction in the form of what has come to be known as the Boerne Wall. (Part of the reason is to keep San Antonio from getting its hands on the water in Canyon Lake.) In the west, Castroville and Helotes, also directly in the path of the city’s growth and terrified of what is about to happen to them, for a variety of reasons have no such convenient defenses.
Then there is the related question of how the city spends its development dollars at a time when, in spite of its booming outer zones, the old urban core on the south, west, and east sides remains poor, underdeveloped, and stuck with abysmal schools. For Cibolo Canyons, the city allowed developers to set up what amounted to their own tax district; they, not the city, would get the tax revenue, a form of subsidy. “Those amount to huge tax breaks to do the development,” says San Antonio Express-News columnist Carlos Guerra, who has been a persistent critic. “They wind up paying taxes to themselves. PGA Village is an outrageous waste of public resources. We are funding the infrastructure of gated communities.”
In the downtown area, which draws 9 million tourists a year, the city is using $130 million of federal “empowerment zone” bonds—designed to give a boost to struggling inner-city businesses in distressed areas—to build an enormous Hyatt Hotel topped by luxury condominiums. The city council is currently considering another $25 million of those bonds to help a private developer fund a large “luxury urban village” called Piazza San Lorenzo on the River Walk. “It’s a misuse of empowerment zone bonds,” says Heywood Sanders, a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a leading expert on the economics of cities. “It’s not going to help the poorer neighborhoods on the east and west sides of town. This is all about making a downtown that works only for tourists.”
Less affluent neighborhoods do seem to have been left out of the economic bonanza. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the recent flight of families from inner-city school districts to districts farther out on the rim, a phenomenon affecting Hispanics and blacks as well as whites. A recent study that compared 1988 school enrollment with 2004 enrollment shows predictably huge increases in the school districts located beyond Loop 410. Boerne ISD is up 109 percent; Northside up 52 percent; North East up 45 percent; and Southside up 85 percent. In the inner city, Edgewood dropped 17 percent, San Antonio dropped 8 percent, and South San Antonio dropped 10 percent. On the east side, where most of the black population lives, student enrollment at Sam Houston High School has dropped 25 percent since 2002, as people moved farther east, apparently toward better schools. Fully 48 percent of all new construction in the past few years has occurred in a single school district: Northside, which, if you think of the city as a clock, sits between 9 and 11.
Though home to few big companies (AT&T being an exception), downtown San Antonio is prospering because of the city’s tourism. But it is increasingly surrounded by areas that are declining even as the outer rim of the city explodes, and its workforce reflects this: Only 9.5 percent of it consists of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees, giving the downtown a rank of 49th among major metropolitan areas in what is considered a key indicator of urban success (by contrast, the percentage for the Portland, Oregon—Salem, Washington area is 54.7).
Still, there aren’t many people from any political camp arguing against jobs these days, especially when they are in non-tourist industries in a town that still desperately needs a strong wage base. One of the city’s great points of pride is a homegrown company called Rackspace Managed Hosting, which is currently renovating a shopping mall on the city’s east side into offices. Started by former Trinity University students, Rackspace has grown over the past seven years from 12 to 1,800 employees, and its revenues have risen from $1.6 million to more than $224 million. By San Antonio standards, the company pays very well (the average annual salary is $51,000), and it is expected to double in size within the next few years.
Jobs like these were the cornerstone of Henry Cisneros’s vision for the city when he became mayor in 1981, a vision that went well beyond just attracting businesses. “The purpose here was not to line some people’s pockets,” says Cisneros, who is now the executive chairman of CityView, a company that builds low-cost housing, or as they prefer to call it, workforce housing, for working families. “The purpose here is to create a new middle class out of people who are poor in a city that is ethnically mixed, very diverse. If we can do this, it really does constitute a model for how cities can advance the national agenda of social progress.” It’s a breathtaking idea, but in the old neighborhoods of the inner city, the work is just beginning.
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