Local Universities Look to Boost Area Neighborhoods

November 14, 2008 · Rick Idar looks down Cincinnati Street as it leads to St. Mary’s University’s historic St. Louis Hall and like what he sees.

Over a hundred years ago when the school was first built Cincinnati was just a dirt-packed buggy trail that stretched west from the city, but this fall evening the wide assault street is bustling with traffic. It’s bordered with families tending to their yards and a few college students walking to the campus.

Idar is the president of the University Park Neighborhood Association. He says the residential area surrounding the university is on an upswing. But it’s still not quite as nice as the old neighborhood that Idar remembers.

"You know you had the corner grocery – you had the corner pharmacist – you had the corner restaurant – but we don’t have that anymore – we wish we could bring all that back into the neighborhood," he said.

Small businesses are moving back into the neighborhood, but Idar says they aren’t always the right types of business.

“We always say we don’t need anymore of the three T’s – the taco, tire and transmission shops. We have enough of those,” he said.

It’s going to take some expert help to get the area back on its feet and help is coming from the economic powerhouse in the neighborhood – St. Mary’s University.

Recently the school announced a plan to improve the quality of life in the University Park neighborhood and beyond.

“It’s an older neighborhood, and as other older neighborhoods throughout the city it has many needs and they begin with commercial amenities,” said St. Mary’s University President Charles Cotrell.

“We and our partners in the neighborhood are very aware of that – and as an anchor in the neighborhood – St. Mary’s university wants to use its intellectual capital – its capacity to work – to halt that and to turn it around,” said Cotrell.

St. Mary’s has a vested interest in seeing the neighborhood thrive, he said. The school will benefit if the area can be re-branded as a new trendy part of town to live in.

The neighborhood does have a lot to offer. It’s close to downtown and residents enjoy free access to the campus library, athletic facilities and cultural activities.

“It’s natural that we would use the assets of a great university to reach across the street and across the neighborhood to aid our neighbors and work with them,” Cotrell said. 

“What we are trying to do is make it the good side of town,” said Ramiro Cavazos is the head of the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. He’s also leading the university task force to revitalize the neighborhood.

The university can push the city to fix streets and sidewalks faster, improve outdoor lighting and beef up the police presence, but the real leverage the school has for improving the neighborhood is job creation.

Cavazos said typically a university is already a significant economic generator in a community, but without focus its power gets spread too thin and looses impact.

“Universities spend a lot of money every year – they employ hundreds of people and St. Mary’s is an example of an institution that generates a lot of capital and jobs and payroll,” he said.

St. Mary’s does a lot of purchasing Cavazos said. “And that purchasing, if possible, should stay as much as possible in the local community and those employees should life in the surrounding neighborhood like you have in other cities like Boston and San Francisco,” he said.

To help turn University Park into a neighborhood that might one day resemble a college town, St. Mary’s is setting up a resource center that is can provide small business expertise, connections to social services and mortgage assistance.

St. Mary’s has been in this part of San Antonio for over a century but in far South San Antonio a new university is taking root.

The 600-acre campus for Texas A&M - San Antonio is in it’s planning stage and the campus’ architects are looking to avoid the urban planning mistakes that St. Mary’s is now trying to correct said Douglas Lipscomb, an architect with the firm Marmon Mok.

“The goal is to create this kind of dense mixed use, walkable kinds of neighborhoods which are very appropriate to surround a university academic setting because that allows for that strong relationship between campus and community or what’s known in the academic world as “town and gown.”

Marmon Mok was recently awarded the Texas Society of Architects 2008 Architecture firm award.

Lipscomb said traditional city zoning ordinances prevented the natural growth “town and gown” neighborhoods.

But A&M San Antonio is incorporating the next generation of city planning principals that will allow a tighter weave between business, campus and residential properties. This will give the school a bustling boulevard like a main drag.

“It’s like what find in Austin, for example. There is the drag Guadalupe Street. In College Station, Texas Avenue is the main drag. So it can evolve into that kind of college campus drag,” said Lipscomb.

Bill Reeves, a partner at Marmon Monk says the design elements of the new A&M campus will also aid the integration of campus and the South San Antonio community.

“San Antonio was founded on courtyard and plaza designs – you are going to see within the overall make up of the campus these green spaces which we see as equally important as the build environment.”

Right now the land where the campus will be built on is a collection of farm fields. But soon the school will reach the required enrollment of fifteen hundred full time students and the building can begin. That’s expected to happen in 2010.

St. Mary's University & University Park

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