San Antonio District 5 Councilmember Teri Castillo announced two new city housing policies during a press conference on Wednesday that she said would increase the amount of deeply affordable housing stock in San Antonio.
The Community Land Trust (CLT) Tiered Affordability and Stay SA policies would tackle new affordable housing development and the red tape that can get in the way.
“San Antonio needs housing now,” Castillo said. “And that’s why I have introduced these two council consideration requests to support the equitable construction and preservation of affordable housing across our city.”
Mayor Ron Nirenberg, Congressman Greg Casar, and Harlandale Independent School District Superintendent Gerardo Soto joined her at the presentation.
Nirenberg said policies like Castillo’s were necessary to maintain housing affordability in a city growing as quickly as San Antonio.
“These solutions center on accommodating denser growth within and between our regional employment centers,” he said. “We must ensure that policies we put forward accomplish this goal of increasing affordability and density.”
Nirenberg said the city’s $150 million Affordable Housing Bond is doing a lot of work to build affordable housing in the city, but it’s not a cure-all for the city’s housing problems.
CLTs are local nonprofits that purchase land to keep it from the speculative real estate market so that costs remain low for residents living on the land even if property values increase. CLTs make out long-term leases to residents who effectively serve as homeowners, but the CLTs retain ownership of the land underneath in perpetuity.
The CLT Tiered Affordability policy would have the city prioritize CLTs with commitments to developing affordable housing for vacant land the city regularly disposes of.
CLTs would submit development proposals to the city and have to demonstrate their capacity to develop land into affordable housing. Viable proposals would be prioritized for selection based on how affordable their housing developments would be, with the highest priority going to developments for households earning 30% or less than the region’s average median income.
Graciela Sánchez is the director of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center on the West Side, which operates a community land trust. She stood with supporters behind Castillo at Wednesday’s press conference. She said she hopes her organization will benefit from the policy.
“The city has these vacant lots and even vacant buildings that have been donated, deeded to them, and we hope that at least the ones within the historic West Side neighborhood are deeded to the Esperanza community land trust,” she said.
The Stay SA policy proposed establishing new density bonus programs that would allow developers to create residential buildings with more units per acre than is traditionally permitted if the units are affordable.
Developers who take advantage of the programs would have certain administrative barriers removed, making development easier for them and bringing more affordable housing with it.
“By ensuring that we reduce some of that red tape we can ensure that with our limited housing dollars, we’re able to support the construction of the housing where our constituents know we need it the most,” Castillo said.
The policy proposal repeatedly references Austin development policies from 2019 that helped spur affordable housing development. Casar, who sat on Austin’s city council at the time, said San Antonio has the opportunity to get ahead of the problem that Austin is still working to fix.
“We had to talk about how we were going to bring thousands of families that had been pushed out of Austin back to the city,” he said. “That’s not the position you want to be in. In San Antonio, before people get pushed out, it would be so much better to just keep people here.”
The policy specifically calls for three density bonus programs, with the possibility for more. Two of the density bonus programs would geographically encompass parts of the city where Transit Oriented Development is taking place and where universities and colleges sit.
Additional density bonus programs the policy suggests exploring could encompass the Downtown Business District and the SA Tomorrow Regional Center Plan Areas — 13 parts of the city like Brooks on the South Side, the Medical Center, and Stone Oak.
Finally, the policy proposal asks city staff to consider whether it would be feasible for Fees in Lieu of Production — when developers pay a fee rather than producing more housing units in a development project — could be transmitted to the San Antonio Housing Trust Fund or Opportunity Home’s Accessibility and Modernization Fund to support the city’s other affordable housing efforts.
The proposal also argues that these density bonus programs will make the city more competitive for federal investment grants.
Castillo said the policies are a critical foundation for the future of affordable housing in the city.
“If we want to get ahold of our local housing crisis, our city must act boldly in preserving our current affordable housing stock while also creating more accessible and affordable housing that our families can rely on for generations,” she said.
Soto said the families that rely on his schools and the teachers that work in them need this kind of effort from the city to increase affordable housing.
“The escalating cost of housing has placed an enormous burden on our school district employees,” he said. “Many of them struggle to find affordable housing close to their workplace when rents often surpass what their salaries can accommodate.”
The housing policy proposals will likely take several months before they get a vote in front of the full city council.
