Recent reports conducted by local and national nonprofits studied how Afghan evacuees have fared in San Antonio since they settled in 2021 following the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Taken together, the studies presented to the San Antonio Housing Commission this week revealed the difficulties Afghan evacuees living in San Antonio have had and pointed to the community's continued needs.
The Washington D.C.-based Urban Institute spoke to 12 Afghan adults living in San Antonio as part of its review of Afghan evacuees across the country.
The Urban Institute found that the humanitarian parole, which gave evacuees the temporary ability to stay in the U.S., had made gaining stable employment very difficult.
Most of the men and women they interviewed reported feelings of depression and stress. Women in particular emphasized how learning to drive presented an ongoing barrier for their success in the U.S.
Perhaps above all, Afghan evacuees expressed their concerns about housing. Apartments many Afghan families are living in are in poor conditions, unaffordable, or ill-suited to their large, multi-generational family sizes.
A stairwell collapse at one Medical Center apartment complex last summer highlighted the poor conditions Afghan evacuees have been forced to live in since fleeing their home country.
Afghan evacuees in San Antonio who spoke to Urban Institute also reported discrimination from property managers.
The San Antonio-based nonprofit Culturingua, which works with communities from Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian backgrounds, shared that its experience working with Afghan evacuees has also demonstrated how central of an issue housing is.
Culturingua CEO Nadia Mavrakis said the Medical Center-area apartments where many Afghan evacuees are concentrated need improvements, while avoiding high rent increases.
“I think it’s really important to know that the naturally occurring affordable housing … [is] severely underinvested, and there are investments that would be needed to ensure quality living conditions,” she said.
Both Urban Institute and Culturingua reported the importance of having a local Afghan community willing to volunteer their time to help newcomers adjust to the U.S. This became especially critical when evacuees discovered Pashto interpreters provided by the U.S. Center for Immigration Services could not reliably interpret for evacuees.
To address housing issues, Mavrakis said Culturingua has stood up a Community Land Trust (CLT) to build up affordable, attainable housing opportunities in the Medical Center area.
CLTs are 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 San Antonio Housing Commission is currently working on establishing the city’s CLT designation process, which must exist before CLTs can operate in the city.
In the meantime, Culturingua is working on other ways to support Afghan evacuees, including three workforce development programs based on many evacuees’ pre-existing skills.
"Those three training programs focus on sewing skills, animal husbandry, and culinary," Mavrakis said. "These trainings are all conducted in the native languages of the refugee and immigrant communities, notably Pastho, Dari, and Arabic."
Culturingua is also part of the MindWell Peer Support & Counseling Program with San Antonio nonprofit Family Service and Metro Health to offer counseling to Afghan middle- and high-schoolers in Northside Independent School District.
Mavrakis said another important part of their work is an idea to train leaders so that they can help themselves and their communities for years to come.
“To create a community ambassador leadership training program to train proximate leaders in the refugee community, including the Afghan community, on how to access city resources so that they can become civic leaders for enabling understanding of the access to information within their ethnic communities," she said.
