This story originally appeared in the nonprofit San Antonio Report.
The visionary behind San Antonio’s plans for a new downtown sports and entertainment district regrets naming it Project Marvel — an idea she said confused the public and distracted from the more popular goal of building the Spurs a new arena.
“Project Marvel” is a code name city officials gave their larger vision for roughly $4 billion worth of upgrades to the Henry B. González Convention Center, the Alamodome, a proposed land bridge and NBA arena expected to make the Hemisfair area a major destination for tourists and locals alike.
It was first revealed in emails obtained by open records requests by the Express-News in July of 2024, and caught on quickly despite city leaders’ efforts to rebrand.
“It’s been a rocky start. We’re still trying to educate the community on what’s happening,” former Assistant City Manager Lori Houston told attendees at a Texas Public Radio breakfast Tuesday. “[I’m] not going to take any bets on where it’s going to go.”
The first major indication of whether the public supports the arena will come from Prop. B in the Nov. 4 election. Voters are being asked whether to put $311 million from Bexar County’s venue tax toward an overall $1.3 billion project — which leans on $489 million of city funding as well.
Houston, who has been a part of many big downtown development projects over the past two decades, believes Project Marvel has the potential to be the most transformative change to downtown in decades.
But the key to major projects’ success is an alignment of support from the private sector, elected officials and the public, she said, and right now the latter isn’t where it needs to be.
“I wish we would have led with the arena opportunity, and then talked about what the city was already doing [on the convention center and Alamodome] versus selling it all in one shot,” said Houston, who shepherded the city’s Riverwalk extensions from dream to reality under then-Mayor Phil Hardberger.
Houston retired from City Hall at the end of last month, but said she plans to “stay engaged” with the project — plus other passion projects like homelessness and affordable housing — while figuring out what’s next for her career.
Measuring public sentiment
So far there’s been no public polling on the Spurs arena, something the team has put $2 million into promoting through its PAC. Results of a UTSA poll are expected to drop next week, days before early voting starts Oct. 20.
But Houston said Tuesday that private polling had helped inform the city’s decision to move the team downtown, in part by indicating there was little interest in investing to update the Spurs’ current Eastside home.
“People were saying, ‘Yeah, I don’t support a new arena, the Frost Bank Center or any improvements because there’s nothing there. We go there and then we leave,'” Houston said.
From that feedback, the idea of Project Marvel was born — though Houston said colleagues long joked it needed another name.
The city worked on the vision with the Spurs’ owners for roughly a year before the idea was presented to the public in November 2024, something she said was intended to first figure out what was possible in that space before offering the public a complete vision.
“[Polling indicated people wanted] something where you have more opportunities in that area, … so we decided, let’s sell the whole project,” Houston said Tuesday.
But that approach roiled some critics who felt left out of the process on a landscape-shifting project that engaged developers long before residents.
Before it was even presented to the public in November, neighborhood leaders had already started organizing against it with yellow “No! Project Marvel” yard signs peppering downtown.
Houston said Tuesday that she now believes the city should have focused on the arena instead of letting the public believe it was voting on all of the surrounding development plans.
The city is using state dollars from a Project Finance Zone to pay for the convention center and Alamodome upgrades. That money is limited-use and doesn’t require a public vote.
The city’s $489 million arena contribution comes from a Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone and rent the team will pay for the lease — more spending it doesn’t need permission for from the public.
“The biggest challenge I’ve had with the project from the get go was we packaged it as a sports entertainment district, and really the issue is about an arena in downtown San Antonio,” Houston said. “Those other components, the convention center, those all were going to get done, regardless of the arena coming in.”