Written by the Mahncke Park Neighborhood Association Board of Directors: Joanie Brooks, President; Stephen Amberg, Vice President; Homer “Butch” Hayes, Treasurer; Camis Milam, Secretary; Jennifer Norton, Estrada Polly, and Noel Matthew Shaddock
A Call for Action by the Housing Commission to Protect and Preserve Dynamic and Diverse Neighborhoods San Antonio’s debate about how to secure affordable housing close to the city core is urgent. As a fast growing city with an anticipated additional one million people expected in the next 25 years, we are a prime target for developers. New people who desire urban living need affordable housing close to downtown to live and work at the same time that existing affordable housing in those areas is being demolished in favor of upper middle-class housing, which is displacing current residents. Our city government must address this growing crisis with a broader set of goals and tools than currently in use. The City should develop policies to sustain current affordable workers’ housing and to prevent displacement as it encourages infill development in the Downtown and Midtown areas.
The City has stated that it is committed to increase affordable housing and preserve existing central city neighborhoods. At the first meeting of the Housing Commission to Protect and Preserve Dynamic and Diverse Neighborhoods, on September 24, 2015, John Dugan, director of the Department of Planning and Community Development stated, “The Housing Commission will have a key role in developing new policies and programs to increase the supply of affordable and workforce housing.” The Housing Commission plans to develop policies and programs to protect and preserve existing central city neighborhoods. It also shares our concerns about affordability and preservation of existing communities. “We are seeing significant reinvestment in many of the neighborhoods located inside Loop 410,” Dugan said. “As new residents move in, we want to ensure that existing residents are not pushed out and the qualities that make these neighborhoods dynamic and diverse are not lost.” The City should now undertake to specify parameters for increased density in and around established Midtown residential neighborhoods, which are already dynamic and diverse, but whose qualities are threatened by inappropriate new development.
Recent developments in Mahncke Park illustrate where stable working class neighborhoods are in direct conflict with developers’ plans for inner tier development and profit. Mahncke Park (MP) is a residential neighborhood in the Midtown Regional Center, which is currently in Year 1 of the SA2020 Comprehensive Plan process, which is projected to gain 1,000 new families by 2040 as well as new businesses and jobs. Because MP has diverse and affordable housing of good quality that is proximate to the Downtown – located south of Alamo Heights between Brackenridge Park and Fort Sam – it has become a magnet for investors who seek to capitalize on rising interest and values. MP is struggling to maintain its identity as a vibrant community of people, who are diverse by income, age, ethnicity, occupation and talents and who share a common interest in maintaining this vibrancy. However, the City’s current housing development policies do not allow MP to protect the values of stability with change, affordable housing stock, and the historic residential fabric of the built environment and community life.
Mahncke Park (MP) is undergoing rapid change as affordable housing is demolished and replaced by upper middle income and luxury homes. MP has roughly 5,000 thousand residents who now live mostly in modest single-family homes, duplexes and quadraplex apartment buildings, and some larger multiunit low-rise apartment buildings, which were built from the 1920’s to the 1950’s. In the new environment, businesses have been allowed to encroach on residential streets and, on the southern side of the neighborhood, homes and apartment buildings that have fallen into various levels of neglect are 2 being snapped up by developers. They are then demolished and replaced with blocks of cookie-cutter “town” homes and condos.
The Mahncke Park Neighborhood Association (MPNA) wants to protect affordable housing and MP’s historic fabric as it supports the SA Comprehensive Plan for greater density in Midtown where it is appropriate. Some developers have worked well with MPNA to make modifications to their plans to accommodate historic values, but others reject community input.
One egregious case where the historic fabric of the MP community is being lost is the Imagine Homes projects. This case also demonstrates the limits of the City’s current policies for appropriate and sustainable development. Imagine Homes (IH) has already demolished homes and apartment buildings and replaced them with upper middle class town homes; it has applied for approval to demolish six more buildings. Claremont Street is being systematically transformed from its heterogeneous residential character to a monoculture of gentrification. IH’s signature project is a single-family house on a 25-foot lot with a front-loaded garage, which is specifically not allowed by the Neighborhood Conservation District (NCD) guidelines. The City adopted the MP Neighborhood Plan in 2004 and the NCD was approved in 2008. The NCD design overlay states that lots greater than 45 feet wide will have garages behind the plane of the house façade. There were no extant lots less than 50 feet wide over the past 50 years. Imagine Homes has made the case to the Development Services Department that the original 1928 platting of the Natalen Terrace area with 25-foot lots should have prior legal authority over later zoning and design guidelines. Imagine Homes is purchasing extant lots with buildings that encompass two or more plats and dividing them up into 25-foot single-family home lots. DSD states that the NCD guidelines do not apply and that zoning regulations do not prohibit what IM is doing. (See the satellite photo of Claremont.)
The Mahncke Park Neighborhood Association (MPNA) has requested a Change Request (CCR) to revise its NCD with the hope of blocking this practice. City Council approved the CCR, but DSD has reiterated the stance that the new NCD will not supersede the 1928 platting. This may well be a correct reading of zoning rules, but the resultant situation is unworkable for the neighborhood and the City. This case calls out for a new policy to govern development to be swiftly considered and acted on.
Debate has gelled on the need for a broader appreciation of our residential fabric than only physical assets. The September 5, 2017 edition of the Rivard Report included an article from Next City reporter Johnny Magdaleño that suggests the proper perspective from which to consider change. It notes that “Part of the value of the UNESCO World Heritage designation includes the ‘intangible heritage’ of people. It’s not the restaurant, it’s the chef,” says William Dupont, director of the Center for Cultural Sustainability at University of Texas at San Antonio. “So, as the city is looking at that, they’re concurrently taking a look at all of their policies citywide, [recognizing] displacement of the people can now cause loss of economic potential.” We urge the Housing Commission to not only look, but to adapt the City’s “equity lens” budget analysis for a new policy to sustain residential equity by protecting the existing community diversity of people and housing stock.
The Mayor and Council must act in a timely way to broaden the policy discussion about affordable housing and city development in ways that address preservation of our neighborhoods’ diversity, culture and heritage. The housing we are living in now is affordable housing. However, it is being torn down and replaced by housing that is not affordable for current residents and/or replaced by affordable housing that is subsidized by the taxpayers.
We recommend the following action items to our City officials.
1. We need a moratorium on the demolition of existing affordable housing until a new housing policy is enacted.
2. The City needs to address historical platting that is antagonistic to the context of current usage and design guidelines in order to maintain the historic diversity of neighborhoods.
3. The Mayor’s Housing Policy Task Force should develop strategies and policies to preserve and rehabilitate existing residential structures.
4. The Task Force should conduct a survey of rents in the sub-area neighborhoods of Midtown.
5. The new policies to preserve existing affordable housing should include support for individuals who own properties, but cannot afford to maintain them, in the form of grants and low cost loans.
6. The new policies should also support long-term residents with appropriate assistance to be able to age in place.
7. The Midtown Regional Planning Task Force should not abandon neighborhood plans, but use them as directives for new zoning maps.
8. There must be neighborhood membership in all decision-making bodies that formulate policies for residential neighborhoods that is at least equal to the representation of development interests.
9. Transportation Corridor planning boundaries for development must be re-scaled from a half-mile to the actual abutting properties while the traffic study boundaries remain in place.