Awakening of realtors

For a long time, there were only three real estate businesses selling in the neighborhood — Centro Properties, Southtown Realty, and Betty’s King William Realty. In general, realtors from elsewhere in the city ignored everything south of Monte Vista.

“Anybody who would come to San Antonio at that time, if they asked about living downtown, would be told no, you don’t want to live down there. It’s too dangerous, the schools are bad, etcetera, etcetera.”

What changed things, Steve believes, was the success of The Pearl, “both locally and nationally,” in 2006 and 2007.

“It kind of blew the lid off the idea that there was no housing downtown. So, at that point, other realtors in town could no longer redline and tell people there was nothing to look at.”

“The neighborhood was too well known, too popular. So they were forced either to learn it or refer business to somebody who knew it. Or lose their business.”

Virtuous cycle

“Once you get to a tipping point,” Steve says, “it’s a virtuous cycle. We still have a lot of great people down here, interesting stuff. We’re the visual arts center of San Antonio. We’ve got the biggest concentration outside The Pearl of independently owned, chef-driven restaurants.”

“Once you get that critical mass of arts, restaurants and people down here, so it feels like there’s something going on, then you tend to get more people down here; the more people you get down here, retail directed at those people gets built, like the H-E-B Flores Street market. And it just feeds on itself.”

"And the trend nation-wide, at least for younger people and for older people who are empty nesters, they want to be where the action is. They — some of them; enough of them — don’t want to be in a generic disconnected neighborhood.”

“San Antonio is now at that point.”

The benefits of lagging

In real estate development, San Antonio tends to lag five or ten years behind the trends in other major Texas cities, Steve says.

“The same thing goes for the return to urban living. San Antonio lags what’s been going on in Dallas, Houston and Austin by a good ten years. So in my mind, we’re really just now getting started.”

It used to be that our economy was really insulated and unique, so development projects that might succeed in Dallas or Houston could either succeed or fail here, and there was no apparent rhyme or reason to it. “You just never knew.”

Because more corporations have grown here and brought people in, our economy and the makeup of our population has become much more like other cities.

“The key, though — while that’s happening — will be to not lose the good part of the culture that we have. So far we’ve done a pretty good job of hanging on to that.”

“Because San Antonio grows so slow — even now, it grows slower than other major Texas cities — we have a chance to see what is working or not working in other Texas cities and correct our path before it gets too far out of hand.”

Austin, on the other hand, has already changed beyond recovery, Steve says. He remembers Austin in the seventies, when he was a kid, and again in the eighties, when, he says, he was already ‘pissed off’ that it wasn’t like he remembered it from the seventies. And now, today, he describes it as the Singapore of Texas, and he doesn’t mean that in a good way.

Once again, people and culture are important to him.

Austin has become sort of a mini-Dallas, Steve says (with apologies to his friends and family who live there and still love it), where “everyone is into themselves” and you have conversations where people are primarily trying to impress each other. “It’s too often only about money and looks and appearance.”

San Antonio is not like that. It still has retained its culture, Steve says.

“You can move to town from somewhere else and within two months be totally tapped into whatever non-profit you want to work on, get invited to parties at a $4 million mansion and a $150,000 house on the same weekend. It’s just always been a great mix of that kind of thing.”

“King William and Lavaca are still a good mix of people. It’s intergenerational; it’s gay, straight, LGBT-friendly; you don’t have to have money in order to fit in, to talk with people and connect with people and make friends.”

“As long as you’re a nice person and relatively interesting, you can make twenty grand and have a nice life down here, go to great parties, and be treated just the same as everybody else.”

“What typically happens in a bigger community, a richer community — like Austin or Houston — when an area becomes hip, this is the place to be, it quickly becomes kind of a yuppie ghetto. People twenty and thirty years old who are making $150,000 a year in some tech business or whatever and that’s all it is. Good luck if you’re a sixty year old living amongst that — you won’t really feel like you’re part of the community. That hasn’t happened in San Antonio.”

Where are we headed

Many long-term neighbors worry that the things that make our neighborhood great are threatened by gentrification. People whose families have lived here for generations are being forced out by rising property taxes that track rising property values. Most of the funky retail stores on South Alamo have been replaced by restaurants and law offices. And neighborhood spots like Bite and Acapulco are disappearing, while ‘destination’ restaurants like Bliss and Battalion absorb prime real estate.

As those homeowners and businesses get forced out, the neighborhood changes. However, we’ve got some backstops, like historical districts and big chunks of government-owned property, and we’ve also got an activist community of neighborhood organizations and neighborhood-focused developers and businesses.

Steve cites two realities that give the neighborhood some protective inertia and control that is lacking elsewhere: our historic district designations and the substantial chunk of property controlled by the San Antonio Housing Authority.

Both Lavaca and King William acquired historic designations late in the twentieth century, thanks to hard work by dedicated community activists.

Today, you’ll hear complaints from people about how that designation makes it hard for them to renovate their homes exactly the way they’d like, but Steve considers that protection to be vital to preserving the uniqueness and value of the neighborhood’s culture and economy.

In addition, a significant chunk of Lavaca residential property is controlled by the San Antonio Housing authority, and SAHA has sought out and been responsive to neighborhood input on what it does with that property.

That property — in the corner of Lavaca closest to the Alamodome — was previously a public housing project called Victoria Courts. Built in 1940, Victoria Courts in the late twentieth century was old, rundown, and had a reputation for being dangerous. When SAHA demolished the housing in 2000, it worked with the neighborhood on plans for re-purposing that property.

SAHA hasn’t made everyone happy, but they’ve listened and incorporated neighborhood feedback in a way that a private developer might not.

One example, Steve points out, is the gradation of housing scale from César Chávez on the north edge of the SAHA property to Leigh Street on the south edge. Dense, multi-story apartments fill the first two blocks, less dense townhomes come next, and single-owner standalone houses line Leigh Street itself. That approach, Steve says, was an approach negotiated between the Lavaca neighborhood and SAHA.

At the same time, SAHA’s mission of supporting housing for lower-income residents has helped preserve the neighborhood’s income diversity. Both the Refugio and Hemisview apartments are a mix of market-rate and subsidized units. Many of the low-income renters are young families with children, which also supports generational diversity, something that can be missing from newer privately-developed apartment complexes.

What are Steve’s concerns

“The only thing that really has begun to concern me is that there are certain elements in the business community who have an attitude of ‘hey, we just need to knock stuff down and build new. We can’t just hang onto all these old buildings.’”

Steve says that this is ‘the exact opposite of what we need to be doing.”

“That’s the only thing that has kept San Antonio in the economic development game -- the fact that we’ve got all that historic structure and fabric that we’ve hung onto.”

Deciding that we’ve got too many old buildings and that "we should tear it down and build something new and cool like Austin or Dallas would be the death knell for San Antonio’s feeling.”

Gentrification and economic diversity

“I think we’ve still got economic diversity down here. San Antonio doesn’t have near the gentrification that other places do.”

“San Antonio is blessed in that our population recognizes that and tries to do something about it. As an example, Lavaca and the re-do of Victoria Commons. At least in the past, and I think still today, a majority of residents in Lavaca made a big push and demanded that it stay a mixed-income community and not become all market-rate.”

“Lavaca is not a NIMBY neighborhood.”

Density

One topic that generates controversy in the neighborhood is density. Many neighbors oppose it. Steve says it’s a good thing.

“Back when we were doing St. Benedict’s, people were saying that we don’t need more development, it’s getting too crowded, there’s too much traffic.”

“I went back and looked at the demographics, and there were twice as many people living in King William as late as the 1970s and eighties as in 2000. Every other house in King William was made up of four or five apartments. All those are gone.”

And, of course, Victoria Courts is gone.

“I bet we’re still not back to the population numbers we had in this neighborhood in the sixties and seventies.”

“And if you’re going to get the Flores Street Market, if you’re going to get drug stores — all the stuff that people always bitch about not being down here — you’ve got to have people.”

“We still need a lot more density down here than we have.”

Steve ran into that attitude when developing his Cedar Street townhomes and his Madison Street project. The neighborhood pushed him to reduce density.

In the case of Madison Street, the original plan was to develop eight or nine townhomes, but he had to reduce the number of units and build garden homes instead.

The Cedar Street townhomes were originally designed for 21 or 22 homes, but “over the course of two years of negotiating with the neighborhood, we got a smaller number and a bigger square footage of units. Push, push, push down to where we got fourteen units.”

Fewer, larger units, of course, means a higher price tag per unit, which affects who can afford them and, for the developer, increases risk, since more expensive units usually sell more slowly. (In the case of Cedar Street, however, Steve says the higher priced units went first).

Continuing commitment

Steve’s commitment to the neighborhood is a personal one, not just a business commitment. The neighborhood reflects his values, and it’s where he wants to be.

And he’ll be here for a while.

He has just begun work renovating a home on Barrera Street in Lavaca, where he and his wife Belinda plan to relocate as soon as the work is done.

“I love this neighborhood,” Steve says. “This is where I want to be.”