Texas Monthly recently paid a backhanded compliment to the community where I serve as mayor, calling San Antonio “one of America’s most beautiful, most welcoming, and poorest cities.” I don’t dispute any of her facts, but the author of the article, San Antonio native Mimi Swartz, blurs the lines of responsibility for various government functions and makes sure that potential solutions are not legal. They list external issues and carefully select those facts to assert them. Full control of city government. This is a grave mistake if you are serious about making change. Because you need to know who holds the keys to your finances, where accountability lies, and when you should act alone when the ball is in your court and when you should work as part of a coalition. is. . If Mr. Swartz’s purpose was to stir up controversy, I accept the challenge.
Differences of opinion aside, I believe Swartz’s story is a must-read for anyone interested in our city. This work paints a beautiful portrait of the many caring neighbors who represent the true strength of San Antonio, are part of our city’s past, and many of the inequalities we face today. provides an honest assessment of the systemic racism that continues to shape the United States. Mr. Swartz’s central question – how to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty – is one that no San Antonian can ignore. I’ll give my perspective here, which is in no way unique to me.
San Antonio is booming. Why are we still so poor?
When considering persistent poverty in families and communities, academic experts often suggest improving what are called the social determinants of health and life success. The rest of us simply call it giving every family a fighting chance to advance. Removing barriers and opening the doors to access to quality education, housing, health care and higher wages is the only way to break through the effects of poverty on families from one generation to the next.
The Texas Constitution puts responsibility for funding public schools directly in the hands of the Legislature. But Swartz said San Antonio’s lack of school district consolidation is more important than the lack of adequate state funding. Never mind that our state recently gave prison guards a raise, but public school teachers received no raises at all.
Every parent in San Antonio knows that education is the great equalizer, and most of us have learned that education is a program created by one of my predecessors as Mayor, Julián Castro. He was an avid supporter of K 4 SA. Pre-K 4 SA helps thousands of children enroll and learn in kindergarten, and voters recently extended the program for eight more years. In 2019, we launched AlamoPromise, which provides free community college to all high school graduates in Bexar County. And in 2020, 77% of San Antonio voters approved the Ready to Work program. The program helps mid-career adults earn college degrees and complete professional and vocational certifications, giving them hands-on training to land well-paying jobs in fields ranging from nursing to nursing. Provide. From accounting to advanced manufacturing. Ready to Work provides child care and other supports to remove major barriers to participation, and the program already has nearly 10,000 San Antonians looking for a path to economic mobility. I am registered.
Bottom line: Even if state leaders don’t have the responsibility to ensure opportunity for all Texans, we in San Antonio have taken it upon ourselves.
But no city is an island. While we can strengthen San Antonio’s resiliency, we are still subject to larger economic forces challenging urban centers across the country. That’s the source of this article, the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s potshot on how a city that gave the country two Housing and Urban Development secretaries can face an affordable housing crisis. This is why the statement (quoting the chairman’s question) is baseless. Find an American city that hasn’t struggled with housing costs in the post-pandemic economy, and name one that has addressed this issue better than San Antonio. (The sound you are hearing now is crickets.)
We changed our City Charter to authorize the first affordable housing bond in San Antonio history. In the two years since then, thanks in part to bond funding, we have produced more than 2,100 new affordable housing units, preserved another 2,200, and have another 5,000 under construction. These units include approximately 900 homes to help low-income seniors age well, with more on the way. We also built the first permanent supportive housing complex and opened the first shelter to get chronically homeless people off the streets, including those in need of care for addiction, trauma and other conditions. I’m doing it. It’s all part of a 10-year plan to produce more than 28,000 units of affordable housing to serve needy and working families in the city. It’s important to remember that public safety makes up nearly two out of every three dollars in the city’s general fund budget, so addressing housing issues requires bond and federal funding.
The same goes for transportation challenges. Transportation costs are the second biggest burden on families after housing. That’s why nearly 68 percent of San Antonio voters voted to redirect some of their existing sales tax dollars through Metropolitan Transit, which is necessary to improve bus frequency and build more routes for the future. It authorized the provision of revenue. The new funding stream makes the company eligible for federal assistance for the first time, and construction is expected to begin in early 2025 on San Antonio’s first advanced rapid transit system.
Swartz cites chronic medical issues such as diabetes that afflict more residents here than in other urban areas. But she fails to mention that San Antonio is creating one of the first public health schools focused on such situations. Established in partnership with the University of Texas at San Antonio and UT Health San Antonio, the school is a game-changer in training health care providers, increasing access to quality care, and promoting health services for business and business. Widely praised by public health leaders. innovation.
Let’s also keep in mind that public health is at the heart of the culture wars. Swartz tells the story of a San Antonio woman whose bright future was derailed when she became pregnant at age 15, but the state supported “crisis pregnancy centers” that lacked trained medical staff. , it does not mention that family planning services, which are actually staffed by medical staff, are being abolished.
On the jobs front, Swartz revisited a decades-old debate about the value of low-wage tourism, while ignoring a manufacturing plant announced on the South Side by JCB, the world’s largest private construction and agricultural heavy equipment maker. There is. It employs 1,500 trained San Antonians at high wages that support their families. She did not mention Toyota’s recently announced expansion of its manufacturing facility in the city. Arrival of Navistar’s automobile assembly plant. It pays enough wages to about 1,000 people. Or the growth of the biomedical and aerospace industries, which together employ tens of thousands of San Antonians.
No one can deny that today’s economy shows little mercy to those at the bottom of the skills ladder. We saw it with the real estate crash of 2007, and we saw it with the COVID-19 pandemic. But scholars at the Brookings Institution have shown that San Antonio families are willing to lean into their neighbors, and in a 2024 report they found that the area between San Antonio and New Braunfels is one of the largest cities of similar size in the country. The city is recognized as being in the top 10% of metropolitan areas. It has helped reduce the income gap between the most advantaged and the least advantaged communities over the past decade. Swartz points out that the needle has moved, but misses why that matters. My city has changed its status quo and created a foundation for long-term economic mobility.
Swartz typically dismisses such data points as coming from “boosters,” but in doing so he misses the real story of San Antonio: We are a city of optimists. Masu. We always bet on the future. We’re going to do whatever it takes to give our kids a fighting chance. And when we look to the future of work, we say: “Please bring it!”
Ron Nirenberg is the mayor of San Antonio.
