San Antonio will remain a poor city until leaders look beyond the low-income status quo

If only San Antonio leaders cared as much about dragging people out of poverty as they do expanding the convention center. Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Michael Barrera

Cityscrapes is a column of opinion and analysis.

The New York Times turned its attention to San Antonio late last month in the form of a lengthy feature article.

No, it wasn’t about the coming wonders of Project Marvel and its multibillion-dollar price tag, or even about Spurs’ exciting playoff run. It didn’t focus on the wonders of the River Walk or our distinctive culture.

The piece, titled “San Antonio Is Booming. Why Are Many Still in Poverty?” noted that our city ranks as the third-poorest among the nation’s 25 largest metro areas, ranking alongside Houston and Detroit. Just as striking, our current poverty rate of about 17% is barely changed from that of 1980, when 20% of San Antonians lived below the federal poverty line.

It can be difficult to see our community, with construction booming downtown, new residential neighborhoods emerging on the urban fringe and clogged highways as somehow on a par with Detroit, the poster child for urban blight. Yet the reality is that this has long been a low-wage area with an economy substantially based on services for its immediate region and with a significant focus on tourism.

That means a lot of San Antonio residents are “a car breakdown or health emergency away from becoming homeless,” as one resident told the Times.

While the article quoted former mayors Julián Castro and Ron Nirenberg on their efforts, arguing they had “enacted policies that were aimed at tackling systemic poverty, knowing they would not see all of the outcomes during their tenures,” the reality is that they, together with their council colleagues, pursued policies that supported that same low-wage service economy.

Castro did indeed bring Pre-K for SA to reality and increase access to early childhood education. He also promoted the “Decade of Downtown” with its emphasis on subsidies for city-center development and market-rate housing together with millions in city bond spending for streets and public improvements.

But Castro’s commitment to downtown also included the most recent expansion of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, opened in 2016 at a cost of $325 million. That spending was justified by the promise that its upgrades would “improve the ranking of the convention center facilities’ position in the national convention and tourism industry from 22nd to the top 10,” and that the expansion would “allow the city to host more, and larger, conventions and meetings in the years to come.”

Nirenberg told the Times “he was playing the long game.” Yet during his tenure as mayor he laid the groundwork and financing foundation for Project Marvel, combining a new Spurs arena with a major convention center expansion, improvements to the Alamodome, redevelopment of the John Wood Federal Courthouse and perhaps a new 1,000-room hotel as well. Well before the project first emerged publicly with news coverage in July 2024, city officials quietly arranged the pieces of the financial puzzle that would not only support the billions in required public investment but could also be carried out with a public vote.

One piece of that puzzle was the “sale” of the Grand Hyatt hotel to a public authority in Wisconsin, approved by the city council in early 2022. By moving the hotel’s debt off the city’s books, the 2% hotel occupancy tax was freed up to support yet another convention center expansion. That portion of the hotel tax has been dedicated to convention center expansion since the city sought the tax from the state legislature in the mid-1990s. And it will remain committed to center expansion seemingly forever.

The other major piece of the financial puzzle is creation of a “project finance zone,” a means of redirecting state hotel tax revenues in an area around the convention center and Alamodome to support those projects, and the new arena. That was managed, with little public visibility, by State Sen. José Menéndez in June 2023. Much like the city’s hotel occupancy tax, the commitment of these funds to the Project Marvel initiative was managed without a public vote.

While the poverty rate in San Antonio has remained remarkably high for decades, we have constructed a system by which vast amounts of public dollars feed tourism and low-wage jobs over and over, decade after decade. The promise is always that a bigger convention center and a renewed and improved Alamodome will bring a flood of new conventions and visitors, a continuing series of big events like the NCAA Final Four, and perhaps even a national political convention.

Yet that promise never seems to translate into materially better lives for low-income San Antonians.

Heywood Sanders is a professor emeritus of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

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