SAN ANTONIO – San Antonio is hoping to couple a rapid transit effort with affordable housing.
While VIA Metropolitan Transit continues to plug away on its Advanced Rapid Transit plan, the city of San Antonio is aiming to strategically align with those plans by buying up vacant lots along the proposed north-south route. The city plans to acquire a handful of parcels utilizing funds from a $7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Pathways to Removing Obstacles grant will also be used to identify ways to remove affordable housing development barriers, according to the application.
Most of the grant money — up to $6.5 million — will be spent acquiring and entitling those parcels. Once that process is complete, the San Antonio Housing Trust will seek development partners for each site. The rest of the funds will be used to hire consultants to draft community engagement plans and conduct economic analyses for different development scenarios.
San Antonio will kick in up to $3.5 million in housing bond dollars, depending on the size of the grant award. In its draft application, the city said it plans to focus on acquiring sites near population centers with the most need.
“Currently, the highest opportunity and highest capacity areas are along the north end of the line, which currently lacks affordable, accessible housing despite having a higher than local average concentration of people with disabilities,” the city wrote. “By acquiring land strategically along the Green Line, residents will have greater access to essential health and social services.”
A timeline submitted as part of the application outlines land acquisition starting in 2025, development partner solicitation in 2026 and awards issued in 2027. The city anticipates completed construction of any proposed development in 2028 or 2029, depending on how many rounds of RFPs are issued.
An estimated 240 apartment units and five to 10 single-family homes are expected to be produced by the effort. The city plans to make the multifamily developments “deeply affordable,” meaning that any apartment project would offer rents at 60% of the area median income or lower.
Concurrently, a task force is evaluating the city’s Unified Development Code to refresh the guidelines around transit-oriented development, hoping to streamline development within a quarter-mile of rapid transit stations.
The city of San Antonio did not provide comment by publication time.
Read more of this story, and other stories like it, in the San Antonio Business Journal.
Editor’s note: This story was published through a partnership between KSAT and the San Antonio Business Journal.