City South Criticized for a Lack of Growth
By Vianna Davila - Express-News
Albert Escobedo never wanted to live in urban sprawl. So he picked up and moved south, to a rural property off Applewhite Road.
But Tuesday, Escobedo found himself at a public meeting in the Southside High School cafeteria, criticizing the lack of South Side development and the entity many of the five dozen attendees hold responsible for the slow pace of growth.
At issue was the City South Management Authority, created in 2003 to oversee development in the mostly rural South Side territory roughly bounded by loops 410 and 1604 and interstates 35 and 37.
The city- and county-led project was envisioned as a means to foster growth in an area that's seen little development, and to do so in a way that avoids North Side-style suburban and commercial sprawl.
“Let's not only create investment, but let's do it better,” said former Mayor Ed Garza, who pushed for the creation of City South while in office and now serves as its chairman. “Let's raise the standard, let's raise the bar.”
But today, despite the shovels turning dirt at a future Texas A&M campus and the pickups rolling out at Toyota's plant, most of the land remains rural and undeveloped. Escobedo blames City South.
“The way they have it, who wants to buy my land right now?” said Escobedo, whose property is zoned light and heavy industrial, meaning a developer can't buy it to build homes or commercial buildings.
While he wants to keep his land undeveloped while he lives there, he wants the option to sell it at a profit and then move farther out into the country.
Critics argue that the authority's restrictive zoning and design rules have hamstrung progress because the majority of the area's 60-plus square miles can't be developed into neighborhoods — which they say drive commercial and retail development.
“There's no rooftops. There's no H-E-B. If there's no people, there's nothing,” said Roger Gray, a real estate broker working with a group that's formed in opposition to City South, called the Home Ownership & Land Affordability Coalition, or HOLA.
HOLA, whose Web site said it opposes “excessive land-use regulation,” organized last week's meeting.
The organizers also have aligned themselves with Ernest and Jesús Chacon, brothers and landowners who with several others are embroiled in a federal lawsuit with the city to recover the value they believe they've lost because of a three-mile buffer zone established around Toyota. The city's original agreement with Toyota includes a nonbinding provision in which city officials essentially pledged to discourage residential development within the zone, deemed non-compatible with heavy manufacturing.
While several local officeholders have stopped short of calling for dissolving the entity, which the City Council reserves the right to do, they expressed some frustration.
“Nothing has really happened over the course of the years,” said Councilwoman Jennifer Ramos, whose district includes much of City South. “We want to make sure it's a well thought-out plan. But we don't want to make it too restrictive that it doesn't allow development to come in.”
As HOLA conducted its “Free City South” session Tuesday, Bill Manuel sat across the street at a meeting called by state Rep. Joe Farias, D-San Antonio. Part of Farias' aim was to gauge public opinion on City South.
Manuel, who owns 61/2 acres off Blue Wing Road, didn't know what to think about it until he dealt with the management board regarding a proposed zoning change near his property.
He found City South receptive, and he applauded its zoning rules because it means sprawling developments are less likely to creep up on his property.
“Without zoning, then anybody could come in and put up Section 8 housing,” Manuel said. “They could come in and put up low-cost housing. They could put in a junkyard.”
Garza said City South was designed to fit the needs of the existing residents but also foster sustainable, measured growth that translates not into just more homes but communities: The plan calls for homes with porches, walkable neighborhoods and tree-lined streets.
It sounded wonderful, Councilwoman Ramos said.
But those amenities ultimately increase the price of a house in an area where the average income for a family of four is $30,000 to $35,000 a year, Ramos said.
Sugar Land-based developer Charlie Turner says he'll break ground next year on a 1,340-acre planned community at U.S. 281 and Loop 410. But he plans to apply for a variance so his contractors aren't constrained by the City South design code.
Among both supporters and detractors, many do not understand City South, how it works or what it was meant to do.
City South's management authority is overseen by a 15-member board: six members each from the city and the county, plus three from the Southwest, Southside and East Central school districts.
Bexar County Commissioner Sergio “Chico” Rodriguez, who compared City South to a cancer, said he will not move forward with City South plans until Toyota clarifies where its 3-mile buffer begins and ends and how the automaker and the city will work to compensate landowners such as the Chacons for the lost value of their property.
But Garza cautioned that compensating landowners, even in the Toyota buffer zone, would set a strong precedent.
“I think anybody in the city could say then, ‘I don't like my zoning,'” he said.
Ramos said she continues to work with city staff to draft a feasible compromise that could ease zoning and design restrictions in parts of City South outside the Toyota buffer zone.
Realistically, Garza said, it would take three to four decades for any entity to develop an area as large as City South.
“These fights are to be expected,” Garza said. “The bottom line is, does our community have the political will to say, ‘We want to do things differently' — do we want to do things better?”
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