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‘KEEP PUBLIC HOUSING PUBLIC’: SAN ANTONIO DISPUTE REFLECTS
NATIONAL TENSIONS  
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Jared Brey
July 9, 2024
Governing
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_ The leader of San Antonio’s public housing authority built strong
relationships with tenants and committed to preserving public housing
units. The board fired him last month. _

The Alazán-Apache Courts are at the center of debate about the
future of public housing in San Antonio., Bonnie Arbittier/San Antonio
Report

 

Even with low-cost housing harder than ever to find in most American
cities, the stock of public housing is shrinking. The number of
families living in public housing shrank 6.5 percent during a recent
five-year period, according to the Urban Institute — not a huge
decline, but a decline nonetheless.

Several federal initiatives to redevelop public-housing towers with
lower-density, mixed-income projects have helped improve the image of
public housing from its nadir in the mid-to-late 20th century. But
they have also changed the mission of public housing authorities. Once
focused solely on building and maintaining public units for poor
people, housing authorities now engage in a wide variety of
housing-related activities, sometimes partnering with private
developers to build apartments for people who make barely less than
the median income.

Tenants in some public housing projects, such as San Antonio’s
Alazán-Apache Courts, feel besieged. The complex is one of the oldest
public housing projects in the U.S., built for low-income Mexican
Americans during the New Deal. In the 2010s, San Antonio’s housing
authority (now called Opportunity Home), sought to partly demolish the
project and rebuild it with mixed-income apartments.

Tenants, who loudly protested that plan, celebrated when the authority
named a new president in 2021. Ed Hinojosa, who had been the
authority's chief financial officer, vowed to nix the mixed-income
redevelopment plan, instead preserving all the existing public housing
units at the site.

But last month, the Opportunity Home board abruptly fired Hinojosa.
Board members have since cited a growing budget deficit under his
leadership as one of the reasons why he was let go. But some tenants
say the board wants to demolish projects including the Alazán-Apache
Courts, replace them with mixed-income housing and use the public
housing authority to finance deals with private developers that
won’t serve the people who need housing the most.

“We’re about to throw down again,” says Kayla Miranda, an
organizer and tenant at the Alazán-Apache Courts.
 

Redevelopment, Reconsidered

Like other housing authorities around the turn of the century,
Opportunity Home used funding from the federal HOPE VI program to
demolish some public housing projects and replace them with
mixed-income apartments. In the years leading up to Hinojosa’s
hiring, the authority planned to work with developers to redevelop the
Alazán-Apache Courts using federal low-income housing tax credits.

Some tenants didn’t like that plan because they believed they’d be
displaced in the redevelopment process and wouldn’t have a unit to
move back into in the new complex. They also believed it would
accelerate the gentrification of the historic west side of San
Antonio. They staged protests
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plan, including outside the home of then-CEO David Nisivoccia.

When Hinojosa took over as president and CEO, he acknowledged and even
seemed to share their concerns. “The approach when you do
mixed-income development is that you offer these families a voucher or
you offer to move them to another public housing location," Hinojosa
said in an interview in 2021
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"As we started looking into the details, it’s hard for tenants to
use their vouchers right now because there aren’t a lot of units
available.”

Many of the families at the courts had vanishingly small monthly
incomes. “We started becoming concerned about the ability to move so
many people out of Alazán and for them to find housing," Hinojosa
said. "So that really led us to start thinking about a different
approach.”

Under Hinojosa, who couldn’t be reached for an interview for this
story (and who has reportedly denied other press requests since his
firing), the San Antonio housing authority sought to redevelop the
Alazán project in small phases using its own funds. That reversal —
and Hinojosa’s different approach to the top job — were a relief
to tenants like Miranda.

“The first thing Ed did was stop the Alazán project. The second
thing he did was call me and other tenants,” Miranda says. “We
didn’t have to go set a meeting with him. When he took over, he came
and found us.”
 

‘A Different Direction’

Many housing authorities adapted their payment enforcement and
eviction processes during the pandemic to be more lenient with
tenants. In San Antonio, uncollected rents began to accumulate over
the last few years, topping $2 million, according to a report
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The Opportunity Home board reportedly urged the organization to begin
enforcing collections.

The authority sent enforcement notifications to all tenants who owed
rent in the spring, according to the San Antonio Report
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More than 600 families in all, some owing as little as $1. The board
then unanimously voted to fire Hinojosa at its June board meeting.

The board hasn’t given a full explanation about why Hinojosa was
fired. Both Opportunity Home and the chair of its board, Gabriel
Lopez, an affordable-housing developer, declined interview requests
and did not answer emailed questions from _Governing. _But Lopez told
a local PBS station
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that the decision had been under discussion “for several months.”
He cited the rising deficit at Opportunity Home and the growing
housing needs in San Antonio, saying, “we decided to take the agency
in a different direction.”

What that means for the Alazán project isn’t exactly clear yet. But
Lopez and other agency leaders have been talking in recent weeks about
using more financing options, like the federal Rental Assistance
Demonstration (RAD) program, which helps housing authorities renovate
public housing and build mixed-income projects. Lopez has said the
authority should look for all opportunities to support affordable
housing for people at a range of income levels.

To some tenants, that’s a red flag. Even though tenants are supposed
to have a right to return to public housing units after redevelopment
projects are complete under RAD and other programs, in practice, many
don’t. Housing vouchers don’t provide the same level of stability
as traditional public housing. There’s also nowhere nearly enough in
terms of either housing vouchers or public housing units to serve
everyone who qualifies for one, in San Antonio or anywhere else.

For the most vulnerable renters, there’s nothing else that replaces
public housing. “For any developer to come in and anyone try to
destroy the only option for people that are at these lowest incomes is
despicable and disgusting. It should not happen,” Miranda says.
“There is nowhere else to go. It’s public housing or it’s
homelessness.”

Some housing advocates and local elected officials have called for
Hinojosa to be reinstated. Teri Castillo, a San Antonio city
councilmember, says the board made a mistake in firing him, given his
strong relationships with tenants.

Castillo notes that the Alazán project and other Opportunity Home
properties sit on valuable real estate adjacent to developing areas.
She worries that the agency could shift its focus to making deals with
private developers to build mixed-income housing, rather than working
to house the city’s poorest residents.

“My hope and expectation is that [Hinojosa’s replacement] is
someone who’s committed to keeping public housing public,” she
says.

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* Public Housing Projects; Alazán-Apache Courts; Redevelopment;
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