The San Antonio Housing Trust is leading an effort to reshape the neighborhood around Cattleman Square, just to the west of Interstate 35 and downtown San Antonio.
There’s no grand plan or shiny rendering right now. The Housing Trust, a nonprofit focused on creating and preserving affordable housing, wants the people who live and work in the area to craft a vision and plan for what it’s calling Project District of Cattleman or Project DC for short.
Comic and superhero fans might draw a connection between the name’s Project Marvel and Project DC.
That’s not a coincidence, said Housing Trust Executive Director Pedro “Pete” Alanis. Community members were frustrated with the amount of public input for Project Marvel, which is the planned downtown arena for the San Antonio Spurs and its surrounding development, including renovations to the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center and a mixed-use district around the arena.
“We wanted the opposite. We wanted a tremendous amount of community input before we unveiled what the master plan was,” Alanis said. “It was really to show we wanted to do this differently and we wanted the community to be a part of it.”
The Housing Trust kicked off Project DC with multiple engagement events last week. The information sessions felt more like interactive museums, where participants could walk through multiple floors at a Housing Trust building near the VIA Centro Plaza, learn about Cattleman Square’s history and record their ideas. Attendees recorded voice memos, covered maps with push pins and Post-it notes and wrote letters with their visions or memories for the neighborhood.
Ideas for names for the District of Cattleman project are stuck to a poster during a Project DC engagement session on March 19, 2026. Credit: Jasper Kenzo Sundeen / San Antonio Report
It’s the first phase of a yearlong plan to gather feedback, Alanis said. The Housing Trust spent the last months of 2025 researching and analyzing Cattleman Square. Staff, including 12 canvassers, are seeking community input right now and will start using that input to craft a vision for the area in April.
Between July and November, the Housing Trust will start drafting a plan. Alanis said that will be a back-and-forth process where multiple drafts are shared with community members for reshaping. The organization plans to take its time before publishing a master plan by January 2027.
The Housing Trust is also communicating with institutions that have a footprint in the area. Alanis said the organization has memorandums of understanding with University Health, Haven for Hope and Prospera, which all own property or have campuses there, and verbal agreements with University of Texas at San Antonio and VIA Metropolitan Transit.
“They have very critical and core services that they are providing for the community,” Alanis said.
A map from the Project DC website from March 24 shows the boundary for the district in purple, as well as key roads and highways in the area. Credit: Courtesy / Project DC
A key component of the project has been homeless outreach, Alanis added, and the Housing Trust is working with Corazon Ministries and 8th and Home to work with homeless community members and develop a response plan.
It’s the latest effort to revitalize Cattleman Square, one of the city’s 32 historic districts.
Designated historic in 1985, the dozen or so blocks that make up the district are situated west of Interstate 35 and the urban core. Its historic assets include the I&GN Railroad Passenger Station and the Heimann Building, which was built in 1909.
Also near the district is the Bexar County Detention Center and Haven for Hope, a nonprofit hub of services and support for people experiencing homelessness.
The neighborhood bears the weight of long-vacant historic buildings that Westside advocates want preserved as well as systemic underinvestment.
The tide seemed to turn briefly in 1997 when UT San Antonio opened its downtown campus, completing the Buena Vista Street and Frio Street buildings in place of the failed Fiesta Plaza Mall and promising to boost enrollment.
Since then, the university has thus far put more of its expansion efforts into the center city despite previous master plans that envisioned academic and residential towers on parcels surrounding the main downtown campus near Cattleman Square.
Other redevelopment efforts in Cattleman Square have started and failed.
In 2023, VIA Metropolitan Transit abandoned plans for a mixed-use and residential development at the massive Scobey site, a former industrial site at 301 N. Medina St. near VIA Centro Plaza which opened in the district in 2015.
Officials cited economic conditions, but the idea also received significant pushback from residents who said the plan would create housing that’s unaffordable to many current Westside residents.
In March 2024, a city panel voted against a request by local developer David Adelman to demolish the historic but crime-ridden and fire-damaged Rich Book building in the district after dozens of residents opposed it.
The historic Rich Book Building, located in Cattleman Square at 900 W. Houston St., was built in 1923. Credit: Brenda Bazán / San Antonio Report
Westside advocates opposed Adelman’s plan to build new affordable housing on the site, saying too much of the area’s historic fabric was not being preserved. Estimates to remodel the building were put at over $1 million.
“What is sad about Cattleman Historic District is that it’s been disappearing since 1988,” Graciela Sanchez, director of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, said at the time. “What’s the point of having a historic district if there’s always someone that has [the ability] to take another building down.”
In recent years, the San Antonio Housing Trust PFC has been acquiring tracts of land on the West Side for its Cattleman Square project. That includes property once owned by the nonprofit Alamo Community Group, which planned then aborted an affordable housing project called Cattleman Square Lofts.
Now, Alanis said, the organization wants to incorporate those properties into a broader plan.
Early discussions with community members have touched on green space, housing strategies, infrastructure needs and historic preservation. The Housing Trust is keeping options open, including the project name, which Alanis said could change.
The nonprofit has noted challenges in the district. Most buildings are private and inaccessible to the public. There’s lots of surface parking and little shade. Mobility is difficult. Cattleman Square is sandwiched between a highway and a railroad and many of its thoroughfares are one-way streets.
Project DC will also need funding. The Housing Trust has funded the public outreach process with help from the Westside TIRZ, but supporting homeless residents, construction and other efforts will require dollars.
It’s hard to tell how much money will be needed, Alanis said, without a plan in place. He’s more concerned with community support and backing than funding.
Once there’s community support, Alanis believes the money will follow.