bigcitysmalltown podcast<\/a>. <\/p>\nSan Antonio has not been spared by the national housing crisis: Half of renters in the city are cost burdened, meaning they\u2019re spending more than 30% of their income on their housing, Reyes said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s also a crisis of many other things,\u201d he added. \u201cIt\u2019s a crisis of uncontrollable urban sprawl. There\u2019s also a crisis of lack of vision of where we want to head in the next decade or two decades. There\u2019s lots of ideas, but concrete plans, we\u2019re still in the process of, as a city, bringing that to fruition.\u201d<\/p>\n
Opportunity Home has an annual operating budget of $250 million and 600 employees, providing housing assistance to nearly 50,000 San Antonians and managing a waiting list of over 60,000 people. They have a total residential population of 85,000 people.<\/p>\n
In 1937, The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development allocated funding for 6,000 public housing units in San Antonio, Reyes said. That funding has dwindled, but the housing remains with a hefty price tag\u2013half a billion dollars\u2013in deferred maintenance, according to Reyes, who added that the federal government has been trying to get out of the business of public housing for some time now. <\/p>\n
Though Opportunity Home faces big challenges, Reyes doesn\u2019t want to do what many other cities have \u2014 privatizing public housing and pushing affordable housing residents out.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlmost half of our 85,000 residents are children,\u201d Reyes said. \u201cI remind our staff all the time, in many ways, we\u2019re a children\u2019s organization. And a good chunk of the other remaining 85,000 are older adults who just want to live in a safe place with dignity and respect. And so these are very vulnerable populations. It has to remain affordable and it has to remain publicly owned.\u201d<\/p>\n
Opportunity Home is in the process of creating a 10-year plan leading up to the organization\u2019s 100th anniversary, what Reyes calls the Centennial Vision. For the first time in its 88-year history, the organization will pursue renovations of all 6,000 public housing units at 59 properties across San Antonio.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cSo there are two scenarios here,\u201d he said. \u201cEither one, we\u2019re going to lose our public housing stock because it\u2019s going to crumble to the ground, or the organization is financially going to be insolvent and not be able to perform. Those are not two good scenarios. There\u2019s no choice but for the housing authority to find a new path. The new pathway is repositioning, but keeping in mind the public entity part and the public ownership part.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"San Antonio\u2019s public housing authority faces two big and expensive problems: a half-a-billion dollar pile of deferred maintenance…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44839,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[3212,12704,13668,26234,26235,3427,82,84,83,6251],"class_list":["post-44838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-antonio","tag-bigcitysmalltown","tag-housing-affordability","tag-housing-and-urban-development","tag-housing-crisis","tag-opportunity-home-san-antonio","tag-public-housing","tag-san-antonio","tag-san-antonio-headlines","tag-san-antonio-news","tag-wc-500-750"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}