Termed-out San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg is clearly looking to cement his legacy.
However, there’s a good chance he won’t be remembered as the leader who saved the the San Antonio Missions, the city’s minor-league baseball team, from relocation but as another mayor in a long line who built something San Antonio didn’t need.
Nirenberg’s eagerness to cement a deal to give the Missions a new, $160 million stadium brings to mind the zeal with which former Mayor Henry Cisneros pursued big projects that would “put San Antonio on the map.” Those included building a SeaWorld in the middle of South Texas, constructing a football stadium without a team and the unforgettable “pink elephant” of a West Side mall that was ultimately torn down.
Similar arguments swirled when Nirenberg and other members of City Council voted Sept. 12 to move ahead with the city-financed ballpark. If only San Antonio had yet another sports facility, it would finally feel like the nation’s seventh-largest city, the logic went. Others on the dais said the 4,500-capacity stadium is needed to revitalize San Antonio’s lackluster downtown.
The truth is, Austin didn’t evolve from a sleepy college town to an international tech hub — and one U.S. News & World Report recently named among the nation’s most livable cities — because it has UT football or an MLS soccer team.
No, Austin came from behind and left San Antonio in the dust because it made strategic decisions to invest in industry — real industry, rather than tourism and service jobs. Like every other city but San Antonio in the so-called Texas Triangle, it has a top-100 nationally ranked university.
Meanwhile, WalletHub has ranked San Antonio among the least-educated large U.S. cities for three consecutive years. In 2021, a report by the San Antonio Public Library found that a quarter of the city’s population was functionally illiterate.
It’s little surprise San Antonio consistently ranks among the most impoverished large cities in the nation. Local leaders have known about the factors that contribute to our problem with generational poverty and have had decades to right them.
False promise
The San Antonio Missions’ sports and entertainment district won’t spark meaningful economic development downtown because that’s not how economic development works, regardless of whatever Centro San Antonio CEO Trish DeBerry says.
True economic development starts with education. Employers want to relocate headquarters and locate investments in areas that offer educated workforces. Municipalities with highly educated workforces also have an easier time building their own resident local economy through entrepreneurship and investment.
That’s the organic manner in which revitalization occurs.
Meanwhile, Weston Urban’s promises and Centro San Antonio’s claims that a minor-league ballpark will jumpstart downtown investment seem flimsy and hollow.
Weston Urban co-founder and CEO Randy Smith, the public face of the stadium proposal, told the Express-News his company plans to build 1,500 luxury apartments in the northeast corner of downtown surrounding the new baseball stadium.
It will be interesting to see how many people in this low-wage city can pay $1,500 a month to live in downtown San Antonio.
Additionally, the idea of building two competing sports districts on different sides of downtown is a questionable one, experts in publicly financed sports facilities have pointed out. If the San Antonio Spurs do end up at Hemisfair, then why would any restaurant or bar owner be enticed to relocate to Weston Urban’s sports district?
Besides, the financing mechanism being used to pay for the stadium has its own problems, those same experts argue.
If business owners do relocate to the Houston Street Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone that will fund the Missions’ facility, that tax money will be removed from San Antonio’s general revenue stream. How good a deal is that, considering the city is already facing a $68.2 million deficit over the next three years?
Schemes vs. substance
But don’t worry, folks, the minor league baseball stadium is going to fix everything, advocates promise. San Antonio will finally be a world-class city.
If San Antonio truly wants to be recognized as a city with that distinction, it needs to invest in people rather than pricy buildings. Instead of pumping public money into a minor league baseball stadium or a $4 billion sports district at Hemisfair, it needs to invest in education.
Nirenberg deserves some credit for openly discussing San Antonio’s problem with generational poverty and trying to apply an equity lens to the city’s longstanding problems. However, it’s a shame that he didn’t appear to pursue those issues with the same vigor as he did the Missions development.
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