City holds Q&A for housing initiative

SMTX 4 All — the city of San Marcos’ housing initiative — held a Facebook Live Q&A Wednesday night. 

The Q&A served as an opportunity for the city’s Housing Task Force to receive public comments about housing in San Marcos as it develops a strategic housing action plan. 

“Housing is a really complex issue,” said Abby Gillfillan, planning manager for the city of San Marcos, in an interview Thursday. “I think that everybody is going into this, including our task force, city council and staff, with open eyes and really wanting to address it in a meaningful way. And so, public input, public participation in this process is really key and really important.” 

Housing Task Force chair Laura Dupont, senior vice president at Corridor Title Co., and vice chair Gloria Salazar, program coordinator at Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos and Gillfillan participated in the panel, while Andrea Villalobos with the city planning department moderated the panel. 

The city developed the housing task force to assist the City Council Workforce Housing Committee in creating the action plan. Dupont called the creation of the task force forward thinking, and Salazar agreed.

“So when we started this, I think that we were maybe a little confused as to what exactly it was we were looking for,” Salazar said during the Q&A. “But as we met and as the study went on, we certainly were made clear as to what the needs of our community are, and it’s not just one section of our community that needs to be addressed. We cannot address just one group of San Marcos without addressing the whole community.

“I think that this task force has made great advances in trying to look at new ideas, new ways to bring housing to San Marcos that will not only meet the needs of our people now but that will be able to grow for the population that’s coming and those who have moved into San Marcos and want to stay longer.”

The task force, with information gathered by Root Policy Research in the San Marcos Housing Needs Assessment, found four key needs for housing in San Marcos: 

• Additional affordable rentals for residents earning less than $25,000. 
• Prevention of displacement. 
• Homes priced near or below $200,000 and increased ownership product diversity. 
• Improvement of the condition and accessibility of existing housing stock.

The biggest challenges facing those living and working in San Marcos is the cost of buying a home and the exponential increase in rent. The median home sales price in San Marcos in 2017 was $256,000. The median rent has increased 55 percent in the last 18 years from $622 in 1999 to $966 in 2017, while the median income has only increased by 37 percent, according to Root Policy Research.

“We’ve gotten to a point where public servants — that goes to police and firefighters — people working in retail, people working in our major industries in this community, so when you look what are major industries in our community, one of the charts that came back in the needs assessment just showed that I don’t think we even had one major industry within San Marcos, where the average wage, or median wage within that industry, was able to purchase a home,” Gillfillan said. “So, that’s a problem. So, that’s why this has been such a pressing issue for our city council.” 

Additionally, the task force looks to keep families in San Marcos. The population of young adults is growing in the city. Many young adults want to stay in the city after graduating college but begin leaving when they’re ready to start families. 

“We think that a big link there is with our housing availability in San Marcos,” Gillfillan said. “Not just the price points of homes because you see fairly similar median home prices in other communities around us. So, it’s not necessarily just cost of homes, but it’s also the availability of quality homes and places that want to live and the types of homes, so places with three bedrooms that are designed and built for families. And people have a really hard time finding those in San Marcos. So, a focus on trying to keep families here and provide places for them, we heard that pretty loud and clear in the survey results that we got back.”

The task force plans to have a rough draft of its action plan on June 13 with three months to have discussions with the community before turning in a final draft in September. 

The city plans to continue gathering community input and is considering doing another live Q&A after Wednesday’s event. 

“I think the (Facebook Live) event was a major success,” said Lauren Volpe, marketing and multimedia specialist for the city of San Marcos. “This is a project we’ve been wanting to do for a while, because it creates an immediate dialogue between city leaders and residents. People attended, asked very thoughtful questions, and participated in a real and meaningful way. There’s already talks about putting another Q&A together later in the project and I’m excited to see the engagement that comes out of this and future events.”