Equitable housing fraught with challenges

San Marcos is a city in the midst of a boom, but with any boom comes a bust, and for many in the area that bust is affordable housing.

The Texas State University Philosophy Department and the LBJ Museum of San Marcos wrapped up their annual Summer Dialogues for Activism last week with a deliberative dialogue on equitable housing in San Marcos.

Texas State University Philosophy Professor Jo Ann Carson moderated, and instead of posing the questions to a panel of experts in housing, she posed them to a mixed group of San Marcos residents including homeowners, renters, university students and faculty and others.

Equitable housing is defined loosely as housing that provides diverse, quality, accessible, affordable housing options with access to opportunities, services and amenities. Carson explained the philosophic idea behind equitable housing and why it’s considered a democratic pursuit.

“Equitable housing ties into a moral component because equality is a basic American value and the idea of housing is sometimes misleading because when we talk about housing, it is an essential basic to have a roof over your head, but the importance of a home is the notion of a social relationship and community,” she said.

Carson instructed the participants to divide into two groups, and the groups seemed to naturally divide along age lines as well as tenant and owner lines almost immediately; which produced two conversations with two sets of issues affecting equitable housing in San Marcos.

Equitable housing is an idyllic goal for any city to achieve, but it can be hard to pinpoint the issues that create and sustain it. The issues for the group of San Marcans that particiapted in the deliberative dialogue seemed to boil down to a burgeoning student population coupled with a position in the heart of one of the fastest-growing regions in the United States, an imbalance between the high demand for housing in San Marcos and the low supply it has to offer, and the effects of a segregated past translated into current economic inequalities.

Like Austin and other cities that have felt growing pains before, San Marcos has found itself with a shortage of affordable housing for students and families alike. John David Carson, a local developer who participated in the dialogue, pointed out that part of the issue is the shortage of student housing contributes to a shortage of affordable family housing.

“There is not enough supply to house the students that we have and that is raising the price on everything,” he said. “But building new buildings with current building code regulations and property values is almost structurally impossible to build and make a profit. The more affordable houses should be your older houses in your community because they have depreciated, but when you have so much demand, well, you can’t solve the problem unless we have a lot more housing — and we are not building fast enough.”

But others pointed out that San Marcos has a lot to lose from careless development or overdevelopment – traffic, flooding and environmental concerns were a few named.

“There is a line where some of us are afraid of bringing in gentrification with greedy developers versus we need more housing for the future of San Marcos – it’s walking the line of preserving what we have and not changing versus introducing more houses in neighborhoods that are already established perhaps,” Dianna McCabe said.

Jenn Garcia, a Texas State University philosophy lecturer that helped lead the group discussion, said one of the issues she experienced as a young professional in the city – no longer a student – was finding affordable accommodations because of the private student housing industries’ use of rent-by-the-room leasing.

“A lot of the developments that are going into San Marcos are private student housing and that is becoming an issue, because now there is a shortage of affordable housing for young professionals and families,” Garcia said. “And the university continues to grow, but they are not necessarily pulling their own weight and so private student housing comes in – which is rent-by-the-room – and that raises the rent for everyone.”

Rent-by-the-room apartments can make apartments implausible and difficult for families, young professionals or couples to occupy. But with a burgeoning university that has a growing student body every year, San Marcos has an insatiable need for more and affordable student housing options as well as single-family and workforce housing options.

“The university is growing, but San Marcos and the San Marcos area are too and not everyone that is coming in is a student,” Professor Carson said. “We have a lack of workforce housing for people that are coming to this area. Where are they going to live?”

The median household income in San Marcos, according to the most recent Census data, is $30,985, with a 35.8 percent poverty rate. But the average home price in San Marcos for the same data year at $151,700, and a median gross rent of $949 – more than the advised 28 percent of income that financial experts recommend going to mortgage or rent payments.

Another aspect contributing to inequitable housing is the city’s – along with most of the nation’s – segregated past. San Marcos was once a town divided by race – the Mexican barrios surrounding the neighborhood around Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos on Lee Street and the historic African-American community occupying most of the Dunbar neighborhood. And now many on the east side of town are demographically minority and lower-income individuals.

As one of example of how minority populations have been affected by inequitable housing practices, Carson presented each member of the dialogue with copy of a Hays County plat dedication that was dated April 15, 1948 and included restrictions that “no lot or any part of any lot, shall be sold, conveyed, leased rented or encumbered, to any person of negro descent, nor shall any lot ever be used or occupied by any person of negro descent except such as may be serving as domestics for the owner or tenant of said lot while said owner or tenant is residing thereon.”

Professor Carson said this was one of many local documents that contained this sort of restriction.

According to dialogue participant and Texas State University graduate Nathaniel Sosa, many of the housing inequalities that minority populations faced in earlier decades have translated, to a degree, into housing inequalities for low-income residents – a feeling of fix the issue “but don’t put low-income people in my neighborhood” – and this can affect both low-income students and low-income families in the area.

“There is a common thread among older and established neighborhoods that they want to address the needs of San Marcos’ housing, but they don’t want it here in their neighborhoods,” Sosa said.