Development of San Antonio's South Side

My San Antonio ^ | 11/11/2006 | Mike Greenberg

[Lorianne]

For most of the 20th century, San Antonians saw southern Bexar County as the place where sewage paused, but people didn't, on the way to the coast.

The band south of the city was, and for the most part still is, a rugged, sparsely populated area of ranches and oil fields, with a scattering of small communities along the Medina and San Antonio rivers.

The area's image, however, was shaped by Mitchell Lake.

It had been prized as a duck habitat for centuries, but in 1901 the city bought it for use as a sewage dump, then after 1930 as a way-station for treated effluent.

In 1973, the city took Mitchell Lake out of sewage service and designated it a wildlife refuge. The ducks came back, along with hundreds of species of migrating birds.

Now owned by the San Antonio Water System, the lake, its wetlands and the surrounding property — 1,300 acres in all — are operated by the Audubon Society as a bird sanctuary and education center.

The Mitchell Lake Audubon Center today is emblematic of the changing fortunes of a once-neglected area.

Once notorious as San Antonio's septic tank, the lake is now a jewel in the middle of City South, the 64-square-mile territory that then-Mayor Ed Garza conceived nearly five years ago as a model for sustainable development shaped by New Urbanist planning ideas.

Garza's South Side Balanced Growth Initiative — the original name for City South — seemed quixotic to many observers when he broached it in early 2002.

But a few months later, Toyota began considering land a little west of Mitchell Lake for a Tundra truck assembly plant. Toyota and its suppliers were expected to generate thousands of jobs and, with them, a market for new neighborhoods.

Suddenly, Garza looked less like Don Quixote and more like Warren Buffett.

When Toyota made it official in early 2003, the planning agenda for City South shifted. The question was no longer how to entice development, but how to manage and assimilate it.

***

No less a figure than New Urbanist guru Andres Duany has marveled at the ambition of City South. It is not just a vast geographic extension of San Antonio's city limits and regulatory authority, but also a reversal of its prior approach to planning.

"We have never done detailed planning for an area of 64 square miles. Successful planning of this kind is nonexistent in the U.S.," Duany said in 2005, at the beginning of a weeklong public exercise to add specificity to previous City South plans and standards.

Whether planning for City South will prove "successful" is yet to be determined. Many policy details relating to urban design are still being discussed by city staff and other public agencies. Little actual development in City South has put the New Urbanist planning approach to the test.

There is no doubt, however, about the daunting ambition underlying City South. Never before had the city swallowed so much non-urbanized land in one gulp. Equally unprecedented was the city's plan for digesting it.

When Garza, a planner by education and profession, ran for mayor in 2001, "balanced growth" was a major part of his platform. He hoped to channel more development toward the long-dormant south.

"He felt the one thing that could affect the direction of growth and the quality of growth was a New Urbanist approach — more density, more walkable," recalls architect Stephen Land Tillotson of Kell-Muñoz Architects. Tillotson has been involved in City South planning almost from its inception, on both the private and the public sides.

In the idealized big picture, as it has emerged from planning studies, public workshops and official policy, City South aims to promote development of compact, walkable, mixed-use urban neighborhoods, concentrated around the intersections of major roads, while preserving much of the area's rural, agricultural character.

The City South Community Plan and subsequent zoning designations endorsed a crucial recommendation of an Urban Land Institute panel that studied the area at the city's request in late 2002.

"One of the key recommendations in the ULI report was that up to 25 percent of the developable land should be kept in agricultural use, to keep the rural character," Tillotson says. "That changed a very basic component. That was the most key qualifier."

Linking urban and rural would be new or expanded roads and a network of recreational greenbelts along the area's numerous waterways, including the San Antonio and Medina rivers and the Leon and Salado creeks.

The city created a special "flex" zoning code for City South. The requirements and options are too extensive to detail here, but this is the key point: Nearly all the design features that have been the norm in suburban development of the past 40 years are forbidden in City South — barring exceptions under carefully defined circumstances, or the open-ended loophole of the City Council's authority to designate a special-use district.

In general, the "flex" code decrees no gated subdivisions and no large tracts of single-family houses on lots of the same size. It summarizes the intent of urban development as being to encourage "compact neighborhoods and centralized commercial areas that promote a sense of community and are pedestrian and transit friendly."

***

To understand the proposed future of City South, it's necessary first to get a sense of its past and present.

City South is bounded on the north by Loop 410 South, on the east by I-37 (the road to Corpus Christi), on the west by I-35 (the road to Laredo) and on the south by a jagged line up to a mile or so south of the Medina River.

West of Texas 16, the land is almost entirely agricultural, but there are a few beloved institutions scattered among the farm fields.

The place to eat and socialize is Benjamin's Kitchen, surrounded by farms on Fischer Road, a two-lane blacktop, a little west of Somerset Road and a little east of a sign pointing to an adult theater. The food is good, hearty Tex-Mex.

When it crosses Somerset, Fischer Road becomes Watson Road, which turns southward and then turns east again. In the middle of that stretch, and seemingly in the middle of nowhere, stands a little barbacoa place, Pepe's No. 8. It opened last March.

The owner, Pepe Salinas, said the building was already on the 5-acre property when he bought it about a decade ago. "I just fixed it up a little."

Though very aware of the development pressures that Toyota might bring, he has no plans sell his land.

"I got three boys. It's still in my plan, making my house in here and then one acre for each of my boys, one acre for the business."

He waves a hand toward the property across the road.

"These guys over there — they don't want to sell. But money talks."

Watson Road's two lanes split around an old oak tree and eventually reach Texas 16. There, on the left, stands the San Antonio Speedway, a half-mile NASCAR track that draws a large, rather sedate crowd to Saturday night races.

Across Watson Road from the speedway, a tractor-trailer stands in an otherwise empty field. A sign on the trailer's side announces "San Antonio's Newest Address. The Preserve at Medina River."

East of Texas 16, Watson Road was expanded this year to four lanes and a wide median landscaped with clusters of palms. It ends at Applewhite Road and the entrance to Toyota.

City South's oldest settlements are concentrated in its eastern half.

Oldest of all is the community around Mission Espada, on the San Antonio River south of Loop 410. Property lines are little changed from Spanish times, when narrow farms were laid out along irrigation ditches fed by the river.

Dating from Civil War times is Losoya, just south of the Medina River at FM 1937.

A four-block enclave of a dozen or so houses on the south bank of the Medina at Pleasanton Road is identified as Earle on some maps, Cassin on others.

Whatever its name, it became a flag stop on the San Antonio, Uvalde and Gulf Railroad when it came through in 1913.

Southton, a hamlet stretching along Southton Road east of Mission Espada, was built on the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway in the early 20th century and became a shipping point for the nearby Yturri-Southton oil field.

To generations of urban San Antonio youths, "Southton" meant a reform school, the Bexar County Boys Home — now the Cyndi Taylor Krier Juvenile Correctional Treatment Center.

Neither river nor rail passes near Buena Vista, first settled about a century ago on what is now FM 1937, just south of its intersection with Blue Wing Road.

Mobile and manufactured houses predominate in Buena Vista. Its commercial and social center is a small grocery, Dave's Quik Stop, with a row of rural-delivery mailboxes along the road. Nearby is a tiny pink church, Iglesia Milagro de Buena Vista, with two portable toilets outside.

The biggest population center in City South is Villa Coronado, a neighborhood of modest houses on small lots just south of Loop 410 and east of Roosevelt Avenue.

Settled in part by people from the Mission Espada community, and still in that church's parish, Villa Coronado is a low-income area, but most of its houses are attractive and proudly maintained.

Big changes may be coming to the area around Villa Coronado.

To the west, across Roosevelt Avenue, is Texas A&M University's controversial "preferred site" for a proposed San Antonio campus.

To the east is property targeted by a Houston developer, Terramark, for the mixed-use first phase of a huge project — virtually a new town — called Espada.

***

The four years since Toyota's interest in the area became public have brought several residential subdivisions to City South.

Of these, only Hunter's Pond II and its adjacent younger sibling, The Park at Hunter's Pond, were designed to satisfy the "flex" zoning code.

Houses have front porches and are set close to the street. Cars enter the garages from wide paved alleys, where utilities are also located. (Lots at the periphery of the subdivision are not served by alleys and have garages facing the street.) Wide sidewalks are buffered from the street by a narrow planting strip. Lot sizes vary.

Despite the extra cost of those paved alleys and other public amenities, two builders bought into the project and have been selling houses in a moderate price range, from about $110,000 to $154,000.

The 530-acre Preserve at Medina River is projected to include up to 1,180 single-family houses (priced from $140,000 to $300,000), 380 apartments, a large retail center, offices and a hotel.

The master plan reserves 160 acres for open space, including a park with a lake near the river and a network of pedestrian trails.

The developer is Crosswinds National LLC of Michigan. San Antonio's Alamo Architects, whose credits include The Shops at La Cantera, is the retail designer.

Joe Cotter, managing partner of Crosswinds' Dallas-based partner, Trinity CW Development, said site constraints required some departures from the "flex" code. Among other things, the site's northeast corner falls within Toyota's no-residential buffer zone.

Detailed land planning is yet to be done, but Cotter said the project will not be New Urbanist.

"You wouldn't want to put a 40-foot lot next to a 70-foot lot," he says.

Instead, he said, the Preserve will follow the conventional late-20th-century pattern: Houses of similar price range and lot size will be grouped together, and apartments will be in a separate area.

But the conceptual master plan, still bearing the project's original name of South Lake, reaches beyond convention to take cues from the 19th-century Garden City movement: A grid of curvy arterial roads and parkways, with traffic circles at some intersections, links all the residential areas with commercial and retail areas, a school site and the park on the south.

If the plan does not show the density and fine-grained development mix of New Urbanism, it does have some of the connectivity. Most residents would live within a half-mile walk of the retail area.

Espada is by far the largest and most ambitious development proposal for City South, and the one that comes closest to the full New Urbanist model. It's partly Tillotson's baby: Kell-Muñoz is part of the planning team.

Espada's full scope is still uncertain. Terramark owns about 1,200 acres and is negotiating with the Bexar Metropolitan Water District to purchase part of its 672-acre Cassin Lake property; BexarMet prefers to sell the whole tract.

In addition, the character of the western portion of the project, immediately south of A&M's preferred site, will depend on whether the campus actually is built there.

Terramark hopes to develop that tract as a campus-oriented neighborhood with a mix of student housing, apartments, town houses and a mixed-use "town center," all on a fairly tight street grid designed for easy movement on foot or bike.

A large commercial center would straddle Roosevelt Avenue between Espada's west tract and its much larger east tract. The area east of Villa Coronado and bordering Loop 410 would be developed intensively with retail, offices and apartments.

Most of the east tract would be developed in a hybrid of New Urbanist and Garden City modes.

A greenbelt, incorporating an enlarged Cassin Lake, would connect areas of single-family houses with a mixed-use neighborhood center. Medium-density or multifamily housing would be concentrated there, along with a small commercial hub and sites for two churches and an elementary school.

If Terramark buys the whole BexarMet site, Espada could reach nearly to Dave's Quik Stop and that tiny church in Buena Vista.

At present, that little community is zoned for "rural development," a designation that could forestall intensive growth and Buena Vista's obliteration.

But, as the urbanist Alex Marshall has observed, transportation is destiny.

Last year Duany's planning team, looking at the present and proposed road network and other infrastructure, proposed designating seven strategic locations in City South as "intended growth" sectors — future regional centers — surrounded by "controlled growth" urban villages.

One of those proposed neighborhoods would cover the site of Buena Vista, a shopping mall's length away from U.S. 281.

The theory behind the planning is that concentrating intensive development in a few areas would enable the rest to maintain something like their old rural way of life.

Duany's map shows growth steering clear of Losoya, Earle (or Cassin), possibly Southton, the Mission Espada community and Pepe Salinas and his neighbors.

But a map is just a map. And as Salinas says, "Money talks."