Texas Monthly recently delivered a backhanded compliment to the community I serve as mayor, calling San Antonio “one of the loveliest, most welcoming—and poorest cities in America.” While I don’t dispute any of her facts, the article’s author, San Antonio native Mimi Swartz, selectively curates those facts to make her argument, blurring the lines of responsibility for various governmental functions and citing challenges for which the potential solutions lie beyond the city government’s full control. That’s a critical mistake if you’re serious about making change, because you need to know who holds the keys to funding, where accountability lies, when the ball is in your court to act alone, and when you must work as part of a coalition. If Swartz’s goal was to stir debate, I accept the challenge.
Disagreements aside, I believe Swartz’s story is a must read for all who care about our city. It paints beautiful portraits of many of our caring neighbors, who represent the true strength of San Antonio, and provides an honest reckoning with the systemic racism that is part of our city’s past and continues to shape many of the inequities we face today. Swartz’s central question—How do we break the cycle of generational poverty?—is one that no San Antonian can ignore. So here’s my take, which is by no means unique to me.
When considering persistent poverty in families and communities, academic experts often suggest improving what they call the social determinants of health and success in life. The rest of us just call that giving every family a fighting chance to get ahead. Busting down barriers and opening doors to provide access to quality education, housing, health care, and higher wages is the only way to break the grip that poverty can have on families from one generation to the next.
The Texas constitution puts the responsibility for public school funding squarely in the hands of the Legislature. Swartz, however, puts more emphasis on San Antonio’s lack of school district consolidation than its lack of adequate state funding. Never mind that we live in a state where the Legislature recently gave pay raises to jailers but none to public school teachers.
Every San Antonio parent knows that education is the great equalizer, and most of them enthusiastically supported Pre-K 4 SA, the program launched by one of my predecessors as mayor, Julián Castro. Pre-K 4 SA has helped ensure that thousands of children enter kindergarten ready to learn, and voters recently extended the program for another eight years. In 2019, we launched AlamoPromise, which offers free community college for all high school graduates in Bexar County. And in 2020, 77 percent of San Antonio voters approved our Ready to Work program, which helps mid-career adults finish college degrees and complete professional and vocational certifications, with hands-on training for higher-paying jobs in fields that range from nursing to accounting to high-skill manufacturing. Ready to Work offers childcare and other assistance to remove the major barriers to participation, and the program has already enrolled nearly 10,000 San Antonians looking for a path to economic mobility.
Bottom line: Even as state leaders fail to take responsibility for ensuring opportunities for all Texans, we in San Antonio are taking the task upon ourselves.
But no city is an island. While we can strengthen San Antonio’s resilience, we’re still impacted by the larger economic forces that challenge urban centers across the country. That’s what makes the article’s potshot—quoting a former president of the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce asking how a city that provided the nation with two Housing and Urban Development secretaries could face an affordable-housing crisis—so baseless. Find me a city in America that hasn’t struggled with housing costs in the postpandemic economy, and name me a city that has done more than San Antonio to address it. (The sound you’re hearing now is crickets.)
We changed the city charter to allow for San Antonio’s first-ever affordable-housing bond. In the two years since, in part with the funding that bond provided, we have produced more than 2,100 new affordable-housing units, have preserved 2,200 more, and have another 5,000 in progress. Those units include nearly 900 homes to help low-income seniors age in place, with more in the pipeline. We’re also building our first permanent supportive housing complexes and opening our first shelters to get those who are chronically homeless—including those in need of care for addiction, trauma, or other conditions—off the streets. It’s all part of a ten-year plan to produce more than 28,000 affordable homes to serve struggling and working families in our city. It’s important to remember that public safety accounts for nearly two out of every three dollars in the city’s general-fund budget, so addressing housing issues requires bonds and federal funding.
The same is true for transportation challenges. Transportation costs rank second only to housing as the highest burden for families. That’s why nearly 68 percent of San Antonio voters approved redirecting part of an existing sales tax to Via Metropolitan Transit, providing the necessary revenue to improve the frequency of bus service and build more routes for the future. The new funding stream enabled us to qualify for federal support for the first time, and in early 2025 we will break ground on San Antonio’s first-ever advanced rapid transit system.
Swartz cites chronic health-care challenges, such as diabetes, that afflict a larger portion of our residents than in other urban areas. But she fails to mention that San Antonio is creating one of the first schools of public health to focus on such conditions. That school, established through a partnership between the University of Texas at San Antonio and UT Health San Antonio, has been widely praised by business and public health leaders as a game changer in training health-care providers, increasing access to quality care, and promoting innovation.
Let’s be clear-eyed in also noting that public health is at the center of the culture wars. Swartz tells the story of one San Antonio resident whose bright future got derailed when she became pregnant at fifteen, but Swartz fails to mention that the state supports “crisis pregnancy centers” that have no trained medical staff while gutting family planning services that actually do.
On the jobs front, Swartz revives debates from decades past regarding the value of a low-wage tourism industry while ignoring an announced manufacturing plant on the South Side from JCB, the largest private construction and agricultural heavy-equipment maker in the world, that will employ 1,500 trained San Antonians at high wages that can provide for families. She makes no mention of Toyota’s recently announced expansion of its manufacturing facility in the city; the arrival of Navistar’s vehicle-assembly plant, which pays good wages to about a thousand of our citizens; or the growth of the biomedical and aerospace industries, which together employ tens of thousands of San Antonians.
No one can deny that today’s economy shows little mercy to those on the lower end of the skills ladder. We saw that in the real estate crash in 2007 and again during the COVID-19 pandemic. But the commitment of San Antonio families to stand by their neighbors is what led scholars at the Brookings Institution to recognize, in a 2024 report, that the San Antonio–New Braunfels area was among the top 10 percent of metros of its size in the country in narrowing the income gap between the most and least advantaged communities over the past decade. Swartz notes that the needle has moved but misses why that’s significant: My city has changed the status quo, and the foundation has been laid for long-term economic mobility.
Swartz generally dismisses such data points as coming from “boosters,” but in doing so, she misses the true story of San Antonio: We’re a city of optimists. We’ll bet on the future, always. We’ll do what it takes to give our kids a fighting chance. And when we look at the work ahead, we say: Bring it!
Ron Nirenberg is mayor of San Antonio.
