After Revival in San Antonio, Washington Comes Calling

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U.S. |After Revival in San Antonio, Washington Comes Calling

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Obama Nominates New HUD Secretary

The president tapped JuliÃ¡n Castro, the mayor of San Antonio, to be the secretary of housing and urban development, replacing Shaun Donovan, who was promoted to run the White House budget office.

Publish Date May 23, 2014

Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

SAN ANTONIO â€” When Mayor Julián Castro of San Antonio and local officials traveled to Washington in 2012 to meet President Obamaâ€™s housing secretary, Shaun Donovan, the agenda was about housing policy. But for Mr. Castro, it was personal, too.

The meeting was about revitalizing the Wheatley Courts public housing project on San Antonioâ€™s impoverished Eastside, once the heart of the cityâ€™s black community. But it also hit home for Mr. Castro, who grew up near the low-rent projects in the Mexican-American barrio on the other side of town. His mother worked for the housing authority, and his father lived in the projects on the cityâ€™s Westside as a teenager.

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Two years after that meeting in Washington, the Eastside is now the focus of a public and private revival, fueled in part by a nearly $30 million grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to demolish and redevelop Wheatley Courts as housing for a broader mix of incomes, including low- and moderate-income families and market-rate households. And Mr. Castro, a politically ambitious Democrat tapped to be the keynote speaker at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, is poised to replace Mr. Donovan as housing secretary, a move President Obama made official on Friday.

If he receives Senate confirmation, Mr. Castro, whose twin brother, Joaquin, is a Democratic congressman representing San Antonio, apparently would become the first housing secretary in the 48-year history of the position whose parents lived and worked in public housing projects.

â€œItâ€™s precisely because heâ€™s lived out the American dream that heâ€™ll work his tail off to make sure more people can travel that same path and earn their own dreams as well,â€ Mr. Obama said as Mr. Castro and Mr. Donovan stood next to him at the White House.

Since becoming mayor in 2009, Mr. Castro, 39, has championed urban renewal and steered San Antonio through a kind of renaissance that has built new housing in areas once ignored by developers and made the city hipper and more expensive. Problems remain, including crime and drugs, and rapid gentrification has raised concerns that low-income residents will be priced out of their neighborhoods. But many here say Mr. Castroâ€™s record of building housing and funneling public and private resources to struggling neighborhoods makes him a natural fit to lead the nationâ€™s housing agency.

â€œIf he hadnâ€™t set the tone, then this wouldnâ€™t be happening,â€ said Nelson W. Wolff, a former mayor of San Antonio who is now the county judge for Bexar County, which includes the city.

Mr. Castro has had success in directing Washingtonâ€™s attention to the Eastside â€” securing four federal initiatives totaling $55 million â€” and in January, President Obama selected the Eastside as one of his first five anti-poverty â€œPromise Zones.â€ Mr. Castro has also led an effort to revive a large part of downtown San Antonio, an area once dominated by tourists visiting the Alamo but now teeming with young professionals.

On a once-forlorn stretch of Broadway at the northern edge of downtown, the Mosaic, a stylish apartment building, rises on a lot that had been vacant for years, with one-bedrooms renting for $1,400 to $2,200 a month. The city enticed developers to build the Mosaic and other residential buildings using waivers of city fees, tax rebates and other incentives, some of which Mr. Castro created. Since 2010, developers have completed or are building 2,700 housing units in a five-square-mile area downtown using $39 million in incentives, city officials said.

â€œWe wouldnâ€™t have made the progress that weâ€™re making on downtown development but for Mayor Castroâ€™s leadership,â€ said Sheryl Sculley, the city manager.

City leaders are confident that they will reach their goal of 7,500 new housing units downtown by 2020. Compared with larger cities, the number is modest. Before he became housing secretary in 2009, Mr. Donovan was the housing commissioner in New York City and led Mayor Michael R. Bloombergâ€™s plan to create or preserve 165,000 housing units for low- and moderate-income families.

In San Antonio, the majority of the new apartments downtown are market-rate units, but a number of them will be student and mixed-income housing. City officials said they required that developers receiving incentives rent 10 percent of the units at each building at the initial rate, so that as rents climb over the years, those apartments stay affordable to moderate-income residents.

Some housing advocates said that the mayor had failed to make low-income housing a priority, and that many of the new housing units downtown would be unaffordable for many residents. â€œWeâ€™re definitely seeing the cost of housing increase significantly,â€ said Jennifer Gonzalez, executive director of the Alamo Community Group, a nonprofit developer of low-income housing.

Others, however, say the housing being built has already had an impact, breathing new life into the center of the city and beyond. Abandoned factories and other vacant sites are being turned into upscale residential, office and shopping complexes, a trend that started before the mayor took office but has continued with his backing.

â€œThe city has become a more marketable city for people out of the state than itâ€™s ever been in its history,â€ said Graham Weston, a co-founder of Rackspace, a web hosting company that converted an abandoned shopping mall into its corporate headquarters in 2008. â€œI think the mayor was the first political leader to put us on that trajectory.â€

Some critics say Mr. Castro has paid more attention in his third term to his political career than to the city. A plan to build a $280 million downtown streetcar system that the mayor supports has drawn intense opposition by conservatives.

â€œTo me, he lost interest in this city a few years ago,â€ said Robert Stovall, the chairman of the Republican Party of Bexar County. â€œHe hasnâ€™t left us in good shape. Good luck to him. Weâ€™ll put the pieces back together in San Antonio.â€

But on the Eastside, where a chain-link fence surrounds the emptied Wheatley Courts as it awaits demolition, Mr. Castro has few critics. â€œItâ€™s a blessing,â€ Althea Baines, 53, who has lived near the housing project for more than 20 years, said of the Eastside revitalization. â€œWe havenâ€™t had a mayor to concentrate specifically on the poor areas of the city like he has.â€

Aside from improving its public housing stock, the city has had a mixed record on other issues central to HUD. San Antonioâ€™s foreclosure rate has been lower than that of other large cities, including Chicago, Las Vegas and Miami, according to RealtyTrac, which monitors housing sales and foreclosures. But it continues to have a large homeless population.

In January 2009, five months before the mayor took office, there were 2,690 homeless residents in San Antonio and Bexar County, according to the federal housing department. By January 2013, that number had risen to 2,980. With the mayorâ€™s support, the city increased its financial aid for a 33-acre homeless services campus called Haven for Hope that opened in 2010. The campus â€” a public and private project that provides temporary outdoor shelter, long-term housing, substance abuse treatment and other assistance to the homeless, including a computer lab, dental clinic and day care center â€” has gained national recognition as an innovative model, with representatives from nearly 200 cities making visits seeking to replicate its programs.

Mr. Castroâ€™s mother, Rosie, an activist who lost a bid for a City Council seat in 1971, worked for the housing authority in the 1990s as an ombudsman responding to resident concerns. Mr. Castroâ€™s parents split up when he was 8, and his father lived in two Westside projects as a teenager.

â€œHe believes in this work,â€ Lourdes Castro Ramirez, the president of the cityâ€™s housing authority, said of the mayor. â€œHe comes from humble beginnings, and he maintains that poise and that sense of knowing exactly who he is and where he comes from.â€

Ms. Castro Ramirez and Ramiro Cavazos, chairman of the housing authorityâ€™s board of commissioners, were among those who went to Washington with Mr. Castro in 2012. Mr. Cavazos recalled walking down a hallway lined with the portraits of former housing secretaries. One showed Henry G. Cisneros, a mentor to Mr. Castro who is a former mayor of San Antonio and was housing secretary in the Clinton administration from 1993 to 1997. Mr. Cisnerosâ€™s political career was derailed after it was revealed that he had lied to the F.B.I. about payments he made to a former mistress, but in San Antonio, he remains an inspirational figure as the first Hispanic housing secretary.

â€œWe all looked at Henry, and everybody was very humbled walking that hallway,â€ Mr. Cavazos said. â€œItâ€™s an amazing circumstance. Here it is 20 years later, and itâ€™s almost a replay of that story.â€

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on May 24, 2014, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: After Revival in San Antonio, Washington Comes Calling.