This story about UTSA and the issues it faces as it tries to accommodate its mostly non-residential student population as it grows is so reminiscent of Houston I had to keep reminding myself as I read it that it wasn’t about something happening here.
Over the past few years, UTSA’s explosive growth and lack of on-campus housing has driven students into surrounding neighborhoods and fueled the development of towering apartment complexes, activity that likely will intensify as the university strives to become a Tier One research institution.
Nearby residents are quick to applaud UTSA’s success but complain of worsening traffic jams, rising crime and falling home values.
[…]
Manuel Pelaez-Prada, a local lawyer hired by Campus Crest [a Charlotte, N.C.-based company trying to build a student housing complex nearby] to lobby for the project, said the company is taking steps to assuage neighbors’ concerns, including providing shuttle service to cut down on car traffic. But the problem is bigger than one project.
“This is a failure on the city’s part to plan adequately,” Pelaez-Prada said.
Boy, where have we heard that before? Look, when I was a student at Trinity in the 80s, UTSA may as well have been in Kerrville as far as we were concerned. We seldom ventured farther west on I-10 than Wurzbach, which was approximately where civilization seemed to end, but it was still another five miles or so to the UTSA campus. But even 25 years ago, you could see some of this coming. Development was moving steadily outward, where the land was cheap and plentiful and still not all that far from downtown. UTSA was at that time just starting to fulfill the need for an accessible public university for San Antonio. Sooner or later, the two were going to start to overlap.
At Auburn Ridge, gates and strict covenants have kept students out of the subdivision. But the Episcopal church next door sold to a developer and now a towering apartment complex called Avalon Place is going up right next to the property line.
Nelson Harborth, president of the homeowners association, said they hired a lobbyist to try and stop Avalon Place, to no avail. Williams stepped in and persuaded the developer to at least build an 8-foot wall between the two properties, he said.
“When you have a four-story tower in your backyard, you don’t have a backyard anymore,” Harborth said.
Clearly, what they need is some good graphics.
Above all other annoyances, residents complain most vigorously about traffic.
“I’m all for education, but that traffic is horrendous. We need help,” said Stephanie Dwyer, a liaison for the Ridgehaven Homeowners Association and mother of a UTSA graduate.
UTSA Boulevard, Hausman Road and Babcock Road, which border the area and connect residents to Interstate 10 and Loop 1604, must be widened before cramming in any more apartment complexes, homeowners say.
Well, as with the suburbs around here, when you eschew building a grid in favor of numerous individual subdivisions each with one viable route to the nearest freeway, that’s what you get. Which kind of goes back to the whole lack of planning thing.
Despite complaints, homeowners say they are not blind to reality.
“We can’t stop UTSA. The students need to go somewhere,” said Melissa Lauer, owner of Hill Country Homeowners Association Management, an umbrella organization representing 580 area homeowners.
“We are not against development; we just want the right development,” she said. To Lauer, that means duplexes or town homes that don’t look cheap and developers who don’t mow down trees.
Of course, that suggests the need for denser development; in other words, apartment complexes. But clearly the existing street grid can’t handle that, and the overall area isn’t dense enough or walkable enough to support transit. If it were up to me, I’d probably push for UTSA to build more student housing on or as close to campus as possible. I have no idea if this is workable or not. All I can say is “good luck” to those who do have to try to figure out a solution.
Pingback: TAMU-SA groundbreaking – Off the Kuff