So, this was the cover story on the Sunday paper, which means it is never actually released to MySA.com - oh, but I dug around and found it in the archives. If anyone has the story and can upload the images (see 6 descriptions at bottom of story) that would be sublime.
Enjoy:
From MySA.com, specifically:
http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/...450&p_docnum=2
GIVING DOWNTOWN A FUTURE; Mayor plans an effort to map out the route to area's revitalization
Jennifer Hiller STAFF
Published: June 20, 2010
For several decades, downtown San Antonio has performed admirably as a tourism destination, pulling in visitors - and their dollars - in the manner of a big economic magnet. But at the same time, residents, along with major employers, have spiraled out to the suburbs in massive numbers.
How to change the locals' experience of downtown, and why it even matters, has become Topic A for many - in particular for Mayor Julián Castro, who has taken up the role of downtown booster from former Mayor Phil Hardberger and is making the cause his own.
"Downtown is the heart of the city," Castro said. "A great city is defined by a great downtown for both residents and visitors. For the past four decades, it's been about the visitors."
Later this summer, Castro will announce a major visioning initiative - SA 2020 - that will look at the city's challenges and goals for the next decade, with a big emphasis on improving downtown.
He and others imagine downtown as a place with a lively, 24-7 urban vibe, pedestrian-friendly sidewalks and streets, alternative transportation such as streetcars or light rail, more apartment buildings, a strong inner-city school system to attract families and practical amenities, such as a grocery store.
A series of public meetings would get people thinking about the kind of things they want the city to pursue.
The city's upcoming bond program in 2012 could direct dollars toward improving downtown.
"I think that in the next five to 10 years, downtown is going to be spectacular," Castro said. "We'll have HemisFair, the new performing arts center, mass transit, a grocery store - knock on wood we'll get that - and infrastructure improvements."
But first, Castro will have to get the entire city - including a mostly suburban population - on board with the idea that improving the urban core would be an economic boon for everyone.
Why downtown?
The sales pitch is this: Downtown is good for the bottom line of local government.
The dense urban core is cheaper to service than far-flung suburbs with everything from police and fire to streets and sewers. So, downtown does more than pay its own way; it subsidizes other areas.
A 2007 study by economist Steve Nivin, then chief economist for the city's economic development department, found downtown property and activities generate $88 million a year, but that downtown costs the city $62 million a year for basic services.
But downtown infrastructure has gotten the short end of the stick.
In the city's last bond election in 2007, downtown received $10 million out of the $550 million total, Deputy City Manager Pat DiGiovanni said.
The improvement needs for streets, sidewalks, accessibility and parks are significant.
"A fresh, new look to downtown is very, very important," DiGiovanni said.
But even as basic infrastructure has been neglected, some major core projects did receive a large slice of public money.
Leaders persuaded voters in 2008 to extend the venue tax on hotel rooms and rental cars, with $125 million going to the Museum Reach river redevelopment and $100 million to revamp the Municipal Auditorium for the performing arts.
Developer James Lifshutz said the city has focused on the San Antonio River but overlooked other areas.
"I think the public invested quite beautifully and heavily in the river itself," he said. "The city has not invested at all in infrastructure even a block away from the river."
What's possible
Engineer Andrés Andújar of Parsons 3D/I, who kick-started efforts to create a plan for the River North area around the new Museum Reach, wrote a white paper recently that looked at all of downtown.
Andújar, who doesn't live downtown but works there, described a vision of downtown as a place with 14,000 residences - or about 2 percent of the city's households - and twice as many offices as today, bringing San Antonio in line with Austin; San Diego, Calif.; and Indianapolis in terms of downtown office space.
Andújar said he was inspired by Castro's decision to make HemisFair Park a focus of his time in office and the mayor's declaration that this would be the "Decade of Downtown."
"Everyone in San Antonio benefits from the success of downtown," he said.
The white paper has been shared with a small number of downtown stakeholders, including the mayor, and is a launching point for ideas and a compilation of projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars - everything from the University Health System's $122 million renovation to the plans for a new federal courthouse - that already are in the works or are likely to happen.
There also are plenty of ideas to get the conversation started.
Andújar proposes, for example, to create a linear park along San Pedro Creek, convert the county jail into housing and build a new, energy-efficient headquarters for CPS Energy, making its riverfront office space available to become a more valuable, taxable project.
He would take the San Antonio Independent School District out of its headquarters at the entrance to the Lavaca neighborhood and put it in a redeveloped HemisFair Park, which would let the Lavaca property become something more neighborhood-appropriate.
He would return Santa Rosa Street to its historical roots as a palm-lined, landscaped downtown boulevard to complement ongoing development there.
As downtown improves, the taxable value of the property would rise in much the same way it did along the River Walk, ultimately paying back any public investment.
Madison Smith, a principal at Overland Partners and president of the HemisFair Park Area Local Government Corp. - the group tasked with taking a new, imaginative view of those 75 acres - believes HemisFair could play a significant role.
The official planning process doesn't start until October, but Smith already believes cutting in more roads would give cars, bikes and pedestrians better access to the park, and extending the river into the property would be like pumping air into an oxygen-starved room.
"We've got this huge piece of property. It's asleep. And it's a mess," Smith said.
A people problem
Downtown's most basic need is for thousands of more residents (it currently has about 3,000).
When consultant and author Rebecca Ryan of the Madison, Wis.-based Next Generation Consulting spoke at a Downtown Alliance lunch in March, she handed the audience a reality check. Doing a Google search of "San Antonio," she said, yielded this message: "If you're single, please don't move here."
"For a city of your size, you're playing small," Ryan said.
To keep young professionals from leaking out of San Antonio, downtown needs more residential property that young workers can afford as well as more activity after work or on the weekends.
"It's about making San Antonio a city of choice," said Ben Brewer, president of the Downtown Alliance. "That's what should drive our every decision, and kids are choosing to live in the inner cities around the country."
Although the numbers aren't dramatic, San Antonio has been losing residents to Austin and other areas known for investing in their urban cores, according to IRS migration data.
Between 2000 and 2008 - a time when the area was growing by thousands of residents - Bexar County had a net loss of 1,034 residents to Travis County.
Now, downtown has a number of higher-end condos available for sale, but few of the kind of rental or for-sale properties affordable to anyone other than executives or affluent empty nesters.
To snag a wider range of residents, including younger workers, Andújar said downtown and places just outside downtown need a true residential mix, including market-rate apartments, affordable and luxury units, single-family homes and multifamily projects both for sale and rent.
Adding residents could answer the major complaint of downtown dwellers: the lack of a grocery store.
"The goal is to bring about one sooner rather than later," DiGiovanni said.
County Judge Nelson Wolff, whose family used to operate the Sun Harvest Farms chain of natural food stores and who's a partner in Green Fields Market in Stone Oak, said landing a downtown grocery store is tricky.
"There's a reason there's not one," he said. "Grocery stores, like a lot of other retail, follow rooftops. When a grocery store serves an urban environment, you need a store that is really good at prepared food and maybe has a seating area. It's a totally different environment. There's no parking, you walk. It's a hard thing. Profit margins are very tight and very competitive."
Need for better schools
Even as downtown struggles to add residents, the city's sprawl pattern has drained students from San Antonio Independent School District for decades. Most families consider price, commute times and school district when buying houses, and they don't see downtown - or the urban core in general - as a real option.
"We're linked at the hip with the school district," DiGiovanni said.
San Antonio-Bexar County Metropolitan Planning Organization expects 600,000 new residents in the area by 2035. If the current northern sprawl trend continues without any effort for infill development or transit-oriented development, the agency projects a more congested future, with 500,000 more cars on the roads and an additional 25 million miles traveled per day.
SAISD has had success with rising test scores, student graduation rates and magnet programs. This year, University Health System and SAISD partnered to create a new magnet school for medical professions at downtown's Fox Tech High School.
Wolff thinks there are more opportunities for such campuses.
"When we get the performing arts center opened, I would love to see a performing arts high school downtown," he said.
As a way to spend scarce resources most efficiently, Superintendent Robert Durón's politically thorny plans would close some schools and renovate others over the next decade.
Banker Tom Frost, who long has been an advocate for SAISD and supports the concept, said it could improve the quality of education.
"Consolidating the schools is important so you have the right financial support, but also so that you have the right facilities. Maybe you have two librarians instead of a half-time job," Frost said. "Consolidation is really about giving a better academic program. The goal is to have a broader curriculum and better facilities."
For Frost, the key question for all residents is: "Are we as a community working toward improving the dynamics to make the urban center a better place, and is one of those things the school district?"
Employers migrate
Although it's still a business center, downtown has become a less popular spot for employers.
Companies such as Valero Energy Corp., Rackspace Managed Hosting and Tesoro Corp. gradually have moved away from the urban core to the suburbs. Westover Hills is one area that became popular with large companies looking for a campus environment.
A Brookings Institution report named San Antonio as among 53 major metropolitan areas rapidly decentralizing in a trend it called "job sprawl." Between 1998 and 2006, San Antonio gained more than 100,000 jobs, but downtown lost more than 3,000 jobs, according to the report.
Even San Antonio's most recent economic development successes follow the suburban pattern.
Medtronic Inc.'s diabetes sales-and-service center is at the Overlook at the Rim. And when Mir Imran of InCube Laboratories LLC establishes his business incubator in San Antonio, it will be in an existing 20,000-square-foot building on the Northwest Side.
Instead of more offices, Wolff and many commercial real estate professionals believe the best chance for downtown development is in apartments.
"The greatest potential is near Broadway," Wolff said. "There are all of those vacant lots and nice wide streets."
Hurdles
Despite the potential, it's hard to lure private investment downtown:
Owners can't demand the kind of office or apartment rent in San Antonio that they can in Houston, Austin and Dallas.
Land prices and construction costs are high.
Commercial credit markets remain virtually frozen, stranding potential projects in financial limbo.
Developing downtown is inherently more difficult than in the suburbs.
DiGiovanni said the city is more equipped than it ever has been to work with downtown investors and can offer, for example, fee waivers, tax abatements and grants or loans.
But developer Ed Cross said that even with the city's good incentives, the process is slow.
"Every single piece of the package is negotiated," Cross said. "That's one of the realities of developing downtown, but it's one of the problems of developing downtown. The city should create this comprehensive package that says, if you're going to develop downtown, boom, you already qualify."
The Centro Partnership, a nonprofit development corporation being formed now, could help put that package together. It will have elected leaders and business owners on its board and is expected to serve as something of a one-stop location for downtown projects.
Even then, the city may have to step in more.
"There's a gap in (return on investment) for private equity and investors," DiGiovanni said. "The key is to find the tipping point where the market can take over naturally."
Cross said downtown is less risky than many developers, government leaders and lenders believe. He opened the Vistana apartment building last year, which is 96 percent leased and has a waiting list.
But the Vistana was lucky in timing, Cross said, and even though it was a conservative loan, he doesn't think he could put the deal together now.
Lifshutz compares development to playing Scrabble, where it's easy to score points with short words out on the edge of the board (the suburbs), but harder to create words in the middle of a crowded board.
"You have to figure out how something exists within an already developed block," he said. "You can't do small little hit and runs. You've got to do more complex words, tie words together. The uses around you have already been established. You need to do it well."
For many, winning that board game could help preserve the city's culture and history.
"It's important to preserve our identity," Castro said. "The identity comes from the core of the city. When you tell someone you're from San Antonio, it does not conjure up an image of 1604 or San Pedro."
1) A CATALYST: HEMISFAIR PARK: "We've got this huge piece of property. It's asleep. And it's a mess," says Madison Smith of Overland Partners. The World's Fair site is a key part of Mayor Julián Castro's downtown improvements initiative. 2) 3) Mayor Julián Castro, seen here on the fifth floor of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, has taken up the role of downtown booster from former Mayor Phil Hardberger and is making the cause his own. PHOTO: JOHN DAVENPORT/jdavenport@express-news.net 4) Engineer Andrés Andújar of Parsons 3D/I has written a white paper that looks at all of downtown. PHOTO: BOB OWEN/rowen@express-news.net 5) The future of downtown (map). GRAPHIC: EXPRESS-NEWS 6) Streets made for walking GRAPHIC: EXPRESS-NEWS
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