There’s a hangar on the Southwest Side of San Antonio that’s big enough to hold fifteen widebody jets. It is the largest freestanding high-bay aircraft hangar in the world, earning it a Guinness world record.

On any given week it holds C-17 Globemasters, some flown in from Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The enormous airframes move military equipment around the world, but are upgraded here in San Antonio. A single overhaul can run to some 30,000 labor hours, spread across a five-year cycle. And somewhere in the rotation, since 2014, are the aircraft that carry the President and his cabinet.

Boeing, among the most recognizable companies in America, runs one of its largest maintenance operations at Port San Antonio. Its payroll there tops 3,000, more than 40% of them military veterans. By almost any measure it’s one of the most consequential employers in San Antonio.

But it didn’t happen overnight; Boeing has been quietly building here for decades. When Kelly Air Force Base closed down it left a complicated and open question: what do you do with acres and acres of runway and hangars built for the military once the military is gone? Boeing turned out to be a huge part of the answer.

The first C-17 arrived for work in 1998, back when the base was still preparing for closure and repurposing. Boeing bet on the durable infrastructure left behind: runways, hangars, and the Air Force-trained technicians. Now, every C-17 in the American fleet still comes through here for its deepest maintenance, along with C-17s flown by eight allied operators.

And demand is strong. The sustainment contract behind that work has topped $8 billion, with the Air Force adding another modification this spring, and work on the B-52, under a $2 billion re-engining order that runs to at least 2033, plus the Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornets and the Air Force’s F-15s, all running into the 2030s. In fact, it has been such a win for Boeing that the company has reinvested more than $240 million in its facilities over the years.

A whole economy took shape around Boeing’s operations. The campus that grew up with it, Port San Antonio, now counts more than 80 employers and nearly 18,000 direct workers. A who’s-who of defense and intelligence companies at the Port includes GDIT, CACI, Booz Allen, L3 Harris, and Leidos.

Widen the lens and the figures look even more impressive. The Texas Comptroller puts the site's total output at $20 billion and ties it to nearly 84,000 jobs across the state. The Port's own commissioned study is more conservative: $5.6 billion in direct output, $9 billion counting broader regional effects, and about 18,000 jobs on the campus itself. Average pay on the campus runs near $111,000, and the after-tax income it sends into Texas households has reached almost $5.7 billion. A veritable aerospace cluster has formed around Boeing, with StandardAero, which overhauls military and commercial jet engines, and a collection of other aerospace firms moving into the Port.

The work is all federal, of course: airlifters, bombers, and even the president’s plane, but Boeing behaves more like a neighbor than a faceless corporation. The company partners with local food banks, lent its name to the Port’s event space, the Boeing Center, and has invested millions of dollars in local STEM education.

And all of that investment culminates in something valuable: A local kid can go to a technical college and find a path to the floor of a hangar that services Air Force One without ever leaving the zip code.

This city spends a lot of its attention on what doesn't work. On the eve of the NBA Finals, with the rest of the world watching, it's worth remembering that some things do—a company as recognizable as Boeing built one of its largest operations here, lent San Antonio its brand, and has grown with us for decades.

It's also worth remembering how. When Kelly closed it was a blow, but the city and Boeing bet on what was already there: durable infrastructure left by the Air Force, and let it compound. If you're looking for what works in San Antonio, this is a good place to start.

Thanks for reading The Civic. This is the first in Growth Engines, a regular look at the parts of San Antonio that work, held to the same standard we bring to the parts that don't. One scheduling note: as I mentioned last week, our weekly briefing has been moved to Fridays so we can respond to the full week of news before it reaches you.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic.

Love him or hate him, Elon Musk is the most consequential businessman in Texas. SpaceX’s Starbase operations alone have generated over $13 billion in economic impact over the last two years and support over 24,000 jobs. Tesla’s Austin Gigafactory supports another 16,000 jobs.

But those are just the most notable facilities. Tesla and SpaceX are also pouring at least $55 billion into a massive computer chip facility called Terafab, likely to be located in Grimes. Meanwhile, SpaceX is expanding its Bastrop semiconductor facility to build Starlink kits. McGregor is producing rocket engines. Brookshire, just outside Houston, will get a battery Megafactory. Corpus Christi is refining lithium. All come with jobs. And Starbase will hire 4,000 more workers this year. In 2024 alone, SpaceX did business with more than 350 suppliers and injected $147 million into the regional supply chain.

Even Dallas, though lacking a big Musk corporate investment, will be the beneficiary of a Boring Co. tunnel connecting the Dallas campus of the University of North Texas with University Hills, a large development approximately a mile away. Our own tunnel project went nowhere after Boring Co. “ghosted” us.

In sum, Elon’s companies are pouring tens of billions of dollars into the Texas economy. In every direction, the largest private economic force in Texas is building.

What about us?

San Antonio isn't starting from zero on physical technology. We have aerospace, defense, and applied R&D that punch well above the city's reputation. On paper, we are the perfect city for what Elon is trying to do. But every single announcement shares one common detail: not in San Antonio.

Over a decade ago, San Antonio made a serious bid for Tesla’s battery factory, reportedly offering $800 million in local incentives. Though media called us a frontrunner, we lost to Reno, Nevada.

Then, six years later, Tesla came back to Texas to build its next Gigafactory. The shortlist was Austin, Nashville, and Tulsa—San Antonio was not on the list. Austin won the factory, thousands of jobs, and later Tesla’s corporate headquarters.

We competed once, over a decade ago, and lost. Since then, we haven’t been in the conversation even as other cities across the state were picking up the phone and building relationships.

Some may say Elon is too politically charged to work with, but the job of city leadership is to promote opportunity at home. And Elon is creating a lot of it, and it is conspicuously all elsewhere. These other communities are working with him, we should be open for business too.

Former mayor Ron Nirenberg flossed the Tesla logo off of his car. He’s “no fan” of Musk but still drives the Tesla, albeit with a Toyota badge. That this even passes as “news” at all tells you something. One politician’s car badge is meaningless, but the instinct here was to perform for a political coalition rather than to compete for these jobs. He’s not alone.

Opportunity builds lives and it builds cities. Thumbing your nose at Elon may be politically advantageous but it doesn’t help San Antonio. We don’t need to lose jobs and investment to every other city in Texas willing to pick up the phone.

The Reframe

Proposed property tax hike divides City Council (Express News) → This is a spending fight pretending to be a revenue crunch. The solution to our fiscal crisis is simple: Spend less.
The most irresponsible thing that the City could do isn’t spending more, it’s spending more without examining the structural issues with our ever-increasing budget. In 2015, TPR described a recently passed $2.5B budget as “mammoth.” Just over ten years later, we’re “looking between the cushions” for our +$4B budget. Are things nearly twice as good as they were ten years ago? The honest conversation Council must have is zero-basing our ballooning expenditures and asking what’s actually working. This is a spending problem, plain and simple. The good news is that spending problems are easy to solve—just cut spending.

UTSA plans new ballpark facilities as fan support surges (Business Journal) → This is how a commuter school is seen as a real university. Competitive sports with local buy-in is the fastest way an institution sheds an old reputation and builds a brand.
The detail worth catching: 18 alumni put up more than $500,000 for the upgrades. That’s alumni pride and local capital backing a San Antonio institution because alumni believe in it, which is very difficult to build over time. Big schools with good academics accumulate these resources naturally over decades, but UT San Antonio is relatively young and small, and we’re just beginning to see that work pay off. The school is deliberately building itself into something the city can point to. Cities with credible flagship universities recruit better, retain alumni better, and tell themselves a better story. Despite numerous local institutions, San Antonio has been short on a credible flagship for a long time, and UT San Antonio is likely the only institution that can truly fill it.

Property tax changes hit Alamo Colleges finances in 2027 budget outlook (Express News) → Revenue contraction is when good intentions become expensive.
“We’re doing amazing things here at the Alamo Colleges. We don’t want to stop that. We don’t want anything to hinder that,” Alamo Colleges Board Vice Chair Joe Alderete Jr. said. This is the problem with nearly any government program: they all sound great. They all help people, they all have economic impact studies suggesting incredible returns on the investment of public dollars. And despite how important it is to the people of San Antonio, the Alamo Colleges budget and seemingly every other government program in town cannot be based on the idea of perpetual fiscal growth. Our good intentions in fiscal surplus must be paired with good stewardship during fiscal contraction.

The Pick

Our weekly recommendation for what’s going on in San Antonio

Miles opened last Friday in St. Paul Square

This is getting some buzz, and for good reason. Three San Antonio culinary vets—Matt Garcia, Tatanka Guerrero, and Steven Lopez—and it's the first thing they've owned on their own. In the old Francis Bogside space, rebuilt around a 360-degree central bar. They opened last Friday and are taking reservations now at the Resy link. Drinks-first room, food that holds its own, go check them out.

- Chad Carey, Empty Stomach Group

Starting next Tuesday, The Civic moves to two emails a week. Tuesdays will carry the column on its own. Fridays will be a shorter edition—the week’s reframes pulled into one place and something worth doing over the weekend. All part of our launch plan: more content, more features, and no more of your inbox than necessary. More exciting announcements to come in month 3.

A particular thanks to our Charter members, whose continued generosity allows us to operate.

If something here landed, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to someone who should be reading.

See you next Tuesday.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

Corporate welfare is bad policy. It rewards political leverage, transfers public money to wealthy private interests, and it’s difficult to measure the impact. Despite this, Project Marvel is one of the rare cases where corporate welfare is necessary.

It is tempting to oppose subsidy entirely. The Spurs are a multibillion-dollar business—it seems entirely reasonable to dig in our heels and force them to pay. But businesses have to remain viable, and the math has to work for them.

Asked directly why the Spurs cannot fund their own arena, Peter Holt told KSAT in October that "we're the 27th out of 30th in market size in the NBA." More than half of team revenues are tied to the home market and those revenues are a direct function of the underlying economy. Among NBA cities, San Antonio is 26th in per capita income, 21st in Fortune 500 companies, and 24th in GDP. Despite that, Sportico values the team at $4.5 billion, 21st in the league. The economic figures are worse than the valuation rank, which implies that the franchise outperforms its market because of operational discipline, not because the market supports it.

This creates a real financial pressure on ownership. Austin, Seattle, Las Vegas—cities dying for an NBA franchise—all rank higher on the economic metrics that determine the profitability of the team. To put it simply, the Spurs would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars more if they moved. The Holt family seems to have no interest in moving, but a different ownership group with no roots here and the same valuation math in front of them would not hesitate.

The math shows that if we want to be an NBA city, we have to help pay for the arena. Of the five least valuable franchises in the NBA, four play in publicly owned, publicly built arenas as tenants. The fifth, Detroit, plays in a publicly owned arena that took roughly a third of its construction from taxpayer-backed bonds and lets the operator keep all arena revenue. In fact, the overwhelming majority of teams in the bottom 15 of valuation play in arenas that received significant public funds. This is the entry cost that every comparable market has had to pay.

Teams that built with private money, like the Clippers, built their arenas in entirely different markets and with different resources. Steve Ballmer is an ex-Microsoft billionaire who privately financed the $2 billion arena project himself, and he did it in the second-largest media market and economy in America. The economics are different in markets that size. Whatever the Intuit Dome proves, it does not prove anything about a small-market arena in South Texas.

Voters remain genuinely split on Project Marvel, but there is a difference between disagreement over public funds and misunderstanding the stakes: whether San Antonio remains a city with an NBA franchise.

The real failure of governance is that San Antonio is negotiating from this position because San Antonio has earned this position. Twenty years of insufficient employer growth, stagnant median income, and a thin roster of corporate customers for arena suite deals put us at the bottom of the NBA market.

We need to make Marvel work. Walking away from a deal where a highly successful franchise is accepting hundreds of millions less than another market would pay doesn't make us more prosperous. The Spurs wouldn’t be the first big institution to leave, and more would follow if they left.

The work of the next 20-30 years is to build the city the market wants, on our own terms—so the next time we have this conversation, we have it from a position the math actually supports.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this piece referred to 'median income' where the underlying data is per capita personal income.

The Reframe

Toyota files plans to expand manufacturing plant in San Antonio (KSAT) → A $2 billion, +2,000-job expansion at the South Side plant is a real win for San Antonio and the economic development teams that landed it.
Toyota's "Project Orca" will add a new assembly line with 2,000 well-paying jobs, plus an average of 600 construction jobs a year from 2026 through 2030, with production beginning in 2030. It may seem inevitable, as Toyota “is already here,” but deals at this scale take years of sustained relationship work to land. Credit to greater:SATX, the city's Economic Development Department, and everyone who kept Toyota engaged & brought this expansion here rather than to another plant in another state.

San Antonio soon to overtake spot of nation’s sixth-largest city, and Philly is crashing out about it (SA Current) → Humor aside, Philadelphia isn’t worried about San Antonio.
We are experts at leveraging statistics to tell the good story. Census data shows that the population of the City of San Antonio proper is on track to pass the population of the City of Philadelphia. It’s a good story, and people are taking it seriously enough in the Instagram replies, but it’s misleading. The Philadelphia metropolitan area has a population exceeding 6 million people, over double the San Antonio metropolitan population of around 2.5 million. The GDP figures are more dramatic: Just shy of $560 billion for Philadelphia and $190 billion for San Antonio—that’s nearly 3x our total economic output and a roughly ~20% advantage for Philadelphia in per capita prosperity. Our population growth is great, but it must be paired with economic growth as well.

San Antonio City Council members call for audit of police overtime (SA Current) → We applaud financial scrutiny for how public dollars are spent. This should be the default posture.
SAPD's adopted overtime budget last year was $17.7 million yet the actual spend was $34.4 million. The department roughly doubled its own overtime budget, and only now—twenty years after the last comprehensive audit, in the middle of a $150 million budget shortfall—is the council asking what the books look like. We commend the councilmembers for looking for financial transparency, but we wish this was the default posture rather than the kneejerk reaction to a higher-than-expected bill. That shouldn’t come across as anti-police, anti-spending, or anti-anything—it should be the norm for use of public funds.

The Pick

Our weekly recommendation for what’s going on in San Antonio

Eva Marengo Sanchez at the Ruiz Healy Art Gallery

Eva Marengo Sanchez is a San Antonio-based painter, and this is her first solo show at Ruiz-Healy Art. The work is still life done with Old Master technique—meticulous oil on canvas—on subjects you’ll recognize from around here: pan dulce on the breakfast table, HEB and La Michoacana bags after the grocery run, flowers in a repurposed jar, tacos wrapped in foil. The titles tell you what kind of show it is: “Mom and Dad’s House,” “Mom’s beans,” “Here for two seconds,” “Are you sure it’s not allergies?”

The opening reception is Wednesday, May 20, from 6 to 8 PM at the gallery’s Olmos Park space (201-A East Olmos), with the artist in attendance. The show runs through August 22 (Wed–Sat, 11am to 4pm). Worth the trip.

- Chad Carey, Empty Stomach Group

Thanks for another week, and welcome to everyone who’s joined us since Brief #2. Remember to follow us on your social media of choice: X/Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, and Facebook. Story tips and reader notes can go to our reporter Jarrett Whitener at jarrett@thecivic.com, and my personal inbox is always open.

A particular thanks to our Charter members, whose continued generosity allows us to operate.

If something here landed, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to someone who should be reading.

See you next Tuesday.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

San Antonio spent months arguing about Project Marvel. $800 million in public money for a new Spurs arena. One of the most contentious local policy fights in recent memory—exactly the kind of scrutiny a public commitment of that size should get.

Now San Antonio is committing roughly the same amount of public money to two bus lines.

VIA’s two new bus projects, the Green Line and Silver Line, will cost over $800 million combined, or roughly equivalent to the public cost of Project Marvel. Federal grants cover about half but the remaining $384 million is billed to local taxpayers through a permanent sales tax that was approved by voters in 2020.

And the price will keep rising. VIA’s board just approved another $5.2 million for Green Line design work, the latest increase to a single contract that has grown from $20.8 million to nearly $32.3 million. The Silver Line, meanwhile, is 40% designed, with construction not expected until 2027. That timeline matters—when was the last time one of these projects finished on-or-under budget?

The bus lanes, while public, have barely been a blip compared to the spectacle that was Project Marvel. Voters approved the funding in 2020 and the VIA board decided what to do with it.

The most useful precedent for what an $800 million bet on rapid transit might deliver in San Antonio is VIA’s own track record. The agency’s $25 million Stone Oak Park-and-Ride opened in 2018, styled as a forward-looking hub for commuters. Eight years later, the 400-space garage serves a couple hundred riders per day. VIA CEO Jon Gary Herrera told council in February it was “an example of something you build before demand is there.”

There is a real need to improve transit in San Antonio. The harder question is whether two bus lines are the strongest $800 million answer, or whether the same money spread across different investments would carry more riders, more reliably, to more places. Driverless car service now operates across more than 60 square miles of the city. The environment that produced the 2020 vote is not the one we are building in now.

When you’re dealing with a price tag of this magnitude, some comparable figures may be instructive. $384 million in local money is roughly twenty times the city’s entire Economic Development Department budget, nearly the full Fire Department budget, and more than eight times what the general fund spends on Metro Health each year. Beyond this figure, operations and maintenance are projected to add millions in annual costs as long as we maintain the bus lines. Big bet.

And the city is about to ask residents to pay more. City Manager Erik Walsh has signaled he will recommend San Antonio’s first property tax rate increase in 33 years, against a projected $264 million shortfall by 2031. Even maxing out the rate will require $70 million in cuts over the next two years, the city’s own budget director has said. Bexar County is forecasting its worst year for property tax revenue since the 2008 housing crash.

Are we measuring what we’re getting, and is what we’re getting worth what we’re paying? In a world with robotaxis already on San Antonio streets, a city raising property taxes to keep the lights on, and a permanent car culture reinforced by sprawl, climate, and geography, would you spend $800 million on two fixed bus lines? I wouldn’t.

The Reframe

~160 people in Austin expected to make $100M+ on SpaceX IPO, ~12 expected to clear $1B (Molly O’Shea) → The SpaceX IPO will create more wealth in central Texas than any event in state history, but only cities positioned as destinations, not obstacles, will share it.
SpaceX is going public in June at something north of a $1.5 trillion valuation. When that happens, about 160 people in Austin could stand to gain $100 million or more and a dozen will clear a billion. Money is about to land in central Texas at an unfathomable scale. Here’s the opportunity: new billionaires (particularly in tech) don’t sit on their money, they start funds, back projects, and build new companies. San Antonio sits 80 miles south of where most of it will live, and that’s a real advantage. We could be on the receiving end of some of that new wealth. Tomorrow’s next big company could be funded by this IPO, but only if we compete for it.

San Antonio approves veteran housing protections despite clashes over landlord exemptions (TPR) → Some policies sound good but don’t move the needle. Mayor Jones’ VASH policy seems more symbolic than effective.
Mayor Jones planted her flag on a nice-sounding housing issue: stop landlords from denying leases to veterans using VASH vouchers. Sounds great. She got it done, albeit with carve-outs that watered it down. A few problems. One, there’s no proof veterans face this discrimination. San Antonio’s VASH acceptance rate is 95%, per Councilwoman Teri Castillo, in a market the landlord lobby itself puts at 81% occupancy. Of ~2,000 voucher-holding veterans, nearly all are placed; the rest, Castillo says, are held back by criminal history, credit, rental history, or expired vouchers—none of which this ordinance addresses. Per city staff, more than 1,000 Opportunity Home vouchers went unused in 2023, holders who couldn’t find or qualify for units. The other problem is that the real cost is downstream. Every new compliance hook becomes a tax paid by every renter. Mayor Jones has named housing affordability her top issue, but her signature housing action looks more like a tent-pole policy to show veterans how much she cares. Good politics, less-so policy.

More than 8k San Antonio kids will get vouchers. Many previously were enrolled at public schools (SA Report) → Ignoring the politics of the program, the local data is its own story and the status quo it points to isn’t working.
San Antonio’s districts have been shedding students for years. SAISD enrollment fell from over 56k in 2003-04 to 44.5k in 2021-22—a 21% decline that led trustees to close 15 campuses in 2024. Northside ISD is on track to be about 14,000 students below its 2019 peak of 107,800 and is carrying a $38 million deficit heading into next year. Against that backdrop, more than 21,000 SA-region families applied to the Texas Education Freedom Account program, and 8,676 got awards in the first round. About a third of SA applicants came from public school last year, well above the 25% statewide rate. Ignoring the politics of the program itself: more SA families are looking for education alternatives, at a higher rate than the rest of Texas. That reflects local conditions, not federal politics.

The Pick

Our weekly recommendation for what’s going on in San Antonio

Magic Tuber Stringband at Echo Bridge

Echo Bridge might be the strangest venue in San Antonio—a 1935 concrete arch over the river near the Mission Reach whose acoustics, completely by accident, sound like a concert hall. The Echo Bridge Appreciation Society sells maybe a hundred tickets a show, and you walk down a dirt path behind Tandem Coffee to get there.

This Sunday, May 17, they’ve got Magic Tuber Stringband—a North Carolina trio playing experimental old-time Appalachian music, with their new record Heavy Water dropping the following Friday on Thrill Jockey. Show starts at 7 & tickets are $20. If you’ve never been under the bridge, this is a good excuse.

- Chad Carey, Empty Stomach Group

Thank you for another week, and to the hundreds of new subscribers since last week—Welcome! Also new to us, our reporter, Jarrett Whitener, started yesterday. You can reach him at jarrett@thecivic.com for story tips or just to get in touch.

A particular thanks to our Charter members, whose continued generosity allows us to operate.

If something here landed, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to someone who should be reading.

See you next Tuesday.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

San Antonio has a growing population, affordable housing (yes, it’s true), no state income tax, high quality of life and a rich culture. We have what a city needs to grow. We are not growing. Well, at least not anywhere close to other Texas cities.

Between 2012 and 2022, Austin added jobs at more than twice our pace. Dallas-Fort Worth added them roughly a third faster. In economic terms, Austin’s GDP grew 39% from 2018 to 2023, nearly twice as fast as ours. We are the slowest-growing major economy in the fastest-growing large state in the country.

San Antonio saw big population growth in the year post Covid, but things are slowing down. In 2026, property values have stagnated, sales tax revenue is falling, and home prices are dropping after a long run-up. The city just closed a $21 million gap in this year’s budget through spending cuts and fee hikes, and is facing a $152 million gap next year. Council is now talking about raising the property tax for the first time in over three decades. All while the San Antonio homeowner already pays among the highest property taxes in Texas.

It isn’t just the city. SAISD has lost 20% of its students over the past two decades and closed over a dozen schools. Northside ISD lost over 10,000 students and faces a $35 million deficit. Across the area, school districts are shrinking, closing buildings, and cutting staff because there aren’t enough families.

This is what stagnation looks like up close: a slow but lethal drain that shows up in your property tax bill and closes your kid’s school.

And, the fix seems to be more taxes. But, the more we take from residents, the less competitive we become in the one category we really have going for us: San Antonio is affordable. That is a huge part of our pitch—affordable for families and affordable to operate a business in a good city with no state income tax. Every fee increase and every tax hike chips away at the only advantage we’re actually selling.

What we need is more jobs and more opportunity.

The employers that once anchored the city’s tax base like Rackspace, USAA’s banking arm, and Tesoro have downsized, relocated, or been acquired out of town. The jobs replacing them are less competitive. San Antonio is adding jobs in aggregate but not gaining the kind of jobs that fund a city, and not doing it at the pace of a true dynamic economy.

Austin doesn’t have this problem because Austin has jobs at scale. Since 2018, Austin has attracted 81 corporate headquarters relocations. Dallas got even more. San Antonio didn’t make the list. When good jobs show up, people get hired, buy houses, fill schools, and spend money. More jobs means more homes and more revenue, and no one has to raise anything. Austin’s revenue doubled without raising rates—in fact, they lowered theirs. We’re raising fees to close a gap that grows every year.

Yes, we know we don’t want to be Austin. But we can’t ignore that the growth engine is slowing. The job of city leaders is to make sure the city creates opportunity for its residents. That is the job. Without growing opportunities, a city will decay. This role cannot be delegated to a partner organization and crossed off the list. San Antonio’s elected leadership has spent the last decade treating job creation as someone else’s department—a mission to fund and a brand to support, not the central function of running a city. And growing the job base is not just about courting employers from elsewhere. It is about building the conditions that make new jobs form here in the first place. Both halves are the work, and both halves belong to the people voters elected.

We do spend on these efforts. But the results are mixed at best. $200 million on Ready to Work, which placed around 5,000 people in “approved” jobs at an average salary of $45K—in mostly truck driving and call center work. $802 million committed to two bus lines in a city built entirely around cars. $150 million in affordable housing bonds. Tens of millions in nonprofit grants. What is actually working? What would we stop doing if we had to choose? And what would we do instead to grow?

These are the questions not enough people are asking. At the core: how do we grow? It is beyond dispute that when growth and jobs come, incomes rise, the tax base expands, and the city can invest in schools and streets and the things that make a place worth raising a family in. That is what flourishing looks like. Austin is living it. Dallas is living it. San Antonio is watching.

Stagnate, raise rates to cover the gap, erode the cost advantage, watch jobs and families choose elsewhere, and raise rates again. That cycle has a name in other cities. Detroit. Baltimore. Portland.

San Antonio has everything it needs to grow. Growth just requires choosing it—and so far, we haven’t.

The Reframe

City Council approves $4.5 million for Robert E. Lee renovations (Business Journal) → Subsidized housing is the wrong answer to the right question.
San Antonio doesn’t have an affordable housing problem. San Antonio has an income problem that looks like an affordable housing problem. A handful of subsidized units at six figures apiece doesn’t move the affordability needle in a city where the median home already costs less than most of Texas, and there is plenty of dirt-cheap housing available. What this does is burn civic capital on a symptom while the disease—an economy that isn’t competing with the rest of the Texas Triangle—compounds. If the goal is for more San Antonians to afford homes, the answer is more $75K jobs, not more subsidized apartments. If the goal is truly more & more affordable housing, the solution is simple: build more. Just ask Austin.

Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones outlines tough choices ahead in State of the City address (SA Report) → Mayor Jones is governing as an economic development mayor despite not running as one.
Good. That's the job. The problem is that the city has been late to it for twenty years. For decades, economic development in San Antonio has been treated as something the mayor supports. It has not been treated as what it actually is: the most important function of municipal leadership, because it is the one function that determines whether every other function is funded. Jones is inheriting the consequences of that delegation and appears to be taking the job personally. The Civic’s position: this is the correct posture, and the measure of success is whether San Antonians are more prosperous three years from now.

OLLU to offer no-cost master’s program starting this fall (SA Report) → A shrinking university makes a smart bet on jobs.
OLLU's new free master's program is being covered as a feel-good story. It's actually something better: a shrinking institution making a clear-eyed decision. Enrollment is down nearly 300 students since 2023, and a dozen undergraduate programs were cut last year. Against that backdrop, the university is doubling down on five graduate tracks across business, cybersecurity, nonprofit management, and social work, and giving them away to students who'll actually finish. All five have direct employment pathways in San Antonio's existing economy. Charity doesn’t always materialize as opportunity, but if these students are funneled into higher paying jobs, this just might.

The Pick

Our weekly recommendation for what’s going on in San Antonio

I Still Love San Antone

Garrett T. Capps—San Antonio’s musical ambassador and founding partner of The Lonesome Rose—has released I Still Love San Antone, his most gonzo record to date. It features Santiago Jiménez, Jr., the late, great Augie Meyers (of the Texas Tornados), and Paul Leary (of Butthole Surfers).

He’s throwing the release fiesta Saturday, May 9th, at The Lonesome Rose. Free admission, with Santiago Jiménez, Jr. opening. If you want to know what makes San Antonio music San Antonio music, it’s a damn good place to start.

- Chad Carey, Empty Stomach Group

Thank you for reading our inaugural newsletter. The Civic exists because San Antonio deserves a weekly publication that asks the questions above out loud—what’s working, what isn’t, what we aren’t talking about. Every Tuesday from here on, you’ll get one argument, one Reframe of recent coverage, and one reason to leave the house.

A particular thanks to our Charter members, whose generosity made this launch possible.

If something here landed, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to someone who should be reading.

See you next Tuesday.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

Friends,

Coming to you with good news: The Civic publishes its first Weekly Brief next Tuesday, May 5th. The opening column, “San Antonio Has to Choose Growth,” lays out the argument we’ll be making consistently: that this city has every ingredient for growth and is choosing not to grow, and that the consequences of that choice show up in school closures, budget deficits, and tax hikes. But, importantly, we can choose to do things differently and San Antonio can be genuinely great if we do.

Many of you know me, but for those who do not: I am Philip Reichert, Editor of The Civic. I’d like to thank everyone for their involvement so far, big or small. The people reading this backed this project before there was anything to read, and we appreciate that immensely. Those of you who generously joined as Charter members are listed on our website.

Two things:

The launch is Tuesday morning. Over the coming weeks, we will have more content delivered every week to your inbox: deep-reported columns, dozens of records requests across every government entity in Bexar County, quality guest writing, and investigations into the programs and policies that shape San Antonio’s future. Our website is fully live at thecivic.com and will quickly fill with content.

We also made our first staff hire. Jarrett Whitener, most recently a reporter at Community Impact, joins us full-time on Monday, May 11th to help us cover everything going on in San Antonio.

When Tuesday’s piece lands, please share it. Send it to at least one person who should be reading us. Word of mouth is how local journalism scales!

More to come.

Philip Reichert