San Antonio

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San Antonio

Having plodded our way through Houston and Dallas, San Antonio’s case study presents a stark contrast in politics-policy system, policy leadership, and economic development. It is questionable whether we will learn more about San Antonio, or better appreciate what happened in Houston and Dallas in this case study. If the reader hasn’t figured it out, San Antonio is not Houston or Dallas. A decent starting point is that during the early years of the Age of Urban Renewal, San Antonio more resembles eastern Big Cities and during the later years, Western Sunbelt cities. What will emerge, I believe, is that Houston and Dallas, with aggressive policy system dominance exercised by organized, or at least semi-organized large corporation elites, are exceptions to the rule. As far as San Antonio goes, it will be clear that in the 1950’s that city essentially changed its character and policy system. It will be also evident, when the reader completes the next chapter on Western cities that San Antonio looks a lot like Albuquerque and San Jose, even Phoenix. As with Houston and Dallas, the key is to understand the dynamics beneath its policy system. To introduce one more moving part into this case study, a second policy system change will arise at the end of the Age of Urban Renewal. Economic growth, success in climbing the urban hierarchy ladder, imposes strains on the body politic—and through that into economic development policy.

Let’s refresh our memory of past discussions. San Antonio has a long history (1691) extending into the Spanish, Mexican, as well as the pre-Republic years. It was the Spanish and Mexican capital of their Texas Province and their largest settlement. American insurgents captured the provincial capital in 1835, prompting Santa Ana to recapture it by taking the Alamo. When Texas was annexed as a state in 1845, San Antonio had about 800 residents. By the end of Civil War, population totaled around 12 to 15,000. Until 1930, San Antonio grew so that it became the largest city in Texas. Attracting a mixture of southern planter types, German, Italian and foreign immigrants, as well Hispanics and Afro-American slaves, not to forget Native Americans. San Antonio possessed a more polyglot culture than most other Texan, certainly southern cities. This is important to our understanding of the politics and policy system found in Houston at the beginning of the Age of Urban Renewal.

San Antonio’s economic base was dominated by the military in the 19^th century, and San Antonio was comfortable in making its living off the military (and tourism)—not especially valuing any diversification of sectors. It did not build a ship channel, nor did it tap into the oil boom. The last of Texas major cities to link up with rail, it did not extend its hinterland into more western areas. Still the 1920’s were golden years, economically speaking with a substantial real estate and construction boom evident. Instead, as our previous discussion in Chapter Six revealed, its politics became conflict-ridden, frequently corrupt, and lacking almost totally in a forward vision and community-wide perspective. Despite all this, the area continued to attract new residents and by 1940 it exceeded over 250,000. In 1930, however, San Antonio lost its first place Texas status to Houston and Dallas and by World War II it was settling into third place status—which it holds to this day (2015).

The Ethnic Machine

To a certain extent, the picture being painted is that more than other Texan (certainly Southern cities), San Antonio had traces of the northern Big City ethnic and immigrant-based population growth that reflected into its political life and policy system. Since the nineteenth century (with a brief reform interlude in 1910 when it adopted the commission form of government) San Antonio politics revolved around what Abbott calls a “self-perpetuating city hall machine” which benefited from “disinterest of military personnel, and low turnouts (about 6-10%) among the Anglo-German middle class, the city hall clique built its majority with well-disciplined black votes from the east side, and scattered Mexican votes from the west side barrio”[1].

The machine created its share of scandals, weak city hall capacity, and personalistic benefits to its business supporters. During the twenties, the machine spent gobs of money from bond issuance for much needed infrastructure (streets, bridges, auditorium, parks and libraries, and some drainage and flood protection (vitally needed). In 1933, only about 40% of streets (almost all in the north neighborhoods) were paved). The surprise is that most of the spending and infrastructure did not go into neighborhoods which provided the machine votes, but to north of the CBD affluent Anglo neighborhoods. Minority neighborhoods got next to nothing; their streets went unpaved, and they flooded regularly. Instead, the infrastructure serviced new areas settled in the boom years and which had in 1929 been formally annexed to San Antonio (extending it from 36 sq. miles to 144) and increased the city population by more than 20,000[2]. While this policy behavior may play havoc with most forms of academic rationality, it may have been the “payoff” to the business classes and the non-machine types to stay home on Election Day.

In any event, after the annexation with the Depression raging, conflict followed. With only one exception, multiple bond referenda were sent down to defeat over the decade—by a new business-led anti-tax group, the Taxpayers League. Sanders asserts[3] that the bond issuances were not the real issue—that instead a core of middle class and business community had now organized, determined to remove the machine from power. San Antonio’s business community split, some following the machine, the others the Taxpayers League[4] and throughout the decade machine and reformers squared off around bond referenda introducing a stasis into city politics and policy. The reader may be forgiven for wondering, at this point, what all this has to do with the Age of Urban Renewal. The relevancy to San Antonio of Chapters 9 through 11 is certainly open to question. But, in 1939, some of it enters the San Antonio picture in the form of the unexpected mayoral victory of an ousted New Deal Congressman.

The War Years, Mavericks, Urban Renewal and Postwar Stasis

Imitating La Guardia and running on a Fusion Party ticket against the machine was a Maverick ex New Deal Congressman–Maury Maverick to be exact, who beat the machine and inserted a two year New Deal style program, a “policy island” before the machine returned to power in the next election. In those two short years, he reformed public sanitation and public health services, grabbed onto WPA funds to build the first leg of the now-famous San Antonio Riverwalk (Paseo del Rio), and using National Youth Administration funding preserved some of the original Mexican settlement (La Villeta). And, are you ready, Maverick seized upon 1937 Public Housing Act funds to clear slums and build a 1200 unit public housing project in the Hispanic west side. This one single urban renewal project is the only urban renewal project conducted by any major Texan city using 1937 Housing Act dollars.[5] Maverick, however, alienated virtually everyone and he was ousted by a machine candidate Gus Mauerman. Mauerman broke with the machine during his four years in office. Two mavericks in a row opened up San Antonio at precisely the right time—the war years.

Fixating on the military was not necessarily a bad idea for San Antonio, especially when the nation fights a World War. Fort Sam Houston was the initial investment back in 1879. That Fort expanded as a training site for both the Spanish-American War and World War II. In 1917, the Army trained its first aviators at a new air base, Kelly Field and the Brooks Medical Center followed in the same year. In response to free land from the city, Randolph Air Base was constructed in 1928, and Lackland in 1941. San Antonio by the start of the second world war was, in effect, a permanent military base with a comprehensive set of businesses and ancillary industries built up around it. The bases also were important employment centers for the area’s population.

During World War II, an estimated 150,000 new residents, tied mostly to various military-related activities settled in San Antonio.[6] The Chamber took advantage of these military assets in the war years, piggybacking off the numerous air bases, supportive industries, and personnel and the military medical facilities as well. In these years, the Chamber made a sustained attempt to position San Antonio as a major link in transcontinental and Latin American air travel. Indeed, its 1942 vision “Platform for Greater San Antonio” called for a comprehensive city plan (from which the city established its first permanent zoning commission, followed by its 1944 creation of a Planning Board entrusted with developing a postwar vision). During these years, also, the Chamber led the successful effort to relocate Trinity University to San Antonio and to convince the state legislature to establish a medical school (eventually the University of Texas Health Center) and relocated another from Galveston. Compared to the paralyzed thirties, the war years produced explosive and sustained growth on many fronts for San Antonio.[7]

All this growth meant San Antonio was bursting at its seams and spilling over its city boundaries. While approving bonds for infrastructure had proven vexing since 1930, Texas law allowed the city council to pass annexation ordinances—and in 1944 it did so—annexing 6,000 acres of highway which created “island suburbs” of Alamo Heights, Terrill Hills, and Olmos Park. From 1943 to 1947, San Antonio annexed 18,000 acres (25 separate annexations) increasing its square mileage by 68%. Many of these council votes (eleven) were 3-2[8]. Annexation was fueling the long-standing political divisiveness in San Antonio politics and bringing it to a climax.

The reformers fragmented in the 1947 elections, allowing the machine to return to power. Not wanting to repeat the Mauerman mistake, machine bosses put a total buffoon in office and his administration proved to be a complete disaster (e.g. he proposed to kill some zoo animals to feed others and save money). For once, the business community pulled together and united around a single candidate, the President of the Chamber, Jack White. White won in 1949 with 80% of the vote. While in his first term, the machine fought back and the reformers split yet again. A stalemate resulted. In 1951, White again prevailed, carried the council ousting the machine, and reunited the reformers. A charter review committee approved a complete municipal government reform (centered about a city manager and in 1951 it was approved by referendum. The new city manager (from Norfolk, VA) tried to clean house and professionalize city administration and all heck broke loose. The reformers split and started squabbling again. The next two years were a mess politically—four city managers were fired. It seemed the inability of the reformers to sustain a consensus would allow the machine to come back into power. At this critical juncture, however, at a meeting arranged by the chamber, a core group of business reformers plus every known business-related service organization (Kiwanis, Lions, Optimist Club, Manufacturers Association, Taxpayers League, press and newspapers, religious leadership, and Bar and Medical Association) banded together in December 1954 and formed the Good Government League (GGL)[9].

The Good Government League

The GGL committed itself to make the city manager system work, upgrade the infrastructure (highways especially), implement a growth-oriented program, and field candidates to control the council (i.e. to act as if they were a political party). They got eight of their candidates on the council in the next election (1955) and moved onto dominate San Antonio politics for the next eighteen years (1973)[10]. The electoral coalition they assembled put in place a new policy system for San Antonio—throwing out the machine and ending the political stasis, which except for the war years, had frustrated nearly all attempts at responsible municipal governance. The key to their image of San Antonio’s future was infrastructure. The growth-oriented GGL council priorities reflected their belief that “industries looking for new locations certainly would not select a city with run-down streets, run-down sanitary sewers, a sewage disposal plant in need of enlargement, and other deficient municipal services”.[11]

The first element of GGL’s economic development program was implemented, however, in a zero-sum manner traditional with traditional San Antonio policy practice. The bond-financed infrastructure program “invested in items like highways, airports, and urban renewal, where its own spending was matched by federal and state aid, and supported outlying development by extending water lines, sewer facilities and storm drainage. The city’s older neighborhoods were effectively ignored until the 1970’s and ‘frills’ like parks, and recreation facilities received only modest attention”.[12] In practical terms this translated into two realities (1) the GGL’s agenda favored Anglo (northern areas), annexation, and intensive bond issuance, and (2) the minorities of San Antonio, the former machine supporters, were outside the GGL business/middle class coalition and effectively left to their own devices—their neighborhoods, while receiving some largesse from the GGL infrastructure programs, continued to, and were perceived to be in chronic decline.

San Antonio’s inability to devise a policy system which provided a neighborhood/geographic balance in its outputs, present since its founding in the nineteenth century, continued under the GGL. The GGL’s dominance of the city’s political system meant that bond issues were crafted to serve a limited number of public purposes. Supported by a council-manager city government that promised efficient, professional city government ‘free from politics’, the city’s capital investments were devoted almost solely to outlying growth and downtown improvements. The same city that could afford an $11 million convention center in 1964 and a $5.5 million Tower of the Americas in 1966 could not afford to pave many of its streets, to solve a flooding and drainage problem …, nor to assure an adequate parks or library system.[13]

Under their tutelage, the GGL mustered sufficient support to pass bond referenda necessary to put in highways, streets, sewers and the like. As to urban renewal, Texas law required public approval for any public housing and that put a crimp on San Antonio’s tapping federal urban renewal funds.[14] But public housing was not a priority with the GGL. If ending political deadlock/administrative chaos and neglect of vital infrastructure was GGL’s first priority then revitalizing “the central business district and refurbish(ing) the image of the city [urban hierarchy]” was their “second and substantive aim”.[15] To this end San Antonians approved a comprehensive downtown-focused urban renewal plan in December, 1957.

When funds finally tumbled down in early 1960s the first project removed sixty-eight acres of Mexican downtown housing to be replaced with commercial reuse. The second project, Rosa Verde cleared or substantially rehabbed housing to support hospital expansion. The third project prepared the site for the 1969 HemisFair. One hundred forty-nine acres were acquired and leveled surrounding the Alamo and resold at significant write down to private developers—evicting 1600 residents and many small businesses. The city supplemented this project with its own bond issue for a civic center, theatre, arena, exhibition building, and then made the remaining area available for the HemisFair.

The “HemisFair itself was a classic example of civic boosterism”. Originally the brainchild of then Congressman Gonzales (1962) Senator Yarborough and Governor Connally brought in the federal and states funds to make it possible. The HemisFair operating corporation was financed by $25,000 pledges from 480 businessmen—the “who’s who” of the GGL plus old German families. HemisFair was San Antonio’s opening gambit announcing its vital position in linking cultural and commercial ties with Latin and South America. The attraction of foreign and domestic visitors, there would be six million, represented more than traditional tourism, but was an announcement to the hemisphere that San Antonio had entered into the charmed elite of America’s urban hierarchy. When the gates were closed, the area was converted into a convention center, a federal building, various tourist attractions supplementing the Alamo including the Institute of Texas Cultures and the Tower of the America’s. Hotels filled in the adjoining areas.[16]

The third and last GGL policy priority was to capture the growth in its periphery through massive annexation. Eight new suburbs incorporated in the 1950’s, and the GGL resolved to minimize further suburban incorporations by taking advantage of favorable Texas annexation law. In 1959, the city council, applying then-applicable extraterritorial jurisdiction to 330 sq. miles of its suburbs—without annexing an inch of them, but preventing their future incorporation. As always seems to have happened unincorporated suburbanites went to the state capital to stop future central city annexation. The 1963 Municipal Annexation law, a compromise, was intended to slow down the cities—but a way around it was found quickly—simply annex the highway—and then reserve the acreage as previous. In 1969, completed in 1971, the GGL council approved its last huge annexation which brought San Antonio to nearly 300 sq. miles in land area—in the period in which GGL was in control, San Antonio increased its land area to include 80% of Bexar County’s population and most of its economic base.[17] The annexed land provided a site in which to locate a branch campus of the University of Texas

Interestingly, it was this final annexation initiative that cracked the foundations of the GGL, led to five years of internal quarrels and civil war, and its eventual termination in 1977. The politics of developers profiting from annexation and city infrastructure financing spilled into the formerly formidable cohesive electoral coalition and led to a northern area business-developer coup taking over the city in 1973. In any case, the GGL business coalition smashed into little pieces by the mid-1970. Into the vacuum that opened, poured new groups and political forces which would during the seventies and eighties form into yet a third policy system for San Antonio.

The Rise of Neighborhood-Based Politics

As shall be discovered in the next chapter, most western cities followed the GGL pattern described in this section. While participation in urban renewal was mixed and suburban resistance to central city annexation more successful than in San Antonio, the period following the early to mid-1970 often was characterized by neighborhood level activists/organizations carving out a serious and meaningful position in their municipal policy systems.

In San Antonio’s case, the seeds for the new system came from the previous systems. The two bastions of the former machine, the African-American east side and the Mexican west side took advantages drawn from the success of the civil rights movement and the active federal government and the Great Society. The world had certainly not been turned upside down, but the previous business-dominated policy systems, fractured, ran out of steam, or simply accommodated themselves to increasingly strident cries to redress wrongs and neglect. As will be developed in later chapters, a new generation was entering both the electorate and politics, and it etched out over a decade or more several new ways to define and pursue “growth”. The more simple definition of population and land area increase, the old-style urban hierarchy, gave way to the reality of formidable suburban autonomy and new generational concern for the environment and shared growth. For San Antonio, this tale starts with the western Latino barrio on the west side.

The likely trigger for west side activism came from the new Hispanic middle class that grew from working at Kelly Field and the other area military bases. Kelly Field, San Antonio’s largest employer in this era, was also the largest single employer of Mexican-Americans in the United States. The median income of Mexican-Americans families living in census tracts adjacent to Kelly Field exceeded the overall Mexican-American median income by $500 in 1970.[18] By that time, these areas had developed neighborhood level leaders and organizations which were not all that enamored with the GGL and its economic development agenda. Mostly, it was that their streets were still unpaved, their neighborhoods still flooded with heavy rain and hurricanes, and service delivery and public programs (recreation, parks and libraries) were still neglected, poor quality, and under-serviced. It was the GGL indifference to flooding and poor drainage that triggered the first public outcries. In 1974 a heavy flood unleashed more than water from the west side barrios.

Neighborhood leader, Ernesto Cortes, trained in Alinsky’s Chicago Industrial Areas Foundation working with San Antonio’s first Mexican-American bishop, Patrick Flores (1970) organized reaction to the poor drainage that followed the 1974 flood. With Flores support Cortes organized Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) with membership and leaders drawn from Kelly Field-employed Mexican-Americans. COPS demanded the city and the city council address their issues. Moreover, COPS insisted that as a first priority, the city economic development should be focused primarily within the city 410-Beltway and away from the traditional northern areas favored by the GGL. Firm Attraction programs should bring companies to San Antonio inner neighborhoods and provide employment for their residents. In the vacuum created by the fracture and soon-to-be-collapse of the GGL, the city council gave in and redirected programs and priorities. The 1975 Amendments to the Voting Rights Act which were discussed in regards to Houston, now hit San Antonio also. The tie-in of annexation, unequal economic development policy, and at-large election districts hit San Antonio like a sledge hammer. District elections were approved by referendum in 1977. In the election of 1977, five Hispanics and one African-American provided a voting majority on the San Antonio city council.

Minority political power now confronted Anglo economic power. It took the form of a struggle between COPS and an economic development organization, formed by a small but powerful group of businessmen in 1974, the Economic Development Foundation (EDF). “The EDF’s sole concern was to diversify San Antonio’s economic base, believing that the Chamber had not been particularly successful in that regard … the EDF launched the city’s first national promotional campaign to attract a variety of enterprises to San Antonio”[19]. The critical element of that promotional effort was San Antonio’s low wage, low regulatory, low cost advantage over other geographies. In 1977 COPS bitterly attacked that promotional campaign and demanded EDF attract higher wage industries and firms. A loud, sometimes bitter debate followed. In effect, the battle was joined on the definition of the type of growth economic development should bring to the community.

At this point in time, EDF won that debate. Rallying behind the traditional Privatist definition of growth and the arguments associated with a competitive urban hierarchy, EDF asserted that the failure to compete with other cities and offer a low-cost alternative would result in economic stagnation for San Antonio—and that stagnation would hurt the low-income neighborhoods first, and hardest. When a major corporation publically withdrew from relocating in San Antonio because of the COPS/EDF conflict and Fantus announced it could no longer recommend San Antonio to its clients due to ethnic and political strife, COPS had its knees cut out from under its position. In 1978, COPS made an informal “treaty” with EDF citing that high wage jobs should be a priority, but that no business should be discouraged from relocating to the city. EDF resumed its campaign and, it seems, was very successful in its future promotional efforts.[20] In 2015 San Antonio EDF celebrated its fortieth anniversary.

For summary see Abbott New Urban, p. 230 for ideas and cobb

[1] Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities, op. cit., p. 132.

[2] Heywood T. Sanders. “Building a New Urban Infrastructure: the Creation of Postwar San Antonio”, in Char Miller and Heywood Sanders, Urban Texas: Politics and Development, op. cit., pp. 155-156.

[3] Heywood T. Sanders. “Building a New Urban Infrastructure, op. cit., pp. 158-160.

[4] Interestingly, this is the backdrop for Dallas being able to “purchase” the 1936 Centennial Exposition. The bonds to revamp the Alamo and provide the infrastructure for the Centennial in San Antonio failed continually through the winter of 1935. The bonds for the Centennial were supported by the taxpayer groups and opposed by the machine—a reversal of the usual pattern, indicating the confused state of San Antonio politics. In the bond referenda of 1936, the pattern was yet reversed. The Centennial Exposition was the catalyst for the formation of the Dallas Citizens Council and Charter Associations. Had San Antonio its politics in some sort of order, and acquired the Exposition, would Dallas politics have evolved as it did?

[5] Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities, op. cit., p. 133.

[6] David R. Johnson, “San Antonio: the Vicissitudes of Boosterism”, Richard M. Bernard and Bradley R. Rice (Eds) Sunbelt Cities: Politics and Growth since World War II (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1983), pp. 235-236.

[7] Arnold Fleischman, “Sunbelt Boosterism: the Politics of Postwar Growth and Annexation in San Antonio”, David C. Perry and Alfred J. Watkins (Eds), The Rise of the Sunbelt Cities (Beverly Hills. SAGE Publications, 1977), Volume 14 Urban Affairs Annual Reviews, p. 153; the actual facilities were not built until the late 1950’s and early 1960’s when annexation made available a site around which the state and private developers could agree. The city would, at that time, support infrastructure through its bond issuance and capital budget programs.

[8] Arnold Fleischman, “Sunbelt Boosterism: the Politics of Postwar Growth and Annexation in San Antonio”, op. cit., p. 155.

[9] David R. Johnson, “San Antonio: the Vicissitudes of Boosterism”, op. cit., p. 239.

[10] From 1955 through 1971, seventy-seven of San Antonio’s eighty-one city council were recruited and endorsed by the Good Government League. As Robert Lineberry has described it, the GGL was a ‘sort of upper-middle class political machine, officing not in Tammany Hall, but in a savings and loan association”: Carl Abbott, The New Urban America, op. cit., p. 136; twenty-nine of forty-nine individual council were business people or professionals—most lived in northern neighborhoods. Walter McAllister (former President of the city’s largest savings and loan association, served as mayor from 1961-1971.

[11] Heywood T. Sanders. “Building a New Urban Infrastructure, op. cit., p. 165.

[12] Heywood T. Sanders. “Building a New Urban Infrastructure, op. cit., p. 168.

[13] Heywood T. Sanders. “Building a New Urban Infrastructure, op. cit., p. 169.

[14] Robert B. Fairbanks, “The Texas Exception: San Antonio and Urban Renewal, 1949-1965, Journal of Planning History, May, 2002, Volume 1, Number 2, pp. 181-196.

[15] Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities, op. cit., p. 152.

[16] Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities, op. cit., pp. 152-153.

[17] David R. Johnson, “San Antonio: the Vicissitudes of Boosterism”, op. cit., pp. 241-242.

[18] David R. Johnson, “San Antonio: the Vicissitudes of Boosterism”, op. cit., p. 246.

[19] David R. Johnson, “San Antonio: the Vicissitudes of Boosterism”, op. cit., p. 249.

[20] David R. Johnson, “San Antonio: the Vicissitudes of Boosterism”, op. cit., p. 250.

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Policy System Cuts

San Antonio

The Ethnic Machine

The War Years, Mavericks, Urban Renewal and Postwar Stasis

The Good Government League

The Rise of Neighborhood-Based Politics

Minority political power now confronted Anglo economic power. It took the form of a struggle between COPS and an economic development organization, formed by a small but powerful group of businessmen in 1974, the Economic Development Foundation (EDF). “The EDF’s sole concern was to diversify San Antonio’s economic base, believing that the Chamber had not been particularly successful in that regard … the EDF launched the city’s first national promotional campaign to attract a variety of enterprises to San Antonio”[19]. The critical element of that promotional effort was San Antonio’s low wage, low regulatory, low cost advantage over other geographies. In 1977 COPS bitterly attacked that promotional campaign and demanded EDF attract more high wage industries and firms. A loud, sometimes bitter debate followed. In effect, the battle was joined on the definition of the type of growth economic development should bring to the community.