In which landlords in Citizen Comment derail me into a deep dive on the Strategic Housing Action Plan that San Marcos put together in 2019. (And after that, there’s a small bit on GSMP.)
The landlords are very mad about the three-month eviction moratorium. It was implemented in March 2020. We’re one of the few holdouts that haven’t lifted it yet, mostly because Hays County did a spectacularly abysmal job giving rental assistance to tenants. The idea was that with a few extra months, maybe more money could be dispersed and keep people in their homes. Evictions lead to homelessness, which derails lives permanently.
This time, the landlords were arguing that the moratorium is bad for tenants, because it allows them to rack up more debt, which then counts against them when they are eventually evicted anyway. Their other argument is that the job insecurity caused by the pandemic is long gone. (Their actual argument is that they would like to collect rent every month. This isn’t itself a crazy argument!)
Look, landlords are generally a problematic group. They leach off renters’ income by virtue of the fact that they had wealth earlier than the renter did. They benefit from a housing crisis and generally try to absorb as much of someone’s disposable income as they can. However: asking landlords to forgo the money that they’re legally entitled to is also a problem.
So here is the key question: is the eviction delay a worthwhile way to prevent homelessness?
Glad you asked – we actually had a council workshop on homelessness just two weeks ago! What are their recommendations?
Those questions should be front and center, every time we are discussing zoning, housing, short-term homelessness, or affordability.
In 2019, San Marcos did a major housing needs assessment. There is tons of good data in it, most of it from 2017. We desperately need to be updating this every year.
So for example, here is our rental stock from 2017:
This should be updated every 2-3 years! – the 3rd/4th columns should come from Census and American Community Survey data, which is released every few years. – We know the number of new units that get occupancy permits each year. This is already aggregated here and here.
But the hard part would be finding out how much apartments are being rented for. Since 2017, those 15,884 total apartments have all risen in cost, so they’re not in the same categories as they used to be. For example, the 4163 units that were under $875/month in 2017? Those must all be in the < $1250 or < $1875 categories by now.
So the gap is presumably way worse in 2022 than it was in 2017, but we don’t know by exactly how much. Still, two questions down.
What is our total housing stock, broken down by affordability?
What is our total housing need, broken down by affordability?
So did we really spend a year and drop a bunch of money on consultants, and then just…never adopt the plan? It’s just sitting there in draft form? Or is it just that the website was never updated?
Oh, this is such a riot.
At this point I was rabidly curious. I found the city council minutes from October 15th, 2019, but it wasn’t there. It turns out that it didn’t go to P&Z until October 23rd, and it finally went to council on November 6th, 2019.
The Strategic Housing Action Plan came from P&Z with a number of edits. At council, they discussed it, and punted to a Council Workshop.
So I went hunting for the workshop. Finally I found it, 12/3/19. It wasn’t a workshop on the Strategic Housing Action Plan, it was on the new Comprehensive Plan. Workshops don’t have minutes, and I didn’t watch the video. But this is taken from the packet:
So it was never approved, because it got absorbed into the Comprehensive Plan process, which is in progress. This is VisionSMTX. It still has at least another year to go. And Comprehensive Plans are vague – they’re not going to promise funding or commit to specific details. So it will be years until someone puts together a new housing plan. (I have vivid memories of the SMTX4All housing project – I just assumed it had been passed and implemented!)
To recap: we’re sitting on housing recommendations from 2019, with data from 2017, while we dither about what we might like to look like in 2050.
I really do believe in longterm planning. But waiting to address a housing crisis like this is just lazy and infuriating.
The problem is those “controversial policy-related items” referenced in the workshop snippet. You can read what P&Z wanted to kill here, on pages 17 and 18. The Strategic Housing Plan was seen as a money grab by realtors, and only interpreted as a fight between realtors and the integrity of existing single family neighborhoods. There was no actual focus on the struggle of people in San Marcos to find homes. Basically, it’s a lot of nimbyism and fear of infill. (Infill can be done in a shitty way! Infill needs to be done very carefully! But the recommendations from P&Z just ignored the actual problem.) But at least P&Z actually passed the damn thing, unlike Council.
So we held a massive housing plan and never implemented anything. And rental rates exploded in the meantime. That sounds about right.
(What were we talking about again? Should we end the 3-month eviction moratorium? At some point we’ll have to, but it sure would be nice if we could get rental assistance to those in need beforehand.)
…
Item 1: Presentation by GSMP
The Greater San Marcos Partnership gets $400k/year from the city of San Marcos, per this contract. For context, the entire city budget for 2022 is $260.5 million dollars. So while GSMP is exasperating, we really are only talking about 0.0015 of the city’s budget.
Per the contract, GSMP has to come get updates to the city. GSMP is doing a lot of outreach and education. They’re holding workshops – financial literacy, a mentorship thing, innovations, cybersecurity. Sure. A resources database. Strengthen! Produce! Support! Identify challenges! My brain just turns to mush when I hear corporate verbs.
Max Baker is worried that GSMP will bring businesses in that aren’t good for San Marcos, and attempts to pin him on the quality of jobs at, say, Amazon. But the speaker is perfectly skilled at side-stepping questions.
For example: “You claim you’re working to bring in big businesses and supporting small businesses. Don’t companies like Amazon undercut small businesses that you claim to support?” asks Max, quite rightly.
“The large companies diversify our economy! There are spin offs! Different intellectual properties spin off and source locally!” the GSMP guy responds cheerfully. Which is an irrelevant answer – new spin-off companies don’t protect existing small businesses in any way. He actually has the cajones to claim that Amazon is known for having good labor practices, from what he hears. You can practically see the smoke pour out of Max’s ears.
Anyway, GSMP is dumb, but this whole thing is small potatoes. The speaker doesn’t do anything wrong exactly, but it’s unsatisfying.
So what is the resolution of the Camacho Street Warehouse? Well, the owner pulled the application.
Is this a win? It’s hard to say! Did he pull the whole project, or just decide to go forward without the permit?
What needs to happen is that the entrance on Camacho needs to be closed. The property should be accessed via Black’s BBQ parking lot. I am guessing we don’t have any mechanism to make that happen.
…
Item 24: Downtown Parking Committee
They’re going to set up a park-and-ride shuttle to help move employees back and forth.
2. Paid Parking is not coming to downtown, at least for the foreseeable future.
City Council has four appointees, four people who answer directly to Council. These are the City Lawyer, the City Manager, the City Clerk, and one more that I’m not sure about. Maybe the municipal judge?
When city employees all get Cost of Living Adjustments, these four don’t. Mayor Hughson proposes to change that.
I am not particularly invested in this issue either way. Salaries should be egalitarian, and COLAs should be automatic. The question is: are these four salaries so outsized that we shouldn’t automatically give them COLAs?
Commissioner Baker points out that COLAs on a $200K salary are way more than most San Marcos residents would get in COLA adjustments. One phrase that Max frequently uses is: “Budgets are moral documents,” which I think is very insightful. Budgets are statements of priorities and goals, judgments made by people. His point is that the range of salaries is immoral, and it’s immoral that a 2% COLA adjustment on $200K is $2k, but a 2% COLA adjustment on $50k is only $500.
I can sharpen Max’s argument: inflation does not impact all people equally. Homeowners are locked into a monthly payment that was established whenever they bought their home, so they get a 30 year pass on housing inflation. Whereas renters are drastically more affected, immediately and repeatedly.
(If you really want to up-end conventional wisdom, consider this point: inflation is great for people with debt. If you’ve got large student debt or a large mortgage, the money you owe gets eaten up as the dollar loses value. This is great!
To state the obvious, inflation sucks because prices go up and wages don’t. One of our biggest moral failings as a society was not to automatically peg the minimum wage to inflation, when it was first established. If jobs always pegged wages to inflation, then the workers would have some protection against the worst parts of inflation.)
Anyway: should these four individuals receive COLA adjustments whenever the rest of the city does? It matters a lot what the City Clerk makes, vs the City Manager or City Lawyer. In the end they decide to wait on the issue until after they get some numbers.
…
Should the performance evaluations of those same four appointees be open to the public? Didn’t we discuss this semi-recently? We did.
I hadn’t agreed with the outcome then, to publish every detail of performance evaluations. This week they changed their mind, and will only publish a summary of evaluations, written by a 3rd party consultant. So now I do approve of their decision. Great! (Why exactly did Mayor Hughson put it back on the agenda? How did councilmembers Gonzalez and Garza come to change their mind? I agree with the outcome, so I’m not too worried, but clearly conversations occurred behind the scenes. Which is part of how the sausage is made.)
I did also listen to the 3 pm workshop, mostly on Capital Improvement Projects, or CIP projects.
There are a group of five houses or so on San Antonio street, right where Bishop meets San Antonio, and they all flood regularly. This has been going on for years and years. Several people spoke and asked if their project could be accelerated.
The answer was “no, not really.” Basically the CIP list gives the wrong impression on timelines. It only tracks how much money will be dedicated to each project in each year. But that is not the actual timeline of the project, because the design phase doesn’t need a big allotment of money. What that means is that the project is already in progress, even though it doesn’t look like it has started yet according to CIP funding. When it’s time to spend money, the money will appear as scheduled. However, the projects can’t be sped up, because they’re already in motion and each step holds up the next step.
To me, this means something deeper: City Council and P&Z are being asked to put their input into a document that has very little flexibility. Therefore their input is coming at the wrong stage. If the city staff were systematically biased in favor of certain parts of the city, that would not be visible from the CIP list, because we have no way of knowing which projects aren’t ever rising into the conversation about potential future projects.
The answer has to be something about a supervised process to determine which projects are rising to attention in the first place, with attention to making it equitable. That’s the part that needs public scrutiny.
Ugh. Listen: Gabrielle Moore lost by 15 votes, in the school board election last night. Just 15 votes. And the opponent is a disengaged random walk-on who has never voted in a school board election in something like 20 years, but conservative voters went for him. And Gaby would have been great.
It is a pretty brutal slog to run for office. I personally loathe small talk and glad-handing, and can’t imagine anything worse than having to convince people to vote for me. But I’m so grateful that people do run for office. And then to come so excruciatingly close! It sucks and I’m sorry.
In which we relish the sentence, “Nothing would give me more pleasure than to sue him.”
All of these are actually pretty short.
A few other notes
Apparently Half-Price books is leaving San Marcos, and I’m super bummed about it. They posted a letter saying they were priced out of rent, and unable to find anything else affordable.
We have a glut of empty store fronts, and yet the vacant store fronts are priced unaffordably for local businesses, and landlords are raising rent on existing buildings and forcing tenants out. Couldn’t GSMP do something here? I generally don’t see eye-to-eye with the business community, but this is their wheelhouse. Could they shake some sense into commercial real estate landlords and get them to stop sabotaging San Marcos? In other words, set rates that are appropriate for San Marcos retail, not Austin retail. I already miss Half-Price Books.
Lastly:
I’m halfway through the city council workshop from Tuesday afternoon, and finding it fascinating. There was an excellent presentation on homelessness in San Marcos, and on an ordinance to hold landlords accountable for unsafe or subpar rental properties. Both are extremely complicated topics.
Item 1: The Sidewalk Maintenance and Gap Infill Program:
If you don’t know Lisa Marie Coppoletta – or LMC – then you are missing out on one of the more memorable of town personalities. She speaks up at far more City Council meetings than anyone else in town. She ran for mayor a few years ago. She tends towards libertarian beliefs – lower taxes, individualism – and so she can veer into ideas that I am vehemently opposed to. But she also picks a few key issues that are personal to her, and focuses like a laser beam on them. What I am saying is that she is the most ever-loving persistent person you’ve ever met. And this item is her shining moment in the sun.
Apparently San Marcos had a survey back in 2011, and road and sidewalk maintenance faired dismally:
Whoops. So we decided to become more walkable. So we needed sidewalks. In 2013, we started the Sidewalk Maintenance & Gap Infill program. They’ve got a teeny budget – 150K-200K per year. They survey the town, look at where we’re not wheelchair-accessible, or where parks aren’t connected to neighborhoods, etc, and generally chip away at the streets of San Marcos.
At some point in the last 5-6 years, Belvin got sidewalks. LMC lives on Belvin, and something happened with the sidewalks and LMC’s trees in her front yard. (I literally do not want to fully understand this issue.) Since then, this has been her number one talking point, and this presentation is the pinnacle of her time and effort spent wearing everyone down on the topic.
But she is successful, and I don’t mean that dismissively! There are four proposed changes to the Sidewalk program, and one is: “Develop protocol for tree inspection and analysis prior to construction, inspection during construction, and follow-up.” This is a good idea. Local activism at work!
Then the question arises: Who gets to vet upcoming sidewalks? Should they go to neighborhood commissions? Historical Preservation Committee? City Council?
Alyssa Garza asks how well the citizen input has been going. Answer: lately it’s been pretty poor. They’ve tried to reach out, and people just don’t show up.
All the councilmembers agree: Sidewalks should go to neighborhood commisions, HPC, and yes, to city council.
Here is my question: Suppose staff is planning a sidewalk project, and brings it to the neighborhood commission. And suppose the neighborhood says no, we don’t want sidewalks. Does it still come to council? Can Council override a neighborhood vote? Would it require a supermajority?
Here is my problem – I’m cynical about neighborhood associations. I’m worried that individuals will focus on the twenty yards of sidewalk along their property, and will only be mad about that. I can imagine a neighborhood full of people who are mildly enthusiastic about sidewalks in general, but passionately mad about the portion in front of their own house.
This could easily be the death knell of the sidewalk program altogether, which is then a huge collective loss.
People are averse to change, and they will overestimate how much it will sting to lose their street easement. But once it’s built, it’s not going to be a thorn in their side. Don’t let their fears wreck what’s best for the whole.
CIP projects are Capital Improvement Programs. This is basically public works – which major water/wastewater/electric/roads/facilities projects are coming down the pipeline in the next year? What about the next three or next ten years? It’s big and complicated. We’re looking at roughly $10 million of projects this coming year.
(There are so many projects that I’m not prepared to do a super deep dive, but if you want to know when a project on your street will be completed, this is where you look. For example, Hopkins will be reopened in 2050.)(Kidding. But really, just email the city and ask about whatever project you care about.)
Then there are a bunch of annexation and zoning cases.
Here’s the first:
That’s I-35 and Posey, right near Trace. They are asking for Heavy Commercial. Think retail and businesses, but they’re allowed to be car shops or other industrial-ish things, like you’d see along I-35.
Max Baker takes issue with how these are such fossil fuel heavy uses. Mark Gleason offers up a proposal: “No waste-related services.” (This is animal waste processing, landfill, composting, recycling, solid and liquid waste, incineration, etc.)
Vote on allowing waste-related services? No: Mark Gleason, Max Baker, Alyssa Garza It’s fine: Jude Prather, Shane Scott, Jane, Saul.
So it’s fine.
Next Max proposes nixing truck stops. Vote on allowing truck stops? No truck stops: Max Baker, Alyssa Garza They’re fine: Jude Prather, Shane Scott, Jane Hughson, Saul Gonzalez, Mark Gleason.
So they’re fine.
Next, this chunk of land:
Which fits like a tetris piece alongside the last one.
This is going to be heavy industrial. This means basically anything goes – manufacturing, warehouses, etc.
The vote: Yes: All of them except Max Baker. No: Max Baker
Here’s the last one:
That is 123 running north-south, on the right hand side of the photo. In other words, if you’re driving out of town on 123, you’ll get to the overpass over Wonderworld, and you’d be at the top of the photo.
If you keep driving south, the site will be on your right, but set back a little ways, and before you get to the intersection with McCarty.
The owners want to do Light Industrial on part of it and leave the rest vacant. Max Baker proposes an amendment to nix waste-related services.
Vote to allow waste-related services? No: Max Baker, Mark Gleason, Alyssa Garza, Saul Gonzalez, Jane Hughson Keep them! Jude Prather, Shane Scott.
1. Council cleans up some ordinances on committees. Most of them are very pro forma – formalizing how many members on different committees are from different groups of people, for example. Or deciding if the City Council rep should be a voting member, or not, on a committee. (It depends on the committee, and whether items are then headed to Council or not.)
The one that gets a little extra time is Economic Development San Marcos, or EDSM. Apparently this is a giant group, with like 13 members. Currently, the City Council representative, the City Manager, and the Greater San Marcos Partnership (GSMP) representative are all non-voting members.
Commissioner Baker points out that the Chamber of Commerce representative, the Hays County Commissioner, and the School District Representative should also be non-voting members. Secondly, while the GSMP rep is a nonvoting member, there are a bunch of other voting members who have close ties to GSMP.
EDSM gets pulled, and it gets kicked to the Finance and Audit committee, which Commissioner Garza and Mayor Hughson are on.
2. The City of San Marcos Economic Development Policy
Like all cities, we give away tax breaks to lure businesses here. I’m generally extremely skeptical that tax breaks attract enough businesses to make it worthwhile. And it’s easy to find lots of sources that agree with me.
The sense I’m getting from those papers is that poor communities pay a lot per job in incentives, the and while the jobs generally do materialize, it doesn’t tend to spill over into creating any bigger robust economy.
It sounds like generally, businesses narrow down their top three locations, and then the towns get into a bidding war with each other. So the local governments are pitted against each other. A city could only opt out if all the cities agreed to opt out. (Why is everything always a collective action problem?!)
Anyway, today’s particular policy updates actually do sound good. Companies that get incentives should have to use local resources for job postings. They should have to pay the average of Hays County as a wage, which is $22/hour. They should have to meet some sustainability criteria. Etc. So while I’m grumpy about tax breaks, these sound like improvements.
Last meeting, a dozen people were extremely frustrated with Texas Aviation Partners. I don’t think this is related to that. This is just some other guy, Shaune Maycock, who owns Blue Skies Aviation, and is out of compliance with a bunch of stuff. So San Marcos needs to hire an attorney, and Charles Soechting is up for the job.
But Maycock submitted stacks and stacks of papers right before the meeting. Max Baker finds and reads a line from a 2014 email, written by Charles Soechting: “As you know, I have no positive feelings about Shaune Maycock. Nothing would give me more pleasure than to sue him.”
God, what a delicious line that is. You have to savor that kind of bitterness. Max Baker questions whether or not Soechting can be appropriately amicable and professional, given this enjoyable display of seething.
(This is right at the 4:00 mark, btw).
However, Soechting gets to talk, a few minutes later. And he finishes the paragraph that Max quoted. Immediately after Nothing would give me more pleasure than to sue him, Schoechting wrote “However, I have to have evidence. As you know, I’ve been to the repair shop and talked about how we were having difficulty with [some background on repairing planes, and stuff about how Maycock has cancelled a lot of appointments and been frustrating]… However, remember, what I said about evidence. We have to have evidence, and anger is not evidence. Being mad at someone is not evidence. The last thing I want to do is to see Shaune get off like he did with [a prior case].”
Do you remember the very old mid-90s scene from the Simpsons, where Lisa finds the alien’s book with the title, “How to Cook Humans”? And then the alien blows off some space dust, and the title is really “How to Cook For Humans”? And then Lisa blows off more space dust, and the title is now revealed to be “How to Cook Forty Humans”? And then the alien blows off even more space dust, and the title finally ends up being “How to Cook For Forty Humans”? It turned out that the aliens were good, and Lisa blew it by being overly suspicious of them.
I’m just saying, maybe Max could have blown off a little more space dust before reading that quote. The very next line provides some useful context, making the lawyer sound like someone who behaves ethically even when he can’t wait to sue someone.
Update as of 8/6/22: Shaune Maycock reached out to me, and he disputes the impression given by Schoecting in the quote above, particularly the part about cancelling appointments.
The San Marxist 