Next we have a whole bunch of zoning and land use items.
Items 12-13: Trace Development (Scroll down here for quick explainer on Trace.)
There’s a little rectangular patch of 5 acres which is surrounded on three sides by Trace. You can see it down at the bottom:
The Trace developers didn’t own it when they started Trace, but now they do. They can’t formally absorb it into Trace, but they basically want it to feel like it’s part of Trace.
The developers want to build townhomes. This sounds great – I like townhomes. Still, let’s hit the five questions:
Price Tag to the City: Will it bring in taxes that pay for itself, over the lifespan of the infrastructure and future repair? How much will it cost to extend roads, utilities, on fire and police coverage, on water and wastewater?
- Development is already planned for three sides. Infill is very useful.
Housing stock: How long will it take to build? How much housing will it provide? What is the forecasted housing deficit at that point? Is it targeting a price-point that serves what San Marcos needs?
- Townhomes hit an underserved price point
Environment: Is it on the aquifer? Is it in a flood zone? Will it create run off into the river?Are we looking at sprawl? Is it uniformly single-family homes?
- Not anywhere close to the river, not environmentally sensitive, not single-family homes. Great.
- Trace itself is sprawl, but that ship has sailed.
Social: Is it meaningfully mixed income? Is it near existing SMCISD schools and amenities?
- Trace is decently mixed income, yes. There’s an elementary school in the middle of it.
The San Marxist Special: Is it a mixed-income blend of single family houses, four-plexes, and eight-plexes, all mixed together? With schools, shops, restaurants, and public community space sprinkled throughout?
- Closer than normal. No shops or restaurants nearby. Rather than have four-plexes and eight-plexes, they segregate the apartments into a giant apartment complex section, which I don’t love. But that’s where we’re at.
One detail irritated me: P&Z recommended that council nix 3 story apartments in this small patch, because it is adjacent to future single family houses.
The houses aren’t built yet! No one’s beautiful view is getting thwarted. There is nothing intrinsically offensive about apartments! But city council agrees and passes a restriction.
It doesn’t really matter – the developer is going to build townhomes, and I think townhomes are generally a good, dense-ish product. I just get irritated at displays of contempt towards apartment-dwellers.
The whole thing passes unanimously.
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Items 14-15: Ringtail Ridge
Ringtail Ridge is a tiny little park off Old 12, outlined in yellow below:
It’s hidden and hard to get to, but very pretty!
Country Estates is the neighborhood next to it, outlined in green. It’s just outside the city limits. A bunch of libertarians live there.
This red part is owned by the city:
It was acquired in 2017/2018. Since it’s owned by the city, the city decided to annex it. This doesn’t really affect anything, but it’s tidier this way.
The plan is to zone it CD-1, which means keeping it as undeveloped as possible. The whole point is that it was acquired for conservation purposes, so they want to keep it natural.
There were a number of speakers from Country Estates on this item at P&Z, on January 10th, and one more at City Council this past Tuesday (who was very annoyed that we were three hours deep in the meeting by the time we got to this item.)
The speakers wanted their natural countryside preserved, but they’re also libertarians, so they were very skeptical about whether or not government can be trusted to help. Sorry, dude-ertarians, the free market is not going to preserve your beautiful nature! But local government to the rescue – the land will now be kept undeveloped, and the longterm goal is to make it available for trails and such.
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Item 17-18: Tiny houses! What fun.
This is out on Post Road:
There’s going to be a small portion of town homes (6 acres) and then a larger portion of tiny homes (24 acres).
Tiny homes seem delightful, because who doesn’t love a dollhouse? But they only work for a very small portion of people:
- you can’t really live with a kid in one.
- You have to figure out a plan for all those household items that you need monthly or a few times a year. Either you need disposable income to replace things all the time, or you really need to commit to a spartan existence. Which is tricky, because you’re stuck in the US, which is not set up that way.
However: if you are too prickly to share a wall with someone else and you are a serious minimalist, then it’s perfect. Go live your dreams, Freebird.
One last thing: This property is on the SMCISD side of the boundary between Hays CISD and SMCISD. This is something that Council never talks about, but it ends up affecting San Marcos schools a lot.
SMCISD needs more kids, basically. Tiny houses are going to be for kid-free adults. So it’s a bit of a bummer that this is in SMCISD, whereas all of the families right over in Blanco Vista go to Hays CISD.
(It’s because of the state funding formula. Because of the university, we look like a wealthier district than we are, and so we’re always on the brink of having to send money back to the state. But we’re actually a Title 1 district, because our students are largely poor. We need more families to keep the state of Texas from sabotaging us.)
….
Item 19: Blanco Riverwalk
These guys have come up before, most recently in June 2021, when they were swatted down for proposing an apartment complex in a flood zone.
This time they are proposing… an apartment complex in a flood zone. It went about as well as it did last time. (Mumble mumble definition of insanity.)
It’s actually very close to the tiny houses, but you can see that it’s like two inches from the Blanco River.
P&Z denied the request on January 10th, so it would require 6 votes from Council to overturn the outcome. Council denied it unanimously.
The San Marxist 
The concept that a CD-1 designation or apellation is the same as a zoning is the real misleading thing in parts of our form-based section of our Land Development Code. The idea that CD-1 will save forever Ringtail Ridge is a false one when the designation can change so readily. CD-1 is not a park, but a generic catch all term that can be changed because we are now changing zoning for many reasons these days including allowing for rezoning for more cash dollars. The idea that the city is getting into or behind business interests is more prevalent vs representing community interests these LDC decisions and our quality of life expectations are on a slippery slope when community representation is not first and foremost.
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They explained it more thoroughly at P&Z, but it’s safer than development than just being zoned CD-1. I think it was donated/acquired under a preservation plan? I believe there were extra steps – including maybe having to go to the voters – before it could be turned into housing.
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The idea that we aare changing zoning so readily and lack of particpation by voters is why we have gone defaultef to the newer form-based land development code that favors developers and property tax base but not transparency in community-local government decisions. Zoning used to be decided upin by an lengthy process of a community input process called the comprehensive plan that carried more definition and weight. Borrowing the words from new urbanist promotion of a project or ratiinale, the comprehensive plan has the “look and feel” of community interaction and participation, but still on course with the predetermined preferred outcome. There is a need to make plans for our area-community, but we really need to get a grip on not leaving behind or excluding community in decisions that affect community.
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I do agree that’s it’s wild sometimes how massive decisions slip by with barely any citizen awareness. I’m very concerned about the land that we traded to Texas State, up off Academy, last year, with zero input or awareness from the public. On the flip side of that, it’s enormously hard to inform the public and get input on decisions, and a lot of our emotions are sometimes driven by fear – fear of change, fear of people unlike us, etc – which is not the best frame to be reaching decisions. I’m not sure how to best thread the needle.
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