We’re going to start with a P&Z blog post, because I think the topic is important. This is nearly two weeks ago, when P&Z discussed the Comprehensive Plan, aka VisionSMTX.
Background
The Comprehensive Plan is the most high level vision of the city, which says things like, “We want more business here, we want to protect the river, we want more housing here,” etc. It’s big, general, and vague. Then when you go to draw up specific master plans – Land Development Code, Transportation Master plan, Housing plan, Environment, etc – you have to be consistent with the Comprehensive Plan. So it drives a lot of choices that get made down the line.
It’s going badly.
Back in 2020, City Council selected a group of 31 citizens, including several city council members and P&Z commissioners. This group met with consultants for two years. City staff also held outreach events every month or two, and sent out online surveys, and generally worked hard to solicit a wide range of community input. All this was drawn up into the VisionSMTX draft.
This draft went to P&Z in February, and the chair, Jim Garber said, “Oh dear. This is such a train wreck that there’s too much to discuss in one meeting. Let’s form a subcommittee.”
So four P&Z members and Mayor Hughson met a dozen times. They had so many revisions that staff just said, “We need to call it an alternate plan, VisionSMTX+.” This subcommittee ends up being so influential that I need to refer to them as “The P&Z Subcommittee”.
So now there are two drafts:
- VisionSMTX, which took two years, $350K+ worth of consultants, and thousands of community hours, and
- VisionSMTX+, which took five people about a month. (Ie, they added a little plus sign to this one.)
They are substantially different from each other. They’re so different that the staff created a comparison table to help us sort through the differences, and the comparison table is 74 pages long.
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Listen: I have been struggling to write this up for the past two weeks. It’s really difficult to explain, because the various sides are not all having the same conversation. It’s a total mess.
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The subcommittee read VisionSMTX and thought, “This document is going to let developers destroy our beautiful neighbohoods. People who live in the historic neighborhood, Dunbar, Barrio Pescado, San Antonio street, and so on, do NOT want their neighborhoods changed!”
What do they fear? Their fears are very slippery.
- Giant apartment complexes, like the Cottages or the Woods. Developers are assholes!
- Increased density in the form of smaller housing – ADUs, which are the tiny house-behind-a-house. Duplexes, triplexes, 4-plexes
- Anything that threatens the “genteel” character of their neighborhoods.
So their fears range from the reasonable (large scale apartment complexes) to the jerky (fear of low income people being able to live near wealthy people).
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Here are my personal beliefs on increasing the density of housing:
- Cars and suburban sprawl are super convenient! I can drive to Target, get exactly what I want, and drive home in 30 minutes. I do not have to plan, or consult a bus schedule, or get sweaty riding my bike.
- Literally, cars should never go away. There are plenty of people with mobility issues and resource constraints, and we have to take care of them, as a community. I will fight for your right to drive to work.
- That said, we are currently gorging ourselves on cars and sprawl. This is a disaster.
On the global scale, the oceans are rising and extreme weather events are escalating. Sprawl and car-centric communities are not sustainable. Younger people are looking at 50 years of climate change. I worry about future generations.
On the local level, San Marcos literally can’t pay for enough cops and firefighters to cover the distant, sprawling developments. Plus, we’re prone to flooding, and we have a river which is one of the most special things on the planet. We’ve got to take this seriously.
And on the individual level it costs $7K-10Kish per year, to have a car-centric life, but centrally located housing is very expensive. That’s a losing combo for younger or poorer people. - I believe that wealth segregation is immoral. Giant apartment complexes are a way of keeping poor people all housed together. In my opinion, duplexes, triplexes, and 4-plexes should be scattered throughout every housing development. They can even be built to look like beautiful houses!
We are predicted to need 50K homes for people moving to San Marcos over the next 20ish years. It’s irresponsible to put all the housing in relentless swaths of single family housing. So what’s the alternative?
The way you take it seriously is that you create a world where it’s more convenient for people to live close to where they need to go. If it’s sufficiently easy for you to walk to work, you might choose to do so 2-3x per week. Smart people have worked hard to figure out charming, small-scale ways to create this. In fact, it should feel like our historic district! It should feel like San Antonio street.
Finally: I personally adore old homes and the historic district. I am not going to advocate for any plan that puts a large scale apartment complex in a charming historic neighborhood. But any plan that pretends “only wealthy people” is an essential ingredient to a charming neighborhood can fuck right off.
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This meeting is too big and sprawling, and would be its own multi-part post for me to do it justice. I’ve struggled for two weeks now to write it up. So I’m going to massively shortchange it.
There is one key moment, at 3:30, that I want to zoom in on. William Agnew reads this sentence from the comp plan out loud:
Many of San Marcos’ original neighborhoods, especially those closest to Downtown, benefit from access to shops, restaurants, cultural amenities, employment opportunities, civic offerings, and recreation. The streets are well connected and for the most part, daily needs can be obtained on foot, by bike, or by car. New development can benefit from modeling and drawing inspiration from the treasured Historic character of these neighborhoods.
Then he says:
I live in one of San Marcos’s original neighborhoods. This paragraph’s just not true! I don’t have better access to all these amenities than most other neighborhoods in San Marcos! It just isn’t true. And on top of it, I don’t know how new development can somehow duplicate what it is that you all think I have that I don’t have.
The only place I can really walk from my house that would be considered goods and services is the Little HEB. It’s about 3 blocks from where I live. That’s great if I come back with one sack, but that’s only if I go to the grocery store each and every day. But you can’t walk back with your big shopping trip of the week and 8 or 10 sacks walking down Hutchison. It’s just not true! Other than that, there’s nothing I’m particularly close to anything. I love my neighborhood. It doesn’t bother me to drive to big HEB , Lowe’s, PetSmart, Target. So I don’t think this sentence is true. That’s why I’d like to get it out of there.
This is…delusional. Like, this is astonishingly delusional.
If you can walk 3 blocks to HEB, you are immediately nearby:
- multiple churches,
- laundromats,
- bars and restaurants,
- hair salons,
- Shipley’s, Mink’s, Zelicks, North Street, Tantra (if it ever reopens)
- You’re only another block from the literal town square.
- The entire university is only a few more blocks away!
- And right past that is the river itself!
Like, Bill Agnew literally thinks that he lives here:
when he is three blocks from this:
Staff continuously tries to explain that people who live in places like Cottonwood Creek complain that they have to drive long distances to get to stores or any other amenities. The “Complete streets” discussion is about places like Cottonwood creek.
But the P&Z subcommittee is on an entirely different planet. The existential threat to Belvin Street is the only conversation to be had. It sucks up all the oxygen in the room, and it will trample anything that the people in Cottonwood Creek might like to have.
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What are the problems with VisionSMTX+? What was changed from VisionSMTX, without the plus sign?
1. ADUs. “Accessory Dwelling Units” are the little house-behind-a-house. You may have noticed that the Historical District is absolutely chock full of them. This is the gentlest way to increase density as people move to San Marcos.
The original draft, VisionSMTX, is pretty positive towards ADUs. The subcommittee version, VisionSMTX+, removes a lot of this encouragement.
2. “15 minute streets” This is a measure that professional urban planners use. It means this: without driving, what kinds of things can you reach from your home, by walking, biking, or using public transportation, within 15 minutes? It’s a way of quantifying how Bill Agnew can easily walk downtown, while people in Cottonwood Creek have to drive everywhere.
The subcommittee added “driving” into the definition. In other words, when the people in Cottonwood Creek have to drive 15 minutes to Target, it should get measured exactly the same as Bill Agnew being able to walk downtown. What breathtaking bullshit.
3. Comp plans vs Area Plans. So, the Comp Plan is what we’re discussing. It’s the biggest umbrella. Area plans are where neighborhoods get to say, “We are wealthy and we don’t actually like living next to poor people, so can we just not?”
The subcommittee wants Area Plans to take priority over the comp plan. The original comp plan calls for a balance.
4. Split “Neighborhood – Low” into “Neighborhood Low (existing)” and “Neighborhood Low (new)”. This would allow them to write different rules for Belvin than for new neighborhoods.
What about Cottonwood Creek, which would like to be more like Belvin? Fuck those guys! Existing neighborhoods aren’t allowed to change because the subcommittee has Historic District tunnel vision.
There are a ton of other concerns. I emailed back and forth with some of the public commenters – Rosalie Ray and Gabrielle Moore – and have their entire list of critiques. This is just too dense and meaty for me to do it justice.
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One last point: Markeymoore was pretty amazing in the P&Z meeting, gently pushing back against problematic ideas, without ever being confrontational.
For example: Bill Agnew is taking issue with the sentence “Many areas in San Marcos today are single use.”
Markeymoore gently asks, “Why is that a negative sentence?”
Bill Agnew answers, “Because I think that the people who wrote that consider it negative. If you understand the plan and the new urbanism concepts behind it, that’s negative. To be single use is negative. That’s my objection to it. Yes, some of these neighborhoods are single use, but they’re good neighborhoods, and they don’t need to be presented as an example of something negative.”
In other words, Agnew does not have a problem with the sentence as written. The problem is the bogeyman in his mind that he is imputing to it. Markeymoore was able to ask from a place of curiosity, and he disarmed Agnew, who gave an honest answer.
To Agnew’s credit, he is very consistent and honest. It’s easy to pick on him because he says the quiet parts out loud.
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So…what happens next?
They decided to have some workshops over the summer, to deal with some of these things. The comp plan is on pause until August.
Let me tell you, I do not have a great feeling about how this is going.
The San Marxist 