Category: 3 pm Workshops

Bonus! 3 pm workshops

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Workshop #1: Utility Payment Assistance

Here’s the situation: We’ve got city-owned water, electric, and wastewater. (Most of the people here are on city utilities, although some people are on Pedernales or Bluebonnet electric.)

When people can’t pay their utility bills, we offer them a two week delay. But we also give $120K to Community Action, to help pay people’s utility bills when they fall behind and can’t afford to catch up.

This has been an ongoing topic of conversation:

The problem is that most of the $120K we set aside for utility assistance isn’t getting used.  There’s a ton of need out there in the community, and we’re not getting the money to the people that need it.

Why??

Community Action gets money from us.  They also get grant money from the state and feds.  So they use that state and federal money first, and then only use the city money if that money’s not available.  That is good!

The problem is that their application process is long and a giant pain in the butt, because they’re trying to give out federal money.  So people are being asked to provide all kinds of crazy paperwork documenting their employment or residence or whatever, and it takes weeks, and the person just needs their water turned back on so that they can cook dinner. This part is bad.

…

So the city is working on how to get the funds out faster.  Would any other organizations like to also hand out utility assistance?  (RFP means “Request for proposals”)

No one wanted to apply!  They kept advertising and reaching out and extending the deadline. 

Eventually they got three more applicants. Here’s what’s being recommended:

The “donated funds” bit means that San Marcos residents have an option to donate when they pay their bill. There’s about $45K in accumulated donations right now.

(Community Action spoke up on Tuesday and said their capacity is actually $30K, so that extra $10K will get re-distributed.)

Discussion points:

Question: How long will the turnaround time be for people needing assistance?

Answer: Different agencies have estimated 3-5 days. Some a little longer. We’ll nail it down for sure in the contract with each agency.

City Manager Stephanie Reyes proposes having a universal application that all the agencies could use for city funds. Everyone likes that.

…

There’s a lot of discussion about how customers can find out about utility assistance.

  • If your bill is overdue, you get an automatic robo-call on the 16th day.
  • On the 18th day, your bill is delinquent.
  • After that, the delinquency notice goes out.

Right now, we don’t mention the utility assistance on the phone call or on the delinquency letter. The person has to call into the city first.

Everyone wants to know, “Why don’t we tell people about the funds earlier?!”

City Manager Stephanie Reyes says tactfully, “It hasn’t always been the philosophy of Council to make this information available at this stage.”

What she means is this: Previous councils have been more obsessed with the random person who might cheat the system than they were with actually connecting people in need with assistance.

This council – thank god – is more obsessed with connecting people to assistance. They want to have the utility assistance mentioned in the robo-call, and put in the delinquency letter.

…

Late Penalties and Reconnection Fees

Suppose you can’t pay your utility bill. This would make it even harder:

In other words, if you’re $140 behind on your utilities, it will cost almost $200 to get everything turned back on. This is pretty typical.

Council looks at each of these individually.

Penalty Fees: on average, people pay about $14 in penalties – a little higher for houses, a little lower for apartments.

They debate capping it at different amounts – $10? $15? $20? – so that you’d pay either 10% or the cap, whichever is less. (This is Lorenzo’s suggestion.)

(This is for residential, not commercial.)

Reconnection Fees: This cost is based on a 2013 estimate of fuel plus labor to go to the house and turn it back on.

Staff is planning on recalculating these fees and see if they can bring it down.

…

Question: If we did away with all fees altogether, how much would rates go up?

Answer: about 0.5 %. Now, we always have rate increases, because costs go up. But if you want to do away with fees, we’ll need to tack on 0.5% on top of that.

…

Q: Can we change how many times they can get assistance per year?

Answer: Right now it’s twice per year. It might be hard to track among different agencies.

Most councilmembers want to change it to four.

Bottom line: This will come up at a future council meeting, along with some of the answers to questions that Council asked tonight.

…

Workshop #2

Update on American Rescue Plan dollars:

A few programs have a little money leftover:

Here’s where we want to re-allocate it:

Alyssa fought long and hard for us to provide rental service, and to use an agency that doesn’t take weeks and weeks in turnaround time. (Same issue as with the utility assistance – federal money comes with a wild amount of paperwork.) It’s nice that this is now becoming the norm.

Any further money that becomes available will also go to Rental Assistance.

Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 2/4/25

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

The first workshop was an update on the budget side of the CIP projects, which is kind of weedy and wonky, so I’m skipping that. But feel free to watch here.

Workshop #2: Equity Cabinet

Last summer, the city received a presentation from Dr. Rosalie Ray, at Texas State. She was proposing to run an equity cabinet on Transportation, and report back with her findings.

So basically, DEI is hard to do well. It takes time, energy, funding, and expertise. An equity cabinet is one model that the research-folk like, as a way to do it well.

Ours is studying transportation.

Here’s what I got out of it: there’s a lot of expertise about transportation by city staff, and there’s a lot of lived experience by people who don’t have cars, out in the community.

If you want to incorporate their experience into city policy, you need to do a lot of things:

  1. Give people rides to meetings and compensate them for their time. The whole point is to focus on people with barriers to participation, so you’d better address the barriers.
  2. Have the cabinet go into detail about what problems they face.
  3. Have city staff give the cabinet a rundown about how city planners organize and work on transportation issues.
  4. At this point, the cabinet has both sides of the equation: lived experience plus expertise. Then the cabinet members can really identify the sources of the problems and understand what it would take to solve them
  5. Eventually they arrive at a set of recommendations, which the city can then incorporate into their plans.

That’s why it’s a big, drawn out process involving time, money, and energy! But it sounds like it went really well.

First: You have to know exactly what you’re aiming for, if you want a concrete, productive conversation:

The participants were giving the presentation, for what it’s worth.

Here’s their experience:

Life is really not easy in San Marcos, without a car. Like, Workforce Solutions that’s supposed to help you train and find a job, cover childcare, etc, is located way out on Posey Road.

This is the participants incorporating the expertise of city planners into their understanding of San Marcos:

So taking expertise plus lived experience together, they identified some key problems:

Those are categories.

Here’s their specific recommendations in each of those five categories:

Again, it’s a great presentation, so feel free to go listen yourself here.

Council had a few questions:

Jane asks about sidewalk priorities and bus shelter status?
Answer: We have 18 sheltered bus stops already. We want more, but we’re holding off because we’re about to re-do the Transportation Master Plan, and we don’t want to put something in that we immediately have to tear out.

Amanda: Are other cities doing anything that we should start doing?
Answer: Sometimes when there’s not enough space for a full shelter, they anchor two seats to the bust stop pole, with a little shade on top.

As Amanda put it, these recommendations are all so feasible! There’s nothing impractical to any of this.

There’s two big plans coming up: TXDOT is doing a transit plan, and the city is re-doing our transportation master plan. Both TXDOT and the city were involved in the Equity Cabinet, and want to incorporate the recommendations into their new plans. Hooray!

Bonus! First 3 pm workshop, 1/21/25

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Workshop #1: Sessom Drive

In 2018, we updated the Transportation Master Plan. We noted a bunch of dangerous intersections, and put in a bit about safe biking lanes.  Since then, you’ve seen all sorts of bike lanes pop up.  

Academy and Sessom was flagged as one of the dangerous spots to improve.  This is the stretch we’re talking about:

It’s always seemed super dangerous to me! Drivers are so zippy through this:

wheeeee!

Here’s what was done:

Here’s a little before and after. Four skinny zippy, windy lanes, in 2021:

I worry for all the bikers!

After:

A light, bike lanes, single lanes, a left turn lane: so much safer.

Here’s another before-and-after:

Hopefully bikers don’t feel like they’re going to be run over anymore!

…

Did it work? 

Looks like it worked great! (“Level of Service” means how much traffic can you handle.)

The bikers have concerns, though. What are “vertical delineators” that the cyclists want?

These things.  You’ve seen them all over town.

The city was trying out different kinds, and it seems like the armadillos work best.  (The other kinds require extra maintenance – they don’t pop back up after awhile, or they get torn off and leave bolts sticking up in the road, etc.  The armadillos are just glued down.)

….

So this brings us to the next question!  We’re going to be improving Sessom down to Aquarena:

We just completed the yellow part. We are about to work on the blue part to the right. We have some choices:

  1. Go back and undo the bike lanes and safety measures in the yellow part.
  2. Keep them, and extend them to the blue part.

[Updated to add: I got this part wrong – there’s no option to extend the bike lanes to the new part. They’re just deciding on the yellow part, and if they should add armadillos. Also fixed below.]

Jane Hughson reminisces about when they agreed to try bike lanes on the yellow part. (This was the very first meeting I blogged publicly, back in 2022!
– Shane, Mark, and Saul all voted against the bike lanes on Sessom and Craddock. 
– Jane, Alyssa, Jude and Max Baker all voted to try the bike lanes out.
Jane was reluctant, but she decided since it’s just paint and easily reversible, we might as well try them out.)

So what should we do?

Undo the old bike lanes:  No one
Keep the bike lanes and add armadillos: Everyone

Hooray! That was a test, Council, and you passed. Good job.

There’s one more workshop after this! Keep going!

Bonus-bonus! Second 3 pm workshop, 1/21/25

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Workshop #2: San Marcos Water Supply.

(I love this one so much.)

Where do we get our water from?  

Until 2000, San Marcos exclusively got Edwards Aquifer water. Then we signed on to get some surface water from Canyon Lake, and in the mid 2000s, we joined ARWA water.  (More on ARWA in a moment.)

“MGD” means a million gallons of water per day.

…

What is ARWA?

ARWA is kind of crazy.  Basically, in 2006,  San Marcos, Kyle, Buda, and the Canyon Regional Water Authority got together and tried to figure out a longterm plan. They formed ARWA, the Alliance Regional Water Authority.

They decided to connect to the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer, which is over here:

The crazy part is that this started in 2006, and they knew they wouldn’t be delivering water until 2023.  This was a very longterm plan! That is really good foresight by the councils that agreed to this.

There was all sorts of infrastructure that had to be built. I think this is the whole project:

So we’re getting all the water from the green oval on the far right. Then it has to be treated, at the blue dot, so that it’s drinkable. All those red lines are pipe that had to be laid down, and it gets run out to Lockhart, Buda, Kyle, San Marcos, and New Braunfels. That’s why it took so long.

But now it’s here! This is great!

….

So we’ve got all this water – Edwards, Canyon, and now ARWA.  Is it enough? 

It depends! How many people are trying to use this water?

This is the population projection, based on 2017 data:

In other words, the black line is the projected population, and the red part is how much water we’d need. So in 2055, we’re expecting to have 140K people and need about 16K acre-feet of water each day. (An acre-foot means take an acre of land, and fill it with water that is 1 foot deep.)

Here’s the water supply, according to when each of those sources kicked in:

So this looks great! So in 2055, when we need 16K acre-feet of water, and we’ll have access to about 27K acre-feet of water. Through 2075, we’ve always got more water than we need.

This is great!

But then…. we had to update our projections.  Between 2017 and 2024, this region grew even more than expected. So we had to ramp up our projections, accordingly:

So if we’ve got the same amount of water planned, but a ton more people, the graph now looks like this:

Whoops. Now we are scheduled to run short on water in 2047.

So what do we do?

The good news is that we’ve got plenty of planning time, and we’re putting it to good use. There are basically two ways to address this:

  1. Find more water
  2. Use less water

We’re going to do both.

First, more water:

Apparently Buda and Kyle are even shorter on water than we are. Everyone is interested in collaborating and shoring up supplies.  An ARWA Phase 3? Maybe a different source?

Second, reduce water usage:

The second two bullet points are huge: reclaiming used water. We’ve already got some reclaimed water already:

(That slide is from a 2022 presentation, here.) All that purple is where we can send reclaimed water to. We currently have about 5.5 million gallons per day of reclaimed water.

The problem is that it’s not drinkable. So you can use it to water the golf course at Kissing Tree (which they do!) but you can’t send it to people’s houses.

The holy grail will be when we can get reclaimed water clean enough to drink. Then we can really ramp up our water re-use.

(I read once that one of the grand failures of midcentury America was not double-piping all the houses, so that we weren’t mixing our toilet water with our sink water.  Then we wouldn’t be watering our lawns with drinking water, and we wouldn’t be trying to clean and re-use toilet water.)  

Here’s what we think we can get to:

Notice that the water supply hasn’t changed. But the red part – our water use – is smaller. The red part dips down again around 2050 because we think we’ll be able to get the reclaimed water clean enough to drink by then.

What does Council say?

Amanda asks if we have a problem with water leakage from pipes?
Answer: We’re actually pretty good on this. It happens, but we’ve got one of the lowest rates in the state.

Amanda: Can we get a graph of the top ten biggest water users?
Answer: Yes! We don’t have it on hand, but we’ll email it to you.

(I love this question. Amanda said she’ll send the graph over when she gets it, but she hasn’t gotten it yet.)

Amanda: Do we still do rebates for rain barrels?
Answer: Yes! Details here.

The City Manager Stephanie Reyes also mentions this: San Marcos water rates are a little higher than those around us, but it’s because of all this advance planning. We are in a much more secure longterm position that most others.

Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 12/17/24

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Workshop: San Marcos Housing Authority

You might have heard about a giant clusterfuck with vouchers and waitlists, back in September? This workshop is that. Council is attempting to figure out what the hell happened.

Background

SMHA is funded by the Housing and Urban Development Agency. (HUD). So it runs on federal dollars and doesn’t have any formal partnership with the city.

SMHA owns about 200 properties, at these sites:

as well as some individual rental houses around town. In addition, they have 251 Section 8 vouchers. This means that SMHA subsidizes your rent, so that you’re only paying according to your income.

To be eligible for a Section 8 voucher, you must earn under 30% of the median income for our region:

link

The median income in San Marcos is $47K/year and the poverty rate is 27%, so I’m going to ballpark that there are about 19,000 people in San Marcos who would qualify for housing assistance.

Anyway! We’ve got 451 apartments and vouchers total, to spread out over those 19,000 people. What could go wrong?

….

Naturally, there’s a super long waitlist. Once you get a voucher or an apartment, you can keep it as long as you qualify. So the waitlist moves very, very slowly.

None of this is SMHA’s fault so far. It’s basically the fault of voters and federal elected officials, who don’t properly fund HUD.

SMHA has an internal policy that everyone on the waitlist should get a voucher within 12-18 months. So they cap the waitlist. It’s very rare that they open up the waitlist and let people on.

The last time they opened up the waitlist was in 2016. They had 500 pre-applicants join the waitlist. That was too many – it took 8 years to whittle it down. Over that time, half the people dropped off the waitlist. There are still 30 people remaining, from that 2016 batch.

…

Ok, we’re getting to the September mess now.

So back in September, they finally decided to open up the waitlist. They ran this notice in the newspaper:

Nothing in that posting is faulty or misleading. But listen: it is so, so hard to get clear messages out to the public. This is not that.

Here’s how it was supposed to work:

  1. Between Sept 9th and Sept 22nd, 250 people stop by and pick up a pre-application.
  2. On Sept 14th, all 250 people drop off their completed pre-application, between 8:30 am-5 pm.
  3. Those 250 people are now on the waitlist.

That’s just not a realistic plan, when it comes to guiding actual people? Organizing people to follow a game plan is really difficult! People are not good at paying attention and following detailed rules. You have to build a lot of redundancy and safeguards into systems.

Here’s what happened:

  1. 250 people did successfully pick up a pre-application.
  2. Tons of people showed up on September 14th. They were hoping for actual vouchers. Chaos reigned and the rumor mill picked it up. People were sent away. People were incredibly frustrated and heartbroken. There was an air of chaos and disorganization.
  3. In the end, about 180 of those original 250 got on the waitlist.

Listen: The biggest failure is having 451 subsidized housing units for 19,000 people who qualify. When you have that kind of massive scarcity, every mistake that follows takes on epic proportions. So yes, their roll-out had lots of problems, but it’s magnified because of the huge need.

…

What is Council’s take on all this?

Council takes three basic approaches:

  1. What the hell?! How was this so poorly planned? [Jane Hughson]
  2. Gingerly asking, “Is there any way we can help? Are there major obstacles that are preventing SMHA from running smoothly?” [Alyssa, Amanda]
  3. There are a lot of broken elevators, broken cameras, and generally crappy living conditions in these apartments [Saul]

What the hell?! How was this so poorly planned?

Jane just cannot get over the fact that they intended to accept 250 people onto the waitlist, but then required a drop-off between 8:30-5 pm on a single Wednesday. “Why not open it up all week? You controlled the number of pre-applications that were out there! You knew for sure that you wouldn’t go over 250.”

There’s not really a good answer, no many how times Jane tries. (And she tries.)

  • Many towns in Texas only open their waitlist for a day.
  • By 3 pm, they weren’t getting people anymore.
  • You could also fax it in! You don’t have to come in, in person!

All of these just make Council’s head spin.

  • “But what if someone works? Or has childcare issues?”
  • “Who the hell has a fax machine in 2024?! Why can’t they email their pre-application paperwork in?”
  • When they ended with only 180 applications, why didn’t they give out more pre-applications to get up to 250?

Ultimately, there are not any satisfying answers. A lot of these are SMHA policy, and the speakers don’t have the power to change the policy. Only the SMHA board can change the policy.

They do plan to do things differently next time:

  • Give away preapplications to all
  • Allow online preapplications
  • Select people for the waitlist by lottery.

Again: Yes, the roll-out was poorly done. But the scarcity is the real problem. If we had 19,000 low-income housing options for 19,000 people, then this would be a hassle, but not a catastrophe. But 451 housing units is just crumbs.

….

“Is there any way we can help? Are there major obstacles that are preventing SMHA from running smoothly?”

Alyssa and Amanda ask variations on this several times, but never get a clear answer.

They also ask:

  • What’s the best way for community feedback?
  • What is the best way for Council and SMHA to partner? Whose lane is whose?

None of these have particularly good answers. Alyssa encourages them to put email and phone numbers on their website.

…

“There are a lot of broken elevators, broken cameras, and generally crappy living conditions in these apartments”

They have four maintenance workers for the public housing units. They try to do all repairs on vacant apartments within 30 days.

Like with everything else, they’re underfunded and understaffed. (That’s my language, not theirs. They most repeat their policies.)

…

Going forward, the plan is to have a joint meeting between City Council and the SMHA Board, probably in February, to iron all this out.

So there is more to come! Stay tuned.

Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 12/3/24

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Workshops were great this week. Per usual.

  1. Texas State University. What’s up with them?

This is new! I can’t ever recall someone from the university giving this kind of presentation before.

(That said, the speaker did not supply his slides to the city, and so all I could get were crappy screenshots of the interesting slides. )

Enrollment Growth

Uh, yeah. Sorry about the quality! I bet it looked great in person!

They’re projecting to grow from 40K to 50K students, but most of that is at the Round Rock campus and online.

The green line at the bottom is Round Rock. The blue line in the middle is San Marcos. The San Marcos campus is projected to grow from 37K to 40K over the next ten years.

Housing need

They’ve got about 10K beds on campus right now.

They’re going to need about 1500 more beds by 2027. They’re building more dorms to cover that.

Construction, etc:

The dark red are new buildings that are under construction or are planned.

The light orange are getting major renovations.

So they’re not really planning to acquire any more land. Aside from those red buildings, they’re mostly going to reconfigure existing buildings to handle more capacity.

Note: This is supposed to comfort city council. The city is mad that the university purchased two downtown apartment buildings, in order to convert them into dorms:

We talked about this last March, when council approved the new Lindsey Street apartments.

Texas State doesn’t pay local taxes. And downtown apartment buildings are worth a lot of money. So the problem is that when Texas State bought those buildings, San Marcos lost a lot of tax revenue.

On the super tiny map, I think they’re here:

Sanctuary Lofts is now called the Balcones Apartments and the Vistas is now called the Cypress Apartments.

Parking and transportation:

Light blue boxes might end up being parking garages. Bottom right is Thorpe Lane.

They’ve got 48 busses, 90,000 weekly ridership. It’s a pressure point for the university.

The plan is to merge the city and university bus system. This benefits San Marcos hugely. When the university started reporting their ridership to the feds, San Marcos got about $13 million in funding.

The speaker talks about having an app showing all busses, at any moment, all free for everyone in San Marcos. That sounds amazing!

Spring Lake:

There will be a lot more trails and improvements coming to Spring Lake:

but again, the slides are so murky. It’s hard for me to provide details.

Council questions:

Amanda: Is there any talk about capping growth at 40K?

Answer: That’s as much capacity as we can accommodate. But the regents want to grow all the universities to handle 60% of Texans by 2030. They tell us what they want, and they want to grow.

This is all taken from the next Master Plan, which will be approved in 2025.

Affordability: Recently, UT went free for families earning up to 100K. Can we do that?

Answer: Right now we’re free for families up to 50K. We’re asking to see if we can get funding to be free up to 100K, like UT. We expect that would be similar – 5-10% of our student body would fall in that 50K-100K range. (That is WILD. 85% of their student body comes from families making more than 100K?)

This plan has not been finalized yet. I think the master plan gets voted on next year.

Workshop #2:

Every four years, San Marcos has to review the City Charter.

Council will appoint seven people to the charter review commission. They only have six months to do a ton of work, because it has to be done in time for the fall election.

The community can also add charter amendments to the ballot, like when we outlawed fluoride in 2015. (We were RFK junior before RFK junior even had a brainworm.) Maybe we can undo that!

If you would like to be considered, they will be opening up for applications.

Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 11/19/24

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Two fantastic workshops. For real. It’s my favorite thing in the world, to be spoonfed these amazing presentations.

First up: Rent by the Bedroom

Backstory: this became a flashpoint last spring, when a developer wanted to tear down some small complexes here:

and put in a big rent-by-the-bedroom student housing complex.

There was a pretty big community outcry.

Council approved it, but vowed to look at the predatory leasing practices and see what could be done. So here we are!

For what it’s worth, I think Council handled this correctly.
– We need physical housing to be built.
– We need landlord reform.

You shouldn’t hold the former hostage in order to accomplish the second, but the second is also urgently needed.

…

So let’s dive in! The speaker was Shannon Fitzpatrick (and these are her slides). She’s been a lawyer for Texas State, working with students, for the past 25 years or so. (Go listen here! I’m not doing it justice. It’s so interesting.)

Here’s what we’re basically comparing:

This part isn’t that bad. A student might not want to be on the hook for their roommates’ share of the rent.

Installment Contracts

This is where things start to get sleazy:

First, this “installments” contract.

The point is that it’s a different legal concept than a regular lease. This lets landlords skip out on the state laws that protect renters. And listen: Texas barely has any renter protections, so if you’re finding ways to cheat those, you are seriously trying to slumlord your way to profit.

Okay, so this installments contract. The basic idea is that you could sign a contract for $11,400, and then they break it into 12 monthly payments.

They show up on campus in October, and sell students hard on these apartments:

  • They’re going fast! You’re not going to have a place to live next year!
  • Your mom will be so proud that you’re making a grown up decision by yourself!
  • No security deposit if you sign right now! (We’ll come back to this.)

So the kid flips through some pages (OF A 60 PAGE LEASE!) and signs.

Already, things are rotten and different than normal:

In general, you have to qualify to lease an apartment. If your income is too low to qualify, or your guarantor’s (parent, aunt, etc) income is too low to qualify, then you can’t rent the apartment.

BUT HERE, YOU’VE ALREADY SIGNED! So you can’t live there and you still owe $11K!

Next: regular leases have a “mitigation” clause. If you break your lease, you have to cover the rent until they re-rent the apartment. The landlord has to attempt to rent out the apartment.

Installment contracts do not have this clause. You break your lease, the company still gets their $11k. They can re-rent the apartment, and now they’re getting another $11K for the same room.

Also: They don’t pro-rate partial months. So you would owe rent on August 1st, even if you can’t move in until August 20th.

Next: “As-Is” Clauses

So the kid signed the lease in October.

Usually when you sign a lease, you look at the apartment. You say things like, “Are there any apartments on the second or third floor?” The leaser says, “Sure” and shows you one. You say something like, “Nah, I don’t want to be this close to the dumpster, I’ll go with the first floor apartment, after all.”

The point is that you’ve seen the actual apartment, and you know if it has mushrooms sprouting in the closets.

“As-is” clauses mean “You get the apartment in its current state, not in a pristine state.” But those are only valid if the tenant can inspect the premises. Since these kids are signing in October without seeing the actual apartment, they’ve signed all kinds of rights away.

They show up in August, see the mold, mushrooms, broken furniture, broken locks, etc, and they have no recourse. They’re not able to request a different apartment, because of the “as-is” clause.

Security Deposits

“Sign now and we’ll waive your Security Deposit! You’d be a fool not to sign!” – me, pretending to be a sleazy landlord.

So this is another scam. They waive the security deposit, and tenants lose some rights. Texas has specific laws that state that if you put down a security deposit, you’re entitled to some protections.

For example, you lose your right to a 30-day move out inspection. So they can come after you for up to four years for damages to your apartment. And they sometimes do! The speaker said that what happens is these complexes get sold every three or four years. Sometimes the new owners look at the past few years of tenants and shake them down for damages.

Also: #notallcollegekids but some college kids are little shits. Since they didn’t pay a security deposit, they don’t think they’re on the hook for damages. Chairs in the pool, trash the place, etc.

Roommate matching

In theory, this is fine. This is what happens in a conventional dorm.

But here, it’s done… maliciously? it’s pretty surreal. Here’s the understated tone from the speaker:

In practice it means that they don’t give a shit if you have allergies and the roommate has a cat, or if you are a quiet person and the roommate throws keggers.

But then it gets worse!

  • You can’t move to a different apartment if you need to. She told a story of a kid who found his roommate, killed, gory, awful, in the living room. They made him stay in that unit.
  • You can be moved even if you don’t want to! You dared to complain? Fine, you’re being moved. Pack up.

The companies are generally retaliatory and vindictive. You called us in for having cockroaches? We’re going to try to charge you for fumigating the building. Etc.

Just straight up being illegal:

For example:

Legally, they have to tell tenants who the owner is. But they don’t.

The very few protections that Texas law does offer, they can just skip out on doing them. Nobody holds them accountable. (Of course, this applies to all of San Marcos rentals! Not just students!)

What about the rest of San Marcos?

It is really important that we don’t limit this to college students! All renters need protections. San Marcos is mostly renters!

Many, many landlords are vindictive and retaliatory, or don’t provide a safe, clean environment. There’s a huge power imbalance between landlords and tenants. Tenants get exploited.

So what can be done?

Here’s what the speaker suggests:

and

The city lawyer is quick to mention that these are all uncharted territory. Most cities are not in this situation. We can research and explore these ideas further, but there’s not much in the way of precedents.

Council also discusses:

  • Capping security deposits so they don’t get exploitative
  • Publishing a list of complexes and grade them, based on complaints to Code Compliance
  • Making a central complaint spot, where tenants can then get directed to one of the legal aid resources or code compliance, or whatever
  • Requiring three months notice before forcing someone to move, or forcing companies to give choices (break your lease, stay, or move to this other unit)

Finally, Texas State is trying to do some stuff too.

Council decides that they want to look into all these ideas. This will come back around!

Bonus! Even more 3 pm workshops! 11/19/24

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Workshop #2: LIHTC projects: This stands for Low Income Housing Tax Credits.

There are two kinds:

  • Developers can get tax credits from the state
  • Sometimes they get tax credits from both the city and the state.

Both kinds have to get approved by Council.

Backstory:

Blue are the developments that get just state tax breaks. Green gets both state and local:

This past spring we approved five developments (2 blue, 3 green) and Mark Gleason panicked that we were being too generous. We can’t help this many people! It’s fiscally irresponsible!

Hence this workshop! Let’s find out if we can afford to help vulnerable residents. (Spoiler: we can.)

More Background:

San Marcos is booming!

So we’ll end up somewhere between the purple and the orange, most likely.

You can look at it this way:

The blue parts are our new sprawl.

San Marcos has a good employment rate, but high poverty rate:

This means that our jobs are not good jobs. The cure for this is raising the minimum wage. (Raising the minimum wage does not cause inflation. Paying a living wage turns a bad job into a good one!)

Anyway!

Here’s where the jobs are:

This is fascinating:

In other words:

  • Only 6700 of us actually live and work in San Marcos
  • 18K of us live in San Marcos, but we work outside of town.
  • 28K people commute into San Marcos, but live elsewhere.

In my humble opinion, this is two things:

  • people who live here can’t find good jobs here, and
  • the University has good jobs, but parents who work for Tx state are scared of SMCISD for problematic reasons. (I have lots of opinions on that. Support SMCISD!)

Anyway, those are my own conclusions. City staff did not lob those accusations.

…

So are LIHTC projects breaking our budget?

The city gets both sales tax and property tax.

When it comes to property tax, there’s a lot of tax-exempt property:

So some LIHTC projects don’t pay city taxes, but neither does city land, Texas State land, SMCISD, County land, Churches, Housing Authority, and others.

(One difference is that most of those are nonprofits. LIHTC developments aren’t necessarily nonprofits.)

So how bad is the dent in our budget??

Not very bad!

You are allowed to ask for a lump sum payout. (Payment In Lieu of Taxes = PILOT). So we do this sometimes:

LIHTC apartments are still full of people, so you still have some fire and SMPD costs. But not particularly different than any other apartment complex.

In general, apartments are much cheaper infrastructure for the city than single family housing.

This is a great illustration of why:

I want to love this graphic, but I can’t. The scale is all off.

  • A 3-4 story apartment building is about 20-30 units per acre. The diagram on the left should be 7-10 acres.
  • Single Family (ND-3/CD-3) are things like town homes and smaller lots – at most 10 units per acre. So that middle diagram is 20 acres big.
  • Single Family (SF-6/SF-4.5) are big traditional lots – at most 7 houses per acre. So that right hand diagram is over 28 acres big. That’s three times as big as the one on the left!

Fixed it:

(I am so smug and insufferable. It’s a miracle you all put up with me.)

Anyway: there are also some city costs for things like libraries and transit. Same as for any residents.

…

How much need is there in San Marcos?

More than elsewhere:

…

Onto the state requirements for their tax credits.

The state organization is TDHCA. (Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs.)

They care about:

  • Location. You can’t put your low income housing in a crappy location.
  • Clustering – you can’t put them too close together
  • Flood plain – nope
  • They must have at least 15 hours each week of an after-school learning center
  • They must supply a shuttle if they’re not on a bus route
  • Free support services, a mix of amenities
  • ADA apartments

How cheap are these apartments?

First off, “AMI” is Area Median Income. We’re in the Austin Metropolitan area, so we use Austin incomes, even though San Marcos incomes are roughly half of Austin’s. (San Marcos median household income is $47K, whereas Austin median household income is $86K.)

Here’s the key feature:

The state also monitors the complexes:

San Marcos does not get those reports, currently. It would be nice if we did.

…

If you’ll recall, we did a big Housing Needs Assessment back in 2019, and came up with a housing plan to work on housing affordability. This is great! And…. council then buried it six feet underground.

Housing affordability has not been a major priority of this council for the past five years. (Except Alyssa Garza.) In the budget we passed in October – two months ago! – our Strategic Plan Goals were:

None of those are affordable housing.

Council did not care until this election cycle, when it became clear that you could lose your election if you didn’t hear the clamor for affordable housing. It was suddenly the #1 issue.

Anyway: We’re finally doing it, five years late. The first step is updating the data for the Housing Needs Assessment, which is almost ten years out of date.

Listen: this workshop was fascinating, and councilmembers asked good questions. I’m not doing it justice. But it was a 5 hour meeting and a 2 hour workshop, and your poor little marxist is tired.

Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 11/6/24

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

We got $18 million dollars from the federal government during Covid. This is called ARPA money. It all has to be obligated by December 31st, 2024.  Not spent, but under contract.

Here’s how we spent our ARPA money:

Some of the projects have come in under budget:

The can ban came in $89K under budget?! But… but we didn’t get rid of the cans…

Anyway, we’ve rounded up all the scraps and put them back in the pot to hand out.  

(True story: my mom would collect all the slivers of bar soaps, and put them in a mesh bag to use as one big bag of bar soap.  It’s gross! You should try it some time! The connection being that we are putting all the last little ARPA slivers into a mesh bag to use as one final ARPA slushfund.)

So what should we do with this last $246K?

Here’s what City staff recommends:

Every time this comes up, over the past four years, Alyssa Garza argues for direct aid to neighbors. We should use covid money on things like rental assistance, utility assistance, emergency grants for car repairs, etc. But somehow these things never materialize.

The conversation gets bogged down.
– Is it because council doesn’t agree on the direction they give staff?
– Is it because it’s very hard to implement these direct aid measures?
– Is it because the federal restrictions make it really hard for residents to find all the correct paperwork and documentation?

It goes in circles for awhile.

Eventually Alyssa convinces everyone to try to redirect the Dunbar bathroom money towards emergency rental assistance. If staff can’t make that work, Plan B is still the Dunbar bathrooms. B is for Bathrooms.

Bonus! 3 pm Workshops, 10/15/24

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

This is the Mitchell Center:

It’s kind of tucked away in the Dunbar Neighborhood:

It’s got deep historical roots:

Since the 30 year lease is coming to an end, the City decided to open up for bids to nonprofits:

In the end, staff recommended the Calaboose African American History as the best choice.

I’m not exactly sure where the $400K is going to come from for the estimated repairs, but certainly the Calaboose folks will be good stewards of this property.

…

Workshop #2 was about the Utility Billing Assistance program. It’s still being hashed out; I’m going to leave this alone for now.