 this I decided to have this session as you noticed 50 years ago when the U.S. Civil Rights Commission hearings were held here in San Antonio housing was not an issue we dealt with civil rights administration of justice employment education and not housing so we this is one of the subjects that we added to this one so I'm very glad that we're here to have a little conversation about that while we're waiting and I think this is our angel who's gonna help us all of us have power I think we got our baby person welcome sister yeah thank you sister so what I thought I do while we are still working on that is introduce our panelists we have a very interesting I think an important group of people who are going to be presenting all experts in housing in one way or another all the way from housing at the federal level and administration of major sums of money for people who work on a daily basis with a community so it's I think the perfect combination to address a very complicated subject Lourdes Castro Ramirez came to San Antonio to serve as president and CEO of the San Antonio Housing Authority before that she had worked in various positions in the housing authority of the city of Los Angeles Lourdes left the San Antonio Housing Authority to join Secretary Julian Castro at HUD in the position of Deputy Secretary for the Public and Indian Housing at HUD and she is now president of the University Health System I had the privilege of working with Lourdes for a year as we put together the we carried with us the Mayor's Housing Policy Task Force report we worked on it for a whole year and it was a joy and a learning experience to sit with Lourdes and have her manage a very diverse group of five people that included a developer a banker an architect and a community person like myself and with her background in housing but with her heart always in the community she made a wonderful chair Jessica Delero for this to my right is the proud product of San Antonio Southside she's an accomplished community organizer and cultural worker she is also strong a strong and independent activist who has the pulse of the grassroots community in her heart I have had the pleasure of working with Jessica for 10 12 years and it has been all working in the community she is she speaks with authority I believe because she is rooted in the community and she is such an incredible organizer that she always wants the people at the table today I think she would have wanted the people at the table here instead of herself because that's the way that Jessica is and she does it magnificently in English and in Spanish Marisol Cortez another dear dear friend it's a writer and a community-based scholar Marisol could be work doctor Marisol Cortez could be working at any university in this country I believe she chooses to be a community scholar and work hand-in-hand with the people of the city right now she's associated with urban 15 where she has among other things has assisted in creating the hidden stories project so when you have time you might Google hidden stories among things that she has done is chronicle the story of the people who have been displaced in the city we always talk about the displacement right but we never asked the question of where do the people go what happens when people are displaced so she did a study on urban renewal we saw that the urban renewal for UTSA is today and she also did one on urban renewal for the hemisphere scientists now what was there before and what is there now along with her husband Greg Harman who is recording us here they have an online journal that again you can Google that's called deceleration and it is an ongoing online journal that reports there's our shared ecological political and cultural crisis riding at the intersection of climate change and social justice journalistically academically and creatively and that's my friend so it's a senior at Trinity University she's majoring in political science and in business administration at Trinity she is the director of business operations of the contemporary of the contemporary a startup publication of public affairs and she is also a McNair scholar and she has research on immigration and on Central American difference specifically and she plans to continue her studies through a graduate program in Latin American studies I met Sabdi in one of many events that I do and once in a while after a presentation or speech I have some person come all enthusiastic and wanting to know more so we became friends and I hope that our association continues for a long time what I you know housing is a very complex issue when we were presenting our report at the V session in September no August right August I was so conscious when we were sitting with the council members that their constituents probably if ever complain about housing to them you know I shared that when you go before your council person or or your senator you're not you're going to talk about your streets particularly at City Council your garbage pickup and so on you're never going to say I have problems with housing because that's just not something that people think government is responsible for so there is very little expertise in the community just the general community on housing and I think it is instructive for me to take just a few minutes to put our our conversation in context maybe a little bit of history of housing in San Antonio specifically and it really starts with a history of the first public housing project in in the United States which was out of some of the courts and that was around 1939 father got me a little bit of our lady with a loop and church actually worked with Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt to call attention to the squalor that people were living in around us the other son freak and they created that public housing project with federal money of course San Antonio has also a history touching on housing that is urban renewal we had a couple of urban renewal projects like I already mentioned one was the destruction of the live lively important neighborhood Vista Verde north and south which is where UTSA downtown is today I wrote a book and I'm selling it downstairs but one of the sections of my book is called analysis on the bus and it's my chronicling of what I learned after 20 years of traveling on the bus every day for 20 years on Martin Street first to work and then to school on how I saw how that neighborhood was impacted by urban renewal even if it even if the houses weren't torn down there it destabilized an entire area the other urban renewal was the one that happened in hemisphere where we displaced a lot of people at some point the federal government did get involved in housing through the model cities project was in the 60s we had model cities some of us got involved in the model cities project not much was done in infrastructure it was really not a very successful program but again it was the federal government trying to dabble in it when the war poverty Lyndon Johnson war poverty came there were efforts in my neighborhood I was raised blocks from our native lake University and Christ the King Church where we actually got training as leaders so you might say that we were working on infrastructure housing being one of them but not very much was done again there was no city commitment to housing at all it was always with federal funds the 70s arrived and we start getting community development block grant money CDBG at that time the cops organization was already very strong and they started doing infrastructure because my growing up was growing up in flooding tremendous flooding in our inner city right here on because the street and West Martin Street and again the the city did not invest city money our tax money in housing however they did impact housing then the way they impact housing up zoning the board of adjustment through historic preservation the code enforcement so you still influence it and in many times cost problems but there is no money to to pay for it the so that's kind of a little history and my point there is that the city of San Antonio has not traditionally spent money our tax money and I don't know how many of you probably weren't hearing what our speaker at noon said but she was talking about the reduction of federal money the way the federal money is today whatever money is coming in for housing which we are still getting some that's going to shrink that's going to go away so one of the things that we one of the recommendations that we had in our task force what it was if the city start investing in housing because the federal government is not going to do it but we as a community but are going to have to make it an issue to to demand that that money is spent okay that's history the other thing I wanted to show you and I hope they're there are just a few slides and that's just to place all of us in San Juan it's encrypted I can't see it but we're going to imagine we can't and my point here is the following we are here commemorating the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission hearings that came to see what was happening with the Mexican-American community in the city the reality is that today the Latino Mexican-American community of San Antonio is the majority we're the majority and it just so happens that if you can imagine a man with loop 410 imagine it 410 and when you see where the largest percentage of old housing is where is it inside 410 if you can okay okay if you can imagine that same inside loop 410 where the greatest poverty exists where is it going to be inside before 10 if you can imagine who lives inside before 10 vast majority of people there are people of color largely Mexican-Americans Latinos and something that has been happening now and I'll just kind of venture into it a little bit maybe it'll come in later is we are predicted to grow by 1 million people all of you have heard that right we're San Antonio is going to grow by 5 million 1 million people by 2040 so okay those are my maps okay you get the idea right that's poverty and then the other one is I think I did pretty good imagine poverty and then the other one is called community some color race ethnicity again the darker areas is where the people live it you get it right so I have a map there that I call the icred map because we are just keep that one there because we are growing the city has to get ready right so what when a city gets to this point you need density instead of growing this way to start growing up so the plans are for the city to build housing to build density so the plan is to do it where in the inner city so interestingly the areas that have been incentivized for housing by city policy happen to be the areas where the people live where there's the old housing communities of color live so right now you know to me this this slide and the others show what our predicament is what our challenges how are we going to to produce the housing that we need to house a million more people which by the way they will not all be people coming in they're going to be natural growth which is where my last two slides are and then I'm going to let my colleagues here speak one of them is well that's a poverty map again but there are two slides that have to do with demographics and that's just to give you a little taste of what our Latino population looks like okay that we don't have that one but if you can imagine a map a graph that has people over 65 you know the bottom or the top and then children the zero to five at the other end we're going to have this pyramid where most of our population is young so the Latino population is young San Antonio is a young city so that's kind of a little bit of history a little bit of demographics just setting what the challenge is how are we going to house people how are we going to not just people for the future but how are we going to address the problems that we have had for generations that's the lack of housing the conditions of housing and the huge issue of displacement when the city is growing and their policies being created what happens to the people so the first person that I will ask to speak is Marisol Dr. Cortez and like I said her expertise is in many things but one of them is displacement and she has journey with the people of mission trails who are the ones that were displaced in 2014 which is the largest displacement of people sit urban since urban renewal and those were 300 people who were displaced from their mobile home park on the river because of high-end housing that came and thank you as well to all of you for organizing this conference and to the executive committee that put it all together it's really impressive and I'm really honored to be here with you as Maria mentioned my name is Marisol and I am a creative writer and a community scholar primarily based here in San Antonio I did my PhD in cultural studies from the University of California Davis but I choose to work in the community instead of in the University supporting social movement building primarily through writing and research and with Maria who I've known for many years with Jessica who have known for many years and many others I participated in numerous struggles mostly around land and water protection struggles to protect the mother theater against predatory and extractive forms of development and to create and preserve the commons and so that's kind of the ones that I bring to thinking about housing that I wanted to share with you today today what I wanted to do is present some kind of bigger picture ways of thinking about housing from that perspective but before I do what I would like to do is open with the poem that I wrote as I was doing kind of the more scholarly writing about what happened at Mission Trails and in part because I think the numbers that came out of that research are very important but I think in the face of institutional courses of erasure some stories can really only be documented poetically or creatively so I'll open with the poem that is called dedication to the ones who stayed until the end the ones who stayed till the end did not want to go to any parks on any developer's approved list the ones who stayed till the end did not want to post to Craigslist $5,000 homes into which they have poured 15,000 in repairs inside which they rebuilt lives once wrecked by violence domestic or state or both the ones who stayed all the way until the end did so because they saw what happened to their neighbors when their neighbors left on someone else's terms someone else's timeline someone else's I know it's best someone else's for your own good for the good of the city for the good of the tax base and they said no sorry not good enough the ones who stayed believed in the rightness and the goodness of what they wanted and what their children deserved they wouldn't settle they dreamed of keeping their homes were buying a home of buying land that they could move together in this land where rights are founded on removal the ones who stayed until the end with a bravest because they had no choice there was nothing no help for women without papers women without English were mothers of young children the ones who could left early before the rats came the break-ins the machines chewing up the empty trailers with mouths gaping not even stopping when the kids walk past on their way home from school the ones with the least had no choice but to stay in furious tones naming the raw deal they've gotten and how it wasn't enough in the end what they got was near nothing near what they needed but they never stopped insisting on their right to it they fought and stayed till abandoned and failed in the end by the city the developers the organizations even the lawyer even us everyone supposedly trying to help confounded by these women who refused to take the deal and get out didn't they understand what a good deal they were getting weren't they grateful didn't they know they were entitled to nothing these mojones desigtates see this we're not about to leave before they were ready or to move where they didn't want to go to begin with the ones who stayed till the end were non-persons in the eyes of the state with no rights to land or even survival much less any pursuit of happiness which was why they insisted in the name of their full humanity that in fact they deserve the world for what had been done to them and to their children came out as I was working with the scene of the mission trails with Jessica and some other folks to support resident organizing and mission trails mobile home community by documenting what had happened there and the report that we produced try and you can if you go online to this URL you can you can get to that report and download it for yourself but the report that we tried to produce wanted to place the story of mission trails into the broader historical context of both neoliberal forms of urban governance as well as San Antonio's deep history of colonialism we use archival documents to piece together how and why the city made its decision to resolve them and most importantly we tried to make visible the impacts of displacement interviewing 51 families which was about approximately half of those who were moved from their homes for us it was a project of witness to remember and write down what happened and how it affects people was to refuse the city and the developer's preference that it be forgotten or erased or denied because the irony of displacement is that when you push people out of a space they've been living which are also erasing is evidence that it happened so we wanted to make sure that that did not happen some of the things we learned from doing the interviews which we wouldn't have known otherwise in the first that three residents died after displacement two of them were elders one of them was a man who died by suicide this is one of the elders to pass about six months after she was removed from her home about one experience period of homelessness after removal in the longest case for about 18 months a year and a half and these are two little girls the children that were on the eve before they they left mission trails and then another kind of severe impact was that even if folks weren't homeless there was a rise in housing and security for many others about two out of five households that we interviewed had moved more than once by the time we interviewed them so it wasn't just if they were they were displaced once it was it sort of unleashed this chain of removals and relocations about one in five residents that we spoke with interviewed experience life-threatening health impacts requiring hospitalization as a result of the stress of new zoning and displacement and about three out of five reported mental health impacts specifically over half of the households that we interviewed reported negative impacts on their children and one in five of those households reported impacts health impacts on their children primarily depression and anxiety at the time when people were living at mission trails about half of them were already housing burden meaning they paid more than 30% of their their income on either rent or mortgage plus utilities but after they were displaced that number rose to 71% of people and you know the reason was because many had many owner home they had to leave their homes behind you know they lost their home and they became renters after being owners and then lastly about three out of four households that we talked to reported negative impacts on social networks and sense of community which doesn't sound as severe as some of the other impacts but I mean in the case of that one of the elders who passed it was because of the primary factor was the deterioration of the social network she had relied on to keep her safe because she was living in a situation where her housemate was abusive and when she moved away from an adopted daughter who had kind of always protected her that's what that's what happened we she her adopted daughter feels that that had a role in in her death and that abuse that is those numbers are important and we wouldn't know those numbers without talking to people but what I actually wanted to talk about today was this the deeper significance of this case and the deeper issues at stake when we talk about gentrification and kind of the fuller development of these ideas come from a chapter that I did for a book that Rudy Rosales edited that just came out called community as the material basis of citizenship so the chapter is based on the work that we did admission trails but it's sort of a more kind of thinking about these the bigger picture ideas of it we often conceptualize gentrification as a housing rights struggle only and it is that but a rude it is a struggle of the most dispossessed communities to claim a right to the city a right to say what happens to the land that they live on in a legal context where land is seen only as a commodity to be bought and sold at profit and where only landowners have a say in what happens to it so while mission trails might seem like an extreme example of development politics in San Antonio I would argue it's simply the most egregiously visible tip of an iceberg that is the deeper logic at work in all struggles over development both here in San Antonio and around the world what was most striking about the case of mission trails for those who live in Winston is true in a more general sense whether we're talking about struggles over the Haste Street Bridge where we're talking about Vista Ridge the pipeline where we're talking about the South Texas nuclear project and we're talking about PGA from so many years ago or we're talking about the present effort to develop a climate action plan based on social justice not only did mission trails residents have no right to remain in their homes more fundamentally they had no rights to participate meaningfully in decisions about the place that they lived even when those decisions would threaten their lives while superficially they might have had a right to address elected officials their interests and input were of no material consequence and this was true for those whose legal status was curtailed for those whose legal status curtailed their rights to participation but it was also true of all mission trails residents regardless of legal status and it was true too for the broader community of San Antonio residents supporting resident organizing at mission trails none of us have the right to participate meaningfully in such a critical decision about the place we call home and that's really what we mean when if you hear if you hear people talk about neoliberal urbanism or neoliberal urban governance and that's really the root issue thinking about gentrification in these terms however I think we arrived at the other striking thing about mission trails which is why I wanted to open with that particular comment and that is residents fierce insistence on claiming rights that they did not have rights that the system of legal citizenship and neoliberal urban governance are in fact set up to deny in fighting for their homes they embodied his residents embodied in their for called for they invoked an alternate vision of political belonging rooted not in citizenship or property ownership but in residence and inhabitants in a relationship to land outside of commodification a relationship to the political body the law beyond exclusionary forms of citizenship so I want to end by just taking a little time to try to put into words what this embodiment means for all of our ongoing efforts to protect and build the commons in the face of these parasitic forms of development native scholar Daniel our wildcat was a uchi creek professor at Haskell Indian Nations University has argued for the need to understand space or land less as an abstraction and instead as particular home places or what he calls nature culture and nexuses so in other words every place grounds particular interactions between its human and its non-human residents so the right to the city is not simply the right to participate in decisions about what happens to the places we inhabit or the right to create cities that meet the needs of the most vulnerable is that but it also depends more deeply on reconceptualizing urban space as land and reconceptualizing land as nature that itself has a right to be healthy undisrupted and free of commodification this is where the right to the city intersects with movements to recognize the rights of nature for the interest of the mother fiera as in the recent constitutional revisions in Ecuador to include a universal declaration of the rights of mother earth it also points to the global south to indigenous led movements throughout latin america from wendy b a model of social and ecological wellness that stands as an alternative to development when you need is it is a misdeso term such as translation in the Spanish from concepts originally part of indigenous cosmo visions most frequently catch the idea of sum up how say meaning a fullness of life in a community together with other persons and nature as a paradigm when you reject several key assumptions of modernity that undergird the idea of development first is that the single highest goal of all societies is development epitomized by the living conditions of the global north when you be rejects the idea that progress toward the school is linear and that the best expression of this progress is economic growth as measured by gdp most importantly when you rejects the idea which is foundational to western thought that humans are outside of and above nature that humans are subjects over an object to be controlled and manipulated in this linear process of things getting better and better first articulation in the post war united states modern western nations have not stopped seeking to impose development on the rest of the world as a supreme social aspiration including among the poor within their own cities and that's idea of economic development whatever internal contradictions or unintended consequences arise from this paradigm we attach prefixes to soften the edges right we call it sustainable development and we call it human development or equitable development but the core logic of this paradigm remains according to the Ecuadorian scholar Eduardo Bolinas development is a he calls it a zombie category we slay it and it returns so even as it's declared defunct he writes in his next step it is promoted as the only way forward how many times do we go to the zoning commission or the city council and feel like we have to say it's not that i against development but before talking about all of the ways that a particular project inherently threatens access to housing or clean water or air or even our lives when we beat however breaks from development entirely as a paradigm and one of the primary ways it does so is by rejecting the idea that idea that nature is an object to be controlled or mastered in the interest of progress Ecuador's universal declaration on the rights of mother earth for instance defines the earth as quote a self-regulating community of interrelated beings that sustains contains and reproduces all beings and which has such possesses inalienable rights to continue its vital cycles and processes free from human disruptions so the earth too has a right to remain when you read then abolishes the nature culture dualism that feminist philosophy bell plunge would has argued is central to western ways of knowing and being in the world and which alberto costa argues is also the root of colonization within the americas in africa by contrast when we read past it's not only a way of knowing and being but also a political body a polity in which nature has agency and political subjectivity to be fully realizable then the rights of the city the rights would have it our home place as well must be grounded in a more primary description of rights to nature itself to be free from commodification like the communities of the south we are done with development as a model of well-being we who call this place home who stood with the ones who stayed at mission trails until the end who tracked their dispersal across the city the state the nation indeed the continent after their removal and who insist on a right to remain and to migration both know that place is important because it is a polity to paraphrase tony risham samara our power resides in our connection to the places where we belong and the strength of that connection derives from our knowledge that the earth itself the river on whose banks mission trails sat is alive and cannot be owned it has its own rights to be healthy good afternoon everyone i'm on lumbis castro ramirez and first i wanted to also echo marisol's comments thanking maria baguio salam for inviting us to be part of today's discussion about housing affordable housing neighborhoods and really the importance of working together to ensure that everyone has a place to call home as maria baguio salam mentioned i had the really the honor of serving as the chair of the mayor's housing policy task force this was a task force that was created last august of 2017 by mayor ron nerver and you know i think that as i was reflecting on like what prompted the mayor to create you know to create this task force i was thinking about some of maria's comments regarding population our our city is growing right by 2040 as maria mentioned we will have a million new people moving in to san antonio or being born in san antonio the other thing that i think you know triggered this really interest in beginning to better understand housing was mission trails and so as dr corces pointed out this was probably the first time in recent history in san antonio where we didn't know what was happening we at the city sort of government level didn't acknowledge that people were being impacted didn't know how to deal with it and yet the the faces the experience the reality as as dr corces pointed out are very clear that these were families that were living in this community that may not have had the financial means or were with all and did their best to organize and you know to have a voice and we when i say we i mean we the sort of collectively city council because this is again you know sort of the impetus for why why create a mayor's housing policy task force i don't think we dealt with this you know correctly i don't think we understood it i think it goes back to a point also that money i made that housing is very a very complex issue and yet it's not because i think when we think about housing i think we think about housing as an individual issue an individual problem and we don't think about it as housing is part of our collective community responsibility and there are forces that play that put pressures on families and those forces play that put pressures on their families are created not necessarily by individual families but by the fact that we don't really sort of dive in deep into understanding the social economic priorities that we have as a city so in august of 2017 mayor Ron Nuremberg created the task force with kind of a very simple singular charge which was to create a comprehensive and compassionate housing policy a framework to guide the city's focus on housing but not just from a data perspective but also to better understand the reality that families were facing at a human perspective so if you can fast forward and so these were our conclusions you know i'm going to walk you through the process and some key data but i think it's really important that we now lose sight of what we found which you know sort of built on on the fact that san antonio like many other cities is having an affordability crisis and housing affordability is impacting neighborhoods across the city and when we don't have access to affordable housing it affects housing stability family stability student success it also affects our health and it does affect the economic prosperity of a city what we also found is that this housing affordability and a security issue is having a disproportional impact on low income individuals and households and you know we saw the map earlier and we saw sort of the areas of our city that have been maybe not as where we have not provided the level of infrastructure support where we still have deep you know pockets of poverty so as a result we also saw that latinos are disproportionately more impacted by housing affordability and insecurity issues finally you know what we saw very clearly was that housing has not been a priority in san antonio it has you know it has not been something that we have been able to understand and rally behind and sort of commit to a set of policies and dedicate resources and implement you know it's it's also something that i think as a country we struggled with right in 1968 50 years ago the housing fair the fair housing act was passed and this was just a focus on basically non-discrimination based on race religion gender and you know nationality as it relates to the sale rental and access to housing and so you know Maria mentioned earlier that as we go back 50 years housing maybe was not as you know critical of a was maybe not sort of on the agenda here locally the way that maybe education was but housing has been a struggle i think here for the last 50 years and it was very clear to us that in san antonio we have not been able to to really make housing central to the conversation that we're having and we have not really acknowledged that housing is part of the infrastructure of our city as one of our colleagues said you know housing is the fourth pillar of our economic infrastructure just like water just like energy just like transportation we need to focus on housing and when we don't focus on housing when we don't focus on affordable housing when we know that you know there is also this history of disinvestment a history of redlining a history of discrimination then we end up also with vulnerable populations being disproportionately more impacted so those were the findings in a very sort of succinct way in terms of what the mayor's housing policy task force has captured in the report that we produce and you know these are just sort of images this is context for everybody this is not happening just here in san antonio it's happening across the country housing affordability whether housing is a right or not homelessness housing and security this is happening across the country and san antonio i think and i think we collectively in our report also put forward this recommendation that while we do have a housing crisis here in san antonio it is not as severe as certain other cities and we have an opportunity to intervene we have an opportunity to be proactive we have an opportunity to be thoughtful and we have an opportunity to put together a set of policies that will help guide the future development of our city when it comes to housing rental housing home ownership housing and other types of housing options so what the task force accomplished in about a year collectively and together with many people was to build or develop a comprehensive plan for an equitable housing system that's how i view it you know i went back and read the report and that this is exactly what we produce it was a bottom-up process that led to the creation of this report and set of recommendations it was community led it was also data driven we wanted to understand the history the data the best practices and to analyze you know what had been done maybe in the past to inform our recommendations it was also a very inclusive community process early on in the development of the mayor's housing policy task force we adopted a set of values as a task force that were really grounded in ensuring in many ways and really creating a different way of developing policy we focused on transparency and accountability accountability meaning to each other but also to the people that were part of this process we also were committed to listening and understanding the community experience it was not just our experience or our perspective it was really trying to understand what is happening on the ground how do we sort of elevate those voices what solutions do people have that will help formulate this comprehensive and compassionate housing policy we did rely on technical experts we brought in about four different groups the National Association of Latino Community Asset Builders, LISC, San Antonio which basically supports the creation of affordable housing a group from Denver that did a lot of the market analysis economic planning systems and also Humanities and Associates which helped with the community facilitation and planning meetings that we held quickly and then you know of course you know history matters and so we went back and took a look at the policies both from the federal level the state level and the local level that have influenced the development of San Antonio and the current sort of state of neighborhoods of housing and so that was you know important for us because you can't develop policy without you know ignoring sort of the history of the community and we were also very keen and focused on understanding the impact that housing is having on vulnerable populations vulnerable communities and for us I think in many ways we defined that as individuals that were making less than 60 percent of AMI individuals that need access to housing and support services and so on something very key that we did early on you know and this again happens across the country when people think about affordable housing they immediately think about public housing or they think about those people or they think about why are they in subsidized housing and we thought it was important to really recalibrate and redefine affordable housing and really affordable housing is the ability for everyone to be able to not spend more than 30% of their income towards housing whether you are a teacher whether you are receiving social security whether you are a city employee whether you are you know working in the restaurant the ability to not pay more than 30% that is how the federal government defines affordability and that is how we define the affordability and the other thing that we thought was really important was to understand the economic situation of San Antonio and understand the number of families that are struggling financially so there's a lot of sort of area medium income data that was gathered and collected another key piece of information that was really important in our development of our policy recommendations was looking at housing costs basically over the last 20 years or so housing costs have been increasing at a much faster rate than incomes and so you know you see in this graph in the last maybe 10 years housing costs increased by about 5% per year while incomes increased by less than 2% per year so what's the impact of that the impact of that is that we have about 30% of households in San Antonio that are spending more than 30% of their income and you know that equates to one out of five homeowners one out of two renters 80% of households that are making less than 30% I mean less than $30,000 a year so when we talk about vulnerable populations we have an issue with housing access housing affordability but we also have an issue with the amount of money that they're spending for that limited housing and in some cases for that housing that is not in very good condition that housing that may not be healthy housing right or housing that is really in need of repair or in need of additional investment if you can just look back the the other really important piece was also that 66% of all Latino households are cost burdened or spending more than 30% of their income so again vulnerable populations who are they understanding how housing has a disproportionate impact on certain communities more so than others the other really important piece of data or information that we gathered was that housing production has not kept up with the the growth of our city in fact we saw that for the last 10 years or so we have been increasing the number of jobs in San Antonio maybe about 14,000 new jobs per year the last 10 years but we have only been creating about 6,500 new housing units so what happens right you're growing you're not producing enough housing so either families will leave the city and look for housing that's affordable outside of the city or they'll stay they'll stay they'll pay more because you know sort of a kind of a supply and demand right you're paying more because there's limited supply this also impacts home ownership rates we also took a look at the impact that these changes in the lack of housing is having in terms of our home ownership rate in San Antonio and one specific sort of factoid was that in the last 10 years or so our home ownership rate has dropped from 61 percent down to 54 percent and so again all of these factors create pressures in families and neighborhoods Marisol spoke about gentrification and displacement so it's important to understand all of the things that are happening right and to to understand that it's not an individual problem that we have a system problem so as we move forward towards our recommendations this is a a very short summary of the recommendations it's in a very high high level but these are basically the five areas that we recommend the city focus on or city leadership focus on these five areas of recommendation include about 11 specific policy implementation strategies along with you know 22 different steps i'll just call on a few of them because i think it's important just as you know we move into implementation i think it's important for you all to be aware i think our highest and number one priority and i think Mania would agree will agree with me was ensuring that our city leadership our community sort of under basically the the recognition and this actually came from the people that were involved in this process right that we don't have a good way of coordinating and sharing information and really focusing on housing that that it's important for us to develop a system that is well coordinated it's important for us you know to have leadership at the city level it's important for us to have the resources necessary to be able to coordinate this housing system and so our number one priority was the creation of a coordinated housing system a coordinated housing system that's not just about staff and programs but a coordinated housing system that would lead to the development of a one-stop housing center where families that are looking for housing information or support would have the opportunity and access you know to to go there a coordinated housing system that would move the city of San Antonio from focusing on housing as a compliance issue to focusing on housing as an opportunity to innovate an opportunity to expand housing options so this is our number one priority we also recommended that the city hire a high level housing executive to lead this effort someone that really cares about housing that is collaborative and that would become basically the face of housing and and basically the face of the city or more than the face you know that would provide the the leadership necessary to make housing a priority the other he recommendation that I like to focus on is this last one on ensuring accountability to the public and this goes back to really the the history of reports that have been maybe produced in the past that lead to a certain set of conclusions that don't get implemented and they don't get implemented one because either there is not sort of the implementation plan which we did include in our task force report or two because there's not the political will and the governance structure necessary to make it happen so under number five we've recommended that the housing commission that was created a few years ago be reconstituted to focus on the mayor's housing policy task force recommendations we also recommended that the city develop a process to keep residents informed about their progress implementing these recommendations and that we also build in accountability measures to ensure really the intent of these to ensure that the implementation was occurring in a manner which was respectful of the intent of those recommendations you can of course read more about the recommendations by you know getting copy of the report it's available online and on page 12 we have a detailed list of all of the things that are included I know of page 11 I know several of you that are in the room also participated and you know we can thank you enough for being part of that process and I just I'll leave you with this while the numbers may be fuzzy we would say what we did see in the city was a commitment to increase funding granted some of these new dollars are dollars that are coming from the federal government because there was a bump in cdg and home dollars but some of these dollars were general fund dollars which was a strong recommendation that we made that the city began to increase its level of investment and its level of resources and and also just kind of thinking ahead we also recommended a change to the city's charter to allow the city to be able to put forward an affordable housing bond similar to what austin has done similar to what many other cities have done to increase resources for affordable housing so with that I'll turn it back thank you thank you I have a situation here that we run out of time however I still have people who need to go to another session please you know feel free to leave you know anybody we think anything about it however we do have other sessions so as you're walking out I would like to call our third person here jessica I'm sorry but we started late but if some of you want to stick with us we'll stick here there isn't another session huh there isn't another session in here okay well she's going to hurry through hers yes I will yes just really quickly I think probably yeah there's another session in here yeah I'm going to she's going to close it real fast we're going to we're going to um I'm sorry but we we've got to be late by the first session we're going to close with where we started right the reason all of this has has come to fruition there was another task force right after Mission Trails happened and a subsequent housing commission was started then now there's this other task force that worked to another level went a little bit deeper and did actually you know hold the community perspectives with more higher regard and respect and you know recognize the community for our knowledge and expertise in our own experiences um and now you know as Lourdes said that task force is uh creating another housing commission to oversee the implementation of the recommendations and the community once again is coming together to monitor that process and to make sure that that process continues to be informed by community so if you are interested in joining that group there are some people that are already part of that if uh you are interested in maybe just learning more about that group because we don't have time to go too much into that but um the only other thing that I would mention is um you know again in different spaces a lot of credit is given to um the public officials that you know brought the political will to bring these groups together in this official capacity and I always make sure that we that it is really clear that is Mission Trails the residents of Mission Trails mobile home community had not raised their voice and insisted on raising their voice once they were ignored and ignored again and ignored after that and even after that first task force was created they did not reap any benefits from that initial effort and now and actually before Mission Trails there was a smaller mobile home park further up the Mission Reach area called Rolling Homes mobile homes mobile home community that none of us even knew about we didn't hear about it until afterwards so we have no idea where those people went and what there what happened today we are still in contact with a lot of people that live at Mission Trails mobile home community and understand that these impacts are ongoing and unfortunately we see also soports and town center coming up again and this group these tenants also spoke up or ignored and are also not going to bring the benefits that this task force process this new task force process might bring about so it comes down to us again to make sure that these five recommendation areas are implemented and really have the impact that we needed to have so I hope that you'll sign your name on there really quick and uh then just your phone number and email that we can we can let you know more about how we're trying to do that but my concluding comments were that the the three women who spoke included an expensive part of the issue of housing you know what I call the the kind of thinking that we as humans we're going to have to engage it and talk about and those are the values that Marisol brought out you know it's not just housing it's the way we live as humans and the way we live with the earth and it's all one what Ludis talked about is we have to work in systems we're a democracy we're a representative democracy we work we have to have people like Ludis inside representing our our interests and and then people in the community who are able to garner the wisdom of the community because without that public policy is not good so this is an example of the kind of leadership we want and for me I am delighted to say that in in my future these women are going to be the leaders in in all that we have discussed today and to tell Sati that she's going to have to take it further than anybody in her studies and also as she finishes and becomes a professional that we need thank you very much