Commentaries at the San Antonio Report provide space for our community to share perspectives and offer solutions to pressing local issues. The views expressed in this commentary belong to the author alone.<\/p>\n
Recent articles in The New York Times and Texas Monthly covering San Antonio\u2019s endemic, intractable poverty weren\u2019t written for the San Antonio community.<\/p>\n
They were written to provide a sad story to readers elsewhere who are in search of something to distract themselves from more popular horrors. \u201cAt least I\u2019m not San Antonio poor,\u201d they might muse from their high-rise breakfast nooks atop heated concrete floors.<\/p>\n
Within that context, these stories are mostly forgivable. They\u2019ve served their purpose in providing their distant readers with a glimpse into a foreign misery. The articles are rarely sourced beyond glancing census data or some mildly exploitative vignette, and they almost never give enough space to our community\u2019s attempts to eliminate our injustices and deficiencies.<\/p>\n
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Sign up for The Recap<\/strong>, a newsletter rundown of the most important news, delivered every Monday and Thursday.<\/p>\n What has been utterly baffling about these stories is how widely shared they are within the San Antonio civic community. More often than not, they\u2019re shared in an attempt to promote \u201cthought leadership\u201d and other AI-assisted blog posts that all unsurprisingly arrive at the same conclusion. But the act of sharing the story, lending it local validation without a shred of contention, leaves a bad taste in my mouth.<\/p>\n It\u2019s true \u2014 our poverty rate is suffocating. There are occupied homes within our city limits that don\u2019t have running water, air conditioning, insulation or solid floors. Railroad tracks continue to fence in our community\u2019s highest concentration of Black residents. We remain one of America\u2019s most socioeconomically segregated<\/a> cities at a time when our Latino-majority population is facing abhorrent attacks from the federal government. Our collective public health is ever-jeopardized by the comorbidities inherited through decades of poverty and divestment.<\/p>\n Emma Tenayuca\u2019s pecan shellers strike<\/a>, popularizing our region\u2019s flourishing inequities, took place in 1938. The first Pre-K 4 SA cohort \u2014 supported by a reallocation of city sales tax traditionally utilized for public transit in Texas \u2014 won\u2019t graduate high school until next year. If San Antonio had followed suit with most other major Texas cities to utilize the maximum available transit tax for transit, instead of repurposing portions of it for projects like the Alamodome, greenway trails, and Edwards Aquifer Protection Program, would voters have effectively banned light rail in 2015? Considering the early success of Pre-K 4 SA<\/a>, would we even consider divesting from our youngest students now? For a community that has long struggled with educational attainment, myself included, would workforce readiness be less of a problem if the Texas legislature didn\u2019t fund public schools at least 20% less than the national average<\/a>?<\/p>\n From its founding in 1718, San Antonio gave the free market plenty of time to figure it out. We went almost three centuries without local investments in early childhood education and longer without a coordinated workforce development ecosystem, any large-scale local investment in affordable housing or dedicated mass transit lanes \u2014 all overwhelmingly voter approved.<\/p>\n Our recent local investments are steps in the right direction, but they\u2019re often at odds with the Texas Legislature\u2019s approach to similar issues. While local control is under attack, the state only legislates for a five-month block every two years. Sweeping budget cuts passed at the Texas Capitol may take a detrimental hold in San Antonio before legislators next convene. In contrast, our local elected bodies meet at least twice a month, year round. These discrepancies in agility and ideology often complicate \u2014 or even disrupt<\/a> \u2014 our greater ability to implement persistent, consistent anti-poverty policies.<\/p>\n We\u2019re not even in year 15 of this nuanced and incomplete \u201cbetting on ourselves\u201d experiment. You would think if San Antonio leaders were to share a NYT piece on our community\u2019s generalized ailments \u2014 they\u2019d do so in an attempt to stand up for this place and its people, promoting our attempts to mitigate such pains and not posit that we\u2019ve already failed. Sadly, these stories usually show up on social media feeds only to impatiently criticize our region\u2019s attempts at healing our ills, with the worst responses containing thinly veiled pleas to abandon our social programs.<\/p>\n Evaluating the performance of such initiatives is a mandate, not a privilege. As we well know, Ready to Work had a messy rollout. Some of that blame falls on me. Had we done a better job of communicating how difficult it would be to get employers, training providers and wraparound services on the same page \u2014 notwithstanding the backbreaking work of convincing underserved residents to take a chance on a new government program \u2014 we may have been better able to solicit some patience from our community.<\/p>\n Thankfully, the program has gathered steam and made good on voters\u2019 confidence in the concept. Less than five years from today, those who have graduated from Ready to Work will have earned far more in new wages<\/a> than the entire amount of sales tax that voters first invested in the program.\u00a0<\/p>\n In that same vein, we shouldn\u2019t rush to pit programs against one another. It\u2019s been said that if we had more pre-K, we would need less job training. That statement would be inarguable today if we had better invested in early childhood education half a century ago. As it stands, one in four San Antonio adults are functionally illiterate<\/a>, reading at or below a fifth grade level. Pre-K investments won\u2019t be successful if the students\u2019 parents can\u2019t hold a job. In today\u2019s San Antonio we need substantial funding toward early childhood education and workforce training, among a host of other worthy investments. The success of our community can\u2019t be a zero sum game.<\/p>\n Richmond, Virginia launched their comprehensive poverty mitigation efforts in 2014. Largely centered around workforce development, their Office of Community Wealth Building brought most of the city\u2019s anti-poverty measures under one figurative roof. Richmond\u2019s poverty rate has since fallen 36%<\/a>, mostly because their community didn\u2019t give up on the program or its goals. The effort was sustained through multiple mayors committed to a single vision, proving that it\u2019s possible to act urgently but not be hasty in the quest for results.<\/p>\n Some of the reactions to the San Antonio poverty stories have intimated that our attempts to invest in our people have been in vain. One even suggested that we choose the vague concept of \u201cgrowth,\u201d which sounds like a neatly packaged way to leave our current residents behind and more like a definition of cancer than an honest remedy. We\u2019re too quick to cite Austin as a model, ignoring the surge in displacement<\/a> and cost of living<\/a> amid their tech boom. As evidenced above, the answer to our pains won\u2019t be found in rapid growth alone. As we seek to lure high tech jobs to our community, we should champion the initiatives that might make it possible for San Antonio residents to pursue those opportunities. The family failed by the system for generations stands nothing to gain from a corporate relocation if we neglect them in that pursuit.\u00a0<\/p>\n Before we choose growth \u2014 we need to first prove we\u2019re deserving of it.<\/p>\n Of all the criticisms of San Antonio, the one I love most is that we haven\u2019t done enough for our people \u2014 so long as it\u2019s coupled with the promise that we\u2019re ready to do more.<\/p>\n Are you doing your part?<\/strong><\/p>\n We\u2019re committed to providing free, fair journalism for all<\/strong>. But without reader support, our nonprofit newsroom can\u2019t do its job to keep our San Antonio community informed and empowered.<\/p>\n This work is\u00a0critical \u2014 will you help us sustain it?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Commentaries at the San Antonio Report provide space for our community to share perspectives and offer solutions to…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":801645,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5133],"tags":[5229,12613,326455,326456,5877,104744,247388,140639,7202,7203,326457,358,70016,15353,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,326458],"class_list":{"0":"post-801644","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-antonio","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-economic-development","10":"tag-economic-pains","11":"tag-education-investment","12":"tag-poverty","13":"tag-pre-k","14":"tag-pre-k-4-sa","15":"tag-ready-to-work","16":"tag-san-antonio","17":"tag-sanantonio","18":"tag-socioeconomically-segregated","19":"tag-texas","20":"tag-texas-monthly","21":"tag-the-new-york-times","22":"tag-tx","23":"tag-united-states","24":"tag-united-states-of-america","25":"tag-unitedstates","26":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","27":"tag-us","28":"tag-usa","29":"tag-workforce-investment"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116586893065036107","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=801644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/801645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=801644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=801644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=801644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}