San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg recommended in an internal memo last week that the city’s Ready To Work program be utilized to help laid-off federal employees. Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Eric Dietrich

Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.

“What you have to understand is the public has a very short memory. But corporations — they never forget.” — Martin Scorsese as the corporate sponsor in the 1994 film Quiz Show

One of the more auspicious moments in Mayor Ron Nirenberg’s four-term tenure came when he co-wrote a letter to Jeff Bezos, the billionaire CEO of Amazon.

At the time, municipalities were throwing tax breaks at the second-largest company on Earth for the privilege of being considered for its new corporate headquarters. “Want jobs? Then bribe us with government subsidies like the $3 billion Foxconn got to build a factory in Wisconsin,” was Amazon’s subtextual diktat.

“Blindly giving away the farm isn’t our style,” Nirenberg and Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said in a joint letter to Bezos. And with that, SA withdrew from a humiliating race to the bottom.

Of course, San Antonio was unlikely to win Amazon’s HQ anyway, and Nirenberg’s conveniently timed progressive grandstanding has frequently stood in contrast with the less-than-inspiring sausage-making that goes with governing.

Last month, for example, Nirenberg penned a letter to the editors of Texas Monthly in which he called out the state legislature for giving “pay raises to jailers but none to public school teachers.” He also lamented that “public safety accounts for nearly two out of every three dollars in the city’s general-fund.”

Even so, it’s doubtful Mayor Ron will be sporting a Defund The Police T-shirt anytime soon.

Indeed, a far-less-radical charter change that went to a local vote in 2023 could have freed up jail space by ticketing petty crimes such as shoplifting and graffiti, and it also would have appointed a justice watchdog to go over the police budget with a fine-tooth comb.

Nirenberg not only refused to support that measure, he went on TV and hyperbolized a purported “lack of consequences for low-level crimes.” In doing so, he joined a chorus of bad-faith critics who alleged that a ballot initiative signed by more than 37,000 San Antonians was the diabolical work of “outside agitators” hellbent on decriminalizing theft and fomenting anti-racist riots.

The Texas Monthly article Nirenberg recently felt compelled to set straight — one bearing the headline “San Antonio Is Booming. Why Is It Still So Poor?” — was one he also recommended as “a must read for all who care about our city” and “an honest reckoning with the systemic racism that … continues to shape many of the inequities we face today.”

In the piece, award-winning journalist Mimi Swartz documented the Alamo City’s persistent generational poverty next to a checkered past of pro-growth agendas. Target ’90 under then-Mayor Henry Cisneros and the Decade of Downtown under then-Mayor Julián Castro boasted “huge tax incentives, fee waivers and infrastructure grants” for real estate moguls, Swartz wrote. Meanwhile, “the really tough stuff” — poverty reduction, education and improving health outcomes — “was passed over in favor of developments for a wealthier clientele.”

“San Antonio’s ‘structure’ remains one dominated by business interests — mostly Anglo — that put short-term gains over improving the lives of San Antonians for the long haul,” Swartz reported, citing remarks from María Berriozábal, the first Latina to serve on City Council.

To Nirenberg, who staked his mayoral legacy on the acuity of his “equity lens,” the Texas Monthly report must have stung.

“While I don’t dispute any of her facts, San Antonio native Mimi Swartz selectively curates those facts to make her argument,” Nirenberg charged. He took particular umbrage when she quoted Diane Sánchez, former president of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, who asked, “How can we have [produced] two Housing and Urban Development secretaries [Cisneros and Castro], and San Antonio has one of the biggest housing problems in the U.S.?”

Nirenberg countered that San Antonio is affected by “larger economic forces” that present challenges to major metros nationwide.

“That’s what makes the article’s potshot — quoting a former president of the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce asking how a city that provided the nation with two Housing and Urban Development secretaries could face an affordable-housing crisis — so baseless,” the mayor wrote. “Find me a city in America that hasn’t struggled with housing costs in the post-pandemic economy, and name me a city that has done more than San Antonio to address it. (The sound you’re hearing now is crickets.)”

Snark aside, Nirenberg presented a straw man fallacy — a misrepresentation of an opponent’s argument to render it easier to refute. Sánchez didn’t actually ask how our city “could face an affordable-housing crisis”, as Nirenberg subtly restated her question. Instead, she asked how we could face “one of the biggest housing problems in the U.S.”

Merely pointing out that every city has “struggled with housing costs in the post-pandemic economy” isn’t a reasonable excuse for San Antonio’s failings. It’s like trying to explain away the F grade you got on exam by saying everyone else got a C or worse.

Per Nirenberg’s challenge, can we name a city that’s done more than San Antonio to address housing costs? Although posed as a bold statement, it’s the kind of political rhetoric that the mayor likely knows is impossible to refute with data.

If one points out that Houston, Fort Worth and El Paso all have lower rates of homelessness per 100,000 residents than San Antonio, Nirenberg might point out the difference between the cards our city’s been dealt versus how well we’ve played the hand.

So too if one points out that eight metro areas beat San Antonio-New Braunfels on the average cost of new residential construction. Or that Washington, D.C., has the highest concentration of subsidized housing per capita. Or that Chicago is doing more to promote “yes, in my backyard” housing policies by loosening zoning restrictions.

Or that the reported wait times for applicants to Opportunity Home, formerly the San Antonio Housing Authority, are measured in years.

However one decides to fact-check Nirenberg, it’s inarguable that San Antonio isn’t doing all it can.

Nirenberg himself has described the city’s decision to leave $20 million in state tax credits on the table after City Council rejected plans to erect an affordable apartment complex in District 10 as “an embarrassment”.

“Nirenberg never spoke with me about the Vista Park zoning case until we were sitting on the dais the day of the vote,” wrote District 10 Councilman Marc Whyte in a defensive op-ed of his own published in the Express-News.

Tough to blame “larger economic forces” for fumbles like that. Yet the mayor found time to lecture an editor at Texas Monthly about the critical importance of collaboration.

“If you’re serious about making change,” Nirenberg remonstrated, “you need to know who holds the keys to funding, where accountability lies, when the ball is in your court to act alone, and when you must work as part of a coalition.”

Sage advice.

Rather than serious investigative journalism, Nirenberg was evidently expecting a business-section puff piece about how many jobs Toyota and Navistar bequeathed the city, proving that elected officials are quite happy to bask in those “larger economic forces” when it suits them.

And the mayor outright ignored Swartz’s critique of his signature Ready To Work initiative. In the article, she noted that “enrollment in the program has been far lower than anticipated” given a significant skills mismatch between available jobs and those applying. Indeed, the effort has since mutated into another thinly veiled experiment in corporate welfare and, as Swartz detailed, “will now be using $3 million in local tax dollars to subsidize 31 local companies to train employees they already have, instead of serving job-seekers.”

Nirenberg’s op-ed “selectively curates” those legitimate criticisms comfortably out of view.

Swartz’s invaluable labor of historical memory remembers a time when “urban renewal” served as a euphemism for the demolition of working-class neighborhoods. What if, in lieu of SeaWorld, Fiesta Texas and the Alamodome, San Antonio had invested in hospitals, schools and public housing?

Yes, “Republican-led state government cuts resources that would enhance opportunities for the working poor,” as Swartz rightly noted in her story. But nobody forced San Antonio to prioritize theme parks and sports arenas above basic needs. Instead we listened to “optimists” with bridges to sell us.

San Antonians are owed a non-condescending answer from their mayor to a very simple question: with a new Missions stadium in the works and Project Marvel looming, why is this time different? And are the behind-the-scenes NDA-protected negotiations and the massaging of already-low expectations really the only way to get things done?

To the man pushing all his worldly possessions through my neighborhood in a stolen grocery store cart two weeks ago, I suspect tedious exchanges like these won’t provide much solace.

Homelessness is up 18% nationwide, and the city’s own website notes that “95,000 households in Bexar County are left without housing options affordable to them.” Nirenberg’s much-ballyhooed plan to address this problem is to build or preserve “over 28,000 affordable homes” and develop “1,000 new permanent supportive housing units over the next 10 years.”

Leaders aspiring to some degree of honesty should level with us: If this is the best we can do, then our best isn’t good enough.

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This article appears in Jan 8-21, 2025.