A Slice of Disparity: Examining Inequity and Homelessness In SA

April 30, 2020 - San Antonio

By Dr. Joseph Lopez - Contributing Writer, San Antonio Sentinel

Growing up in San Antonio in the 80’s and 90’s on the northwest side of town, I was born into a cross-pollination of social and cultural strata.  My family’s roots in San Antonio date back to the Texas Revolution and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. More recently (in the 50s and 60s) my father was raised Methodist off Cincinnati St., while my mother lived close by, on St. Cloud.  By the time I was born, we were living in the medical center. I attended Glenn Oaks Elementary, Pat Neff Middle School, followed by Holmes High School.

While attending Holmes, I played Varsity tennis and, despite the fact that I was quantitatively dumb (as in my test scores showed I lacked average intelligence), I had a very dynamic educational experience. I took regular and remedial courses in some subjects and AP and dual-credit courses in classes such as history and computer science. Due to my involvement with the Boy Scouts of America, the tennis team, and my close proximity to the medical center, I had the opportunity to make friends with peers from affluent backgrounds. I also hung out with friends who lived off literal dirt roads by Holmes, which my friends used to refer to as “little Mexico” (not a politically-correct term these days, but it was a lived reality for my friends).  

In 1999, however, I made my exodus from the Alamo City and ventured off up I-35 to attend college at the University of Texas at Austin. There, I obtained my BS, MA and Ph.D. in New Media in the Moody College of Communication.  Upon graduation, however, I wasted no time in getting back to San Antonio, where in 2010 I began teaching Convergent Media at the University of the Incarnate Word.  Here, I developed the Convergent Media concentration and built an academic program that stretched beyond the four walls of the classroom and encouraged students to follow their dreams.

Over the next 7 years, I would experience many life-defining moments which I would journal on my personal blog. One of these moments involved my action-based research about inequities in San Antonio, TX. After realizing many of my colleagues and friends had similar experiences growing up and that many of my students were still being raised in these situations, I began a project in 2015 called openEDSA. Using 2010 census data and an API provided by The New York Times, I teamed up with local engineer/designer Jeremy Zunker to further investigate the economic and racial geographic information of Bexar County.  

The initial findings suggested that much of San Antonio’s wealth was concentrated in a triangle from downtown San Antonio, up IH-10 to Borne and across 46 to Bulverde (it should be noted not all of this area is affluent, but a large part of it is). The data provided by other newspapers and researchers have since backed up this finding.

OpenEDSA would go on to take the information we gathered and document and host art-based outreach taking place outside of the triangle in an effort to recognize organizations and individuals doing advocacy based worked in those communities. You can still go to openEDSA.org to this day and follow various initiatives and see past ones to get an idea of the various ways people conduct arts-based advocacy work in San Antonio.

More recently, my interests took a “deeper dive” into other city issues such as crime, homelessness and drug/mental health problems. This new research uses geographic mapping to better understand inequities taking place and how we may address, and at the very least, better understand core differences in the lived-realities of all San Antonians.

In 2017, I opened a HiFi shop called Dreamonoid’s on 1711 Guadalupe ST near downtown. With my family having roots on the Westside as far back as the 1920’s, I saw this as an opportunity to bring some commerce back home to the Westside. Myself and my business partner (who grew up in the Harlandale area) both take great pride in having Dreamonoid’s HiFi be part of the Westside commerce landscape.  

I personally interact with the Westside Development Corporation, as well as Launch SA, TechBloc, and other community nonprofits and government entities. We’ve also both made an effort to meet with our respective council members as well as State Representative Diego Bernal who even made an appearance on my podcast last year to discuss this exact topic.

Much like San Antonio, Guadalupe Street still faces a long road ahead. Looking out the window from our shop, we still see our fair share of drug addiction, vagrancy, and derelict buildings. The businesses that have survived, like Linda’s Mexican Restaurant, have done it through pure effort and determination. Like us, they take advantage of grants when available and make every effort to survive and thrive in these tough economic times. The fact remains though, that if we look at the geographic crime maps for San Antonio, one can easily see that Guadalupe St. is much like many other areas of San Antonio with a high rate of crime. 

My hope isn’t to draw divides, but to generate meaningful discourse on how we might bring equity to our geographical spaces. As an active member in San Antonio’s entrepreneurial community, I’ve noticed that these concerns resonate with many other local business owners, especially with SA’s homeless crisis creeping up to their storefronts and disrupting their communities. My general view is that, while America’s West Coast faces an epidemic of homelessness due to both housing costs and drug/mental illness issues, San Antonio’s homelessness crisis tends to be wholly centered around drug abuse and mental illness.  

Our housing is inexpensive compared to other cities, we have ample public housing opportunities available, and SAHA and Haven for Hope both claim to offer world class, leading solutions for people looking to be in a home and off the streets. With many parts of the US facing a methamphetamine pandemic, San Antonio has no doubt played a role as a source for this scourge, as covered in a previous article by the Sentinel.

RELATED: A Crisis on the Brink: San Antonio’s Homelessness and Addiction Conundrum

The issues we are facing as San Antonians do not have simple solutions. Back in 2015, I asserted that we needed more advocacy rather than charity in San Antonio. As part of my argument, I stated that I would take 100,000 engaged and equitable San Antonians over 100 million dollars to hire consultants to “fix” our problems. In 2020, I still feel that you and I have to do our part, whatever that may be, to become civically engaged advocates for helping others and moving our city forward. For some, this may mean volunteering, going to neighborhood meetings, building community resources, volunteering on the board of a non-profit, running a successful small business that stimulates the local economy, buying local, or working as a first responder.

I now teach New Media in the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University in College Station where I try to get my students to visit San Antonio and hopefully bring their talent our way. Likewise, I also bring many native San Antonians to visit the campus at Texas A&M in the hopes that they will one day attend and later bring their talents back to SA. 

We all have roles we can play. In my personal opinion, a lot of these roles are not easy ones. While most of us only see law enforcement for traffic tickets, the reality is that many law enforcement officers' typical days involve responding to a computer screen full of 911 calls dispatching them to deal with situations such as the ones we’ve discussed above. Now, it’s time for us to confront these issues as well. While we may not be engaging with dangerous situations on a daily basis, we nonetheless can make a vital difference in keeping our city on the right track simply by being engaged and keeping equity at the forefront of all our efforts. 

So I end this article with the following questions:

• What do you feel others are doing help bring equity to our city?

• What is an idea you have to help with some of the inequity you see in our city?

• What is your fondest memory of San Antonio?

• What is a hardship you have seen others in SA overcome and how?