Can San Antonio Keep the Love?

My wife (then girlfriend) and I moved to San Antonio in the fall of 2017. She was starting her first year at St. Mary’s University School of Law. Growing up in Spokane, Washington, I knew little to nothing about Texas, let alone San Antonio (besides the Spurs). 

Ask 18-year-old Cory what city he'd think he'd end up building his life in and I don't think San Antonio would've cracked the Top 100. Nothing against San Antonio, it just wasn't on my radar.

Anyhow, we ended up here because of law school (St. Mary’s is a great one by the way). But why did we stay? 

When we first moved here, San Antonio felt hard to get a grasp of. This city certainly has that small town feel, but San Antonio is huge in its own right (bigcitysmalltown?). I remember feeling shocked at how long it could take to reach the city limits driving North to South or East to West—all while weaving through independent municipalities like Leon Valley, Alamo Heights, and Castle Hills. 

We lived by Woodlawn Lake. A location I took for granted, looking back. We paid $750 per month for a large one-bedroom apartment with our dog. Coming from Austin where I'd paid $1,050 a month for a bedroom in a house with a few 30-somethings who weren't willing to split the costs to address a cockroach infestation, San Antonio's early appeal to us was in its affordability

I didn't appreciate this at the time, but now, as my wife and I are building a life (and a family for that matter) in San Antonio, I've come to believe that affordability means something much more than just being able to make ends meet.

In affordability there's both invaluable security and opportunity. You have the incredible opportunity to not compromise on what you want to do, or how you want to build your life. Living in an affordable city makes you feel like your city cares about you, not just what you earn. Affordability in a city is about making life feel easier for all who live in it, bit by bit, as the costs to live are kept down or unjust expenses are stripped away.

Affordability in a city is about your city loving you. Investing in you. Showing that you, the people who live there, are who it must answer to and work tirelessly to raise up. 

You see, in our transition from Austin to San Antonio, I had just resigned from a job. And my wife was a law student. So our household income wasn't…great. We made do as I picked up ad hoc consulting work and she worked part-time as a research assistant on top of being a full-time student. We were broke, sure, but we could pay our bills and buy our groceries. San Antonio provided a soft landing for the major life and career transitions we were making that have come to determine the lives that my wife and I have crafted for ourselves today.

I consulted part-time to keep income coming in, but outside of that I wrote, started to conduct my first interviews, played around a little bit with cameras, and ventured to every coffee shop in San Antonio. My wife was able to pour her energy into her studies at St. Mary's and seed the incredible academic career she's building for herself today.

San Antonio was a city that welcomed us. The culture was warm and familial, and the lifestyle didn't push us to be anything we didn't want to be. My wife and I each saw what we aspired to be reflected back to us in this city we began to call home: service-oriented, open and inclusive, passionate but not pushy, and above all, humble.

San Antonio felt like the first city that really loved us. And by the end of my wife's three years at St. Mary's, we'd come to love it too. There was no other place that made sense for us to call home.

We bought a home we love here (for half or sometimes a third the cost of homes friends and family are looking at in Washington, California, or even Austin). We're raising our two boys here, who love the DoSeum, the zoo, and the Botanical Garden. I think we're members at every museum and cultural institution in town.

Because of the investment San Antonio made in me, in us, we each feel invested in using our most productive years to pay it back.

Rent and mortgages aren't just numbers—in many cases, like for more than half of San Antonio renters, they are lifelines. For those of us fortunate enough (like we were) to take chances and invest in ourselves professionally through higher education or a career pivot, affordability is about more than costs. It's an affirmation. Keep going. Take the chance on yourself, because your community has your back. 

Now, affordability is by no means a guarantee. Of course, there's no use in singling out San Antonio when cities across the country are all struggling to keep the costs of living down. But man, were my wife and I so fortunate to find that love in San Antonio at the time we did, when we needed it most. The love in this city is still here, it's still real, but with time, continued growth and development without foresight can risk that love fading away.

When Austin, Texas paves over historic music venues and opens the way for out of town developers to leverage that love into a loan, you see how a community and its culture becomes a commodity. 

That love becomes lust, where investment-class power brokers who don’t know the area code mortgage the city away.  

San Antonio’s affordability is slipping. Market rents have increased more than 20% from pre-pandemic rates. Home prices have followed a similar trajectory, increasing over 20% as well, since 2020.

And now, based on the passing of the most recent ballot propositions this last November, it seems like in the coming years, we'll be seeing record levels of investment coming from both inside and most certainly outside of the city. I believe the growth and change can be good. And as our previous Mayor, now Bexar County Judge candidate, Ron Nirenberg once stated, San Antonio is a compassionate city, and I believe we can continue to build, grow, and develop in a compassionate way.

But it's absolutely essential to stress this, to make it a priority, to make it policy: the safeguarding of affordability. We must push hard for equity in the growth and development inevitably to come, to make sure that in our city, in our community, no love is lost.

Let's do the compassionate work to build, grow, and develop San Antonio for the demographics of today, not the demographics of who can afford to live here someday when all is said and built and leveraged in the future. 

Can San Antonio keep the love? For the future of my children, for the future of the city that I've been so grateful to love back, I hope so.

Footnotes:

1. On episode 145 of bigcitysmalltown, Michael Reyes, CEO of Opportunity Home San Antonio, explained that over half of San Antonio renters are "cost burdened"—spending more than 30% of their income on housing, a threshold economists consider high-risk for financial instability.
2. Where the legendary Armadillo World Headquarters once helped establish Austin as the "Live Music Capital of the World," out-of-town developers built Music Lane—a 163,000-square-foot luxury retail complex anchored by Hermès, Lululemon, Equinox, and Soho House. The contrast illustrates how cultural value created by local artists and entrepreneurs can be extracted and commodified by outside capital.
3. Greg Zlotnick of Saint Mary's University School of Law noted on bigcitysmalltown that San Antonio market rents increased "somewhere north of 20% from pre-pandemic rates," affecting approximately 40% of the city's population who are renters.
4. According to the Zillow Home Value Index, median home prices in San Antonio increased 22.3% between October 2020 and December 2025.