Edinburg is the fastest growing city in the Rio Grande Valley and the fifth fastest in the entire state.
But as the city’s population grows and is faced with the same effects of the housing crisis that the rest of the country has to deal with, the city council denied support for an affordable housing development after residents spoke out against it.
The city council unanimously rejected a resolution of support to RISE Residential, a Dallas-based real estate company, that proposed an affordable housing complex off the intersection of Sprague Street and McColl Road.
Though city staff had recommended approval, the council readily conceded to residents who asked the council to reject it during a city council meeting on Monday.
OBJECTIONS
About four Edinburg residents living along that intersection addressed the council to explain their opposition to the development.
Some of the cited reasons were the effects to traffic congestion and the burden to nearby schools.
Kristina Valadez, who has lived in a neighborhood near the site of the proposed development for 18 years, was among the residents who asked the council to deny the resolution supporting the apartment complex.
“We just feel like in our area, there’s just way too many apartments,” Valadez said, referring to the area from State Highway 107 to Freddy Gonzalez and from McColl to 10th Street.
“There’s nothing wrong with apartments, I just (believe in) building responsibly and planning for the future and what those apartments would look like long-term,” she said.
“In my 18 years of living here in the same address, I’ve seen how yeah, they look pretty in the beginning … but then you see the impact that it has in the community and it’s not a positive one,” Valadez said, adding that she believes the only beneficiaries are the developers who are making money off of them.
In addition to traffic and the burden to schools, she said crime had increased in the area.
City Councilmember Dan Diaz, who lives in the area, reiterated the concerns of his neighbors.
“In this instance, Sprague is already an inundated streets because of the schools that are there and the school Norma Linda Trevino, the elementary is already bursting at the seams — they’re adding, I think, a fourth portable building because they don’t have enough rooms for students,” Diaz said.
“So you’re question on where does the city want these kinds of complexes, well we want them in areas that are zoned multi-family all around where it’s not going to upset the neighbors,” he said.
Diaz noted the unusual way the area was zoned.
Off of a main road, there is typically a commercially zoned tract of land facing the street, followed by a multi-family tract right behind it, then a single-family tract behind that.
Here, though, there is a single-family tract right behind the commercial zone and then the multi-family tract where the development was proposed sits behind the single-family zone.
Planning and Zoning Director Jaime Acevedo told the council on Monday that the middle portion also used to be multi-family, but at some point it was flipped to commercial. When parties tried to rezone it back to multi-family, that’s when residents spoke in opposition to that and so the city re-zoned it to a single-family tract instead.
The 13.79 acres where RISE hoped to build the affordable housing apartments has been zoned multi-family since August 2008.
THE PROPOSAL
RISE Residential submitted plans for the Sprague Villas, an 80-unit apartment complex. Most of its units would have been two or three-bedroom apartments though it would have also had six one-bedroom and six studio apartments.
To try to appease residents, the complex would be limited to two stories and would have sat on only six of the 13 available acres.
“What they were offering was basically, for practical purposes, a down-zoning of the property,” said Bill Fisher of Sonoma Housing Advisors, which is representing RISE Residential for this project.
Fisher is also the father of Melissa Fisher, president of RISE Residential Management.
He added that none of the buildings would face the neighborhood the single-family subdivision next door, assuring people in the apartments would not be looking into their backyards.
RISE would also be willing to restrict the other half of the property to another 80 units.
“So that would top out the maximum number of units that could be done on the property to 160 and, again, that’s more than halving the density 50%,” Fisher said.
By turning them away, the residents are gambling, Fisher said.
“They’re turning away a maximum of 160 units, only 80 which would be built first, and gambling that somebody — a wealthy investor — is not going to come in and buy the tract and build 300 apartments right there,” Fisher said. “I think if they can come to understand that, that we’re a better option, that we would normally get some traction with that.”
While Fisher is representing RISE Residential on this project — and is also the father of Melissa Fisher, president of RISE Residential Management — Sonoma Housing Advisors can continue pursuing the property on behalf of other developers.
If RISE Residential can’t move forward with the affordable housing project, Fisher said he might work on developing apartments here that would be rented out at market value.
“I do have inventors that would be interested in a tract like this to build at market rate,” Fisher said, “but my first obligation is to my client right now which is RISE Residential and to explore all the avenues that we can to make it work affordable.”
However, Valadez, for one, said she would prefer that rather than having the low-income units.
“Yes, it sounds enticing because 80 versus 100, 80 versus 160 — yes, sounds good,” she said referring to RISE’s proposal, “but the whole low-income element that you add to that is just a whole other ballgame so you kind of have to weigh out ‘well, what do you want to do.’”
She said she’s not opposed to low-income housing in general but said the area already had affordable housing options.
“I’m not against affordable housing, I just think it needs to be balanced out because we already have apartments that are accepting Section 8 vouchers or in partnership to subsidize the rent,” Valadez said. “We already have that so we’re not against that either, it’s just now we’re adding more.”
STATE FUNDING
Support from the city is a significant part of a developer’s application to the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs. They apply to the state to receive competitive tax credits to help fund these types of developments.
“The process to get funding for these is very, very competitive,” said Nick Mitchell-Bennett, executive director of Come Dream Come Build, nonprofit community housing development organization based in Brownsville.
Mitchell-Bennett explained the application to TDHC consists of a point structure and every project needs to meet certain requirements to earn those points.
“One of those points is that the local community gives its support through a resolution by that municipality — whether it be Edinburg or Brownsville or wherever,” he said. “They have to vote yes and give some sort of financial support to it which means typically, they’ll waive all the construction permit (fees).”
Without that resolution of support, which Edinburg rejected for RISE during Monday’s meeting, developers can’t get those points.
“They’ll lose funding by one point all the time,” he said of developers who don’t get that resolution. “Just losing one point is massive. It could kill the deal.”
Noting he didn’t know the specifics of this project and therefore couldn’t say what the developers would do next, Mitchell-Bennet said lack of community support usually resulted in the project not moving forward.
“Typically, if the community doesn’t approve it then the state’s not going to allow it to happen,” he said.
AFFORDABLE HOUSING
Mitchell-Bennett argues that there’s a strong need for more affordable housing options in the Valley.
“McAllen and Brownsville are two of the least affordable communities in the state of Texas — least affordable,” Mitchell-Bennett said. “You’ve got places like Kerrville and Austin which are a little above them in least affordable but we’re ranked up there.”
That’s caused by low wages that continue to be much lower than in other places throughout the state.
“A lot of folks think ‘Oh, the Valley is inexpensive because I can buy the same house … that would cost me $350,000 in Austin that would only cost me $125,000 in the Rio Grande Valley,’” he said. “That may be true; however, that does not mean the house is affordable for people who live in the Valley because our incomes are so low.”
There have recently been two major affordable housing developments in the city — Avanti East on East Owassa Road which opened in 2018, and Aventi West on South McColl Road which was just completed in 2022. Both were done by MadHouse Development, according to Edinburg Planning and Zoning Director Jaime Acevedo.
Aside from that, they have two public housing developments — a senior living facility near the Hidalgo County courthouse and a development owned by the Edinburg Housing Authority.
But because the Valley’s population is growing so fast, Mitchell-Bennett estimates there’s a lack of about 25,000 affordable units in Hidalgo and Cameron counties.
“Is there a housing affordability crisis? There very much is in the Rio Grande Valley,” Mitchell-Bennett said. “It’s a desperate need.”
CDCB hasn’t yet received push back on their developments but is aware that it has happened, moreso in the Upper Valley than in the Lower Valley.
“A lot of it is, people will tell you that it is traffic that they’re worried about, that it’s the impact on their school system,” he said. “I have my opinions about what they’re really saying and it’s disturbing given the fact that we’re supposed to be a community that has really kind of picked itself up and is trying to pick itself up by its own bootstraps and here is the possibility of being able to get people an affordable place to live and some people don’t want them in their neighborhoods.”
He added that affordable housing provides benefits to a community by creating a tax base and getting people into safe, sanitary and affordable places to live that leads to children performing better in school and leads to better health outcomes.
“They are able to save more money and create more wealth for the community,” he said.
Mitchell-Bennett also pointed out that these affordable housing developments are not like the 1950s and 60s housing authority units. Developers of affordable housing apartments have to meet high standards set by the state and the federal government.
He described CDCB’s own units as little cottages.
“People walk through ours and think ‘This looks like something in Austin,’” he said.
Mitchell Bennett reiterated that providing people an affordable place to live is good for an entire community, even if it creates a little more traffic.
“My concern is that they’re using traffic, they’re using impacts on their schools to redline low-income people out of their community and that’s just not healthy,” he said.
Diaz said balancing the needs of the community with the wishes of existing residents was a delicate issue.
“In this instance, this neighborhood, because they’ve already fought two or three different multi-family (developments) that had nothing to do with affordable housing, they’ve already organized enough that they come in numbers and it’s kind of hard to ignore them when they’re representing five or six HOAs,” Diaz said.
NEXT STEPS
The future of the project and the site where it was proposed remains up in the air.
Fisher said their application, this year, would have no chance of being competitive without the city council’s resolution of support so they would not be going forward with it.
But that’s not to say RISE is giving up. They will try to address community concerns through meetings with the neighboring residents, including Diaz.
“I believe RISE’s intent at this point is to double back to the council member who lives in the area which is Councilman Diaz and try to arrange a meeting with the neighbors and try to walk them through what kind of option that they really have under our situation,” Fisher said.
While the property is zoned for multi-family development, Diaz had asked Acevedo during the meeting to look into whether the city could prevent a multi-family unit from going into an area that is not considered to have the proper structure in place.
But having that infrastructure in place is like a chicken and the egg situation, Diaz said.
“In growth you say ‘Well, we need to expand the road,’” he said. “Well, we can’t expand the road if there isn’t growth in the area.”
He added, though, that the positives of someone developing that area is that they would have to expand that portion of Sprague.
Acevedo said he will be looking into the city’s options in the next few days including whether the city can initiate some type of rezoning for that tract.
“There have been instances where the city does a city-initiated rezoning but it’s typically done on a large scale, when the whole city’s evaluated and certain sections get changed,” Acevedo said. “It’s typically not done on a spot basis where you pick a property and rezone just one property.”
Fisher suggested the possibility of swapping the zoning designations for the property so that the single-family tract wouldn’t be sandwiched between the multi-family tract and the commercial tract on McColl.
“Whether the neighbors believe it or not, this is a real opportunity for them,” Fisher said. “They can resolve a lot of concerns about a lot of multi-family, as their direct neighbor, working with us and letting us work with the current owner to get everything into a better situation.”
“I can’t solve multi-family for them,” Fisher added. “I don’t think anyone can.”
