Cost of gentrification at Mission Road park

This Thursday, the City Council will vote on a proposed zoning change that could displace more than 200 residents of a South Side trailer park from their homes.

It's a case that will force council members to confront thorny questions about the real-life consequences of gentrification, and what limits we should put on the value of economic development.

Every time I think about this case, which affects nearly 21 acres of property at 1515 Mission Road, I find myself flashing back to the story of Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles. Although the particulars of this case are very different and the scale much smaller, you can sense a similar lack of regard for anything whose worth can't be measured in dollars and cents.

In the case of Mission Road, developer White-Conlee is looking at a property that sits between Riverside Golf Course and Concepción Park, and has recently benefited from the San Antonio River Improvements Project. White-Conlee sees the potential for high-end apartments to replace the modest trailer homes that sit on blocks at the Mission Trails Mobile Home Community.

It's simple mathematics: 400 apartments renting for about $1,000 a month vs. 200 mobile-home units that generally rent for $300-$350. The proposed project will likely drive up property values for area homeowners and bring in more revenue to the city.

But there's always a hitch to this kind of gentrification.

The residents don't want to move, and they say they received no notice from the Colorado-based property owners, American Family Communities, that they were being targeted for displacement.

Mary Cubillos Flores, 62, and her husband have lived at Mission Trails for 37 years. He's a retired sheet-metal worker, and she's a retired civil servant.

To Flores, the destruction of Mission Trails means that children who are currently enrolled at San Antonio Independent School District schools will have to transfer to new schools, and, in some cases, new districts. It means all kinds of complications for elderly and disabled residents. It means she and her husband will no longer live around the corner from their doctor.

More importantly, it means the uprooting of a community. When you drive through Mission Trails, you see swing sets, basketball hoops, birdbaths and barbecue pits. It's not just some abstract inconvenience for developers.

“I'm not against development,” Flores told me Friday. “But you're talking about building over the lives of people who've been here for a long time.”

That second sentence easily could have been uttered by a member of the 1,000 Mexican American families displaced from Chavez Ravine in the 1950s. A tight-knit community in a valley a few miles from downtown Los Angeles, Chavez Ravine was bulldozed by the city — under the power of eminent domain — to make room for a federally funded housing project that never came to fruition.

Eventually, the city sold the property to Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley, who moved his team to L.A., and built a baseball stadium in Chavez Ravine.

Did the construction of a major-league baseball park prove to be a major economic asset for Los Angeles? Of course. But what price do you put on a development that strips a community of its identity?

It's a question that council members should seriously consider on Thursday.

A German perspective on Castro

Martin Klingst, the Washington correspondent for Die Zeit, one of Germany's leading newspapers, visited San Antonio a few months ago, and last week's issue of the paper offered Klingst's take on the political future of Mayor Julián Castro.

Klingst describes Castro as “slight and unassuming,” adding that he comes across as a “youthful version of Barack Obama at the beginning of his political career.”

Klingst notes that Castro would like to someday spend a year in Latin America perfecting his Spanish, but adds, “That has to wait because the Democrats need him at home.”

ggarcia@express-news.net