Originally Posted by Hindentanic
It might be useful to consider where San Antonio's military installations are located: in the city's suburbs and fringes. So too is UTSA and the city's other universities and colleges, with the state public university being the furthest from the downtown core. USAA, Valero, Tesoro, Toyota, the Medical Center, and Port San Antonio are also in the suburban ring city, with USAA's headquarters and it's floor equivalent of New York City's former 1 World Trade Center not providing any greater boost to downtown activity or skyline. The economic engines to produce large numbers of stable middle and upper level jobs in San Antonio are all diffused outside the downtown area, leaving a core with a larger proportion of lower wage hospitality jobs serving outfits where the profits are sent away to national chain hoteliers. And "diffused" is the key word--San Antonio sprawls such that Manhattan, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Miami, and Pittsburgh all fit within its city limits, but San Antonio does not have anywhere near those combined populations or city GDPs. Maps from the 1960s boasted San Antonio's built or planned triple rings of highways, at the time seemingly more extensive than other cities in Texas and even more than most cities in the U.S., and much of this infrastructure was driven by San Antonio's many military installations into a feedback for suburban sprawl and patchwork development.
Austin's suburbs sprawl too, but it now has a stronger downtown, which has long been made up of three components: the commercial CBD, the state capitol, and the University of Texas campus. The latter two are huge economic engines of state largess operating almost as cities in themselves and around which large amounts of investment capital accrues. UT alone puts 74,000 people with high paychecks or attached Federal financing and grants right into the city center. The commercial CDB, however, was in no better shape in the 1990s than that of San Antonio, with a few local bank and insurance branch office buildings surrounded by empty warehouse and light industrial districts all of whose vitality had been sapped by sprawling suburban growth, which is where Dell and IBM are located. What has changed are general economic and demographic trends nationally to favor dynamic downtown cores of urban professionals, and Austin's has the immediacy of UT and State government to drive demand and investment and then retain them, for even Millennial lifestyles still gravitate around concentrations of Millennial money. Smaller Austin never built a highway network to the extent of that of San Antonio, and while that has made for terrible traffic, it may have restricted pressure to further sprawl as city growth later mushroomed and magnified additional growth pressure instead on the core, where the two large state-powered economic generators operate successfully regardless of traffic.
San Antonio's downtown still does not have the immediacy of investment that comes with a flagship state institution like UT or state government, and its comparable downtown redevelopment without such giant economic engines has been predictably slower. Had UTSA been built within the same proximity and connectivity to downtown that UT had done in Austin, then San Antonio's downtown core and inner suburbs would have been in much more advanced economic and developmental position. They are only now discussing the types of core development plans that Austin had discussed 20 years ago, and while San Antonio now has a downtown UTSA component campus and a new boom in downtown and inner ring construction with Frost, Pearl, and riverwalk expansions, San Antonio is still well behind the curve despite its seeming advantage over Austin in size of area and population. Suburban UTSA has long been spurring large developments not unlike UT Austin, but that development is lost into the sprawl. Density matters, but particularly density of capital, and for a downtown area, a flagship state university and permanent state governmental institutions continually cycling money on the scales of state budgets have greater economic heft than distant suburban sprawl or a river lined with enchilada restaurants.
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