Pairing Housing + Transportation to Uplift Communities Across San Antonio
A Housing Typology Survey
The Urban Land Institute’s (ULI) Homeless to Housed (H2H) initiative focuses on identifying best practices and effective solutions for addressing the needs of unhoused people through research, local engagement, and awareness-building activities. With support from the H2H initiative, ULI San Antonio embarked on a Homeless to Housed journey to enhance education around the range of housing types San Antonians must begin to embrace to ensure that everyone in the city has a place to call home. Homelessness in San Antonio is a community challenge, with 3,155 people living unhoused in the city using 2023 point-in-time calculations.
Housing every San Antonian, however, will require systemic change that will need to include emergency shelters and more transitional housing as well as additional affordable, attainable, and accessible housing units built across its landscape. In a city quite comfortable with the traditional single-family home, new housing policies are finally taking hold and stretching building configurations to accommodate new modes of living, owning, and renting in San Antonio. A recent accessory dwelling (ADU) ordinance gained approval, representing significant progress for the city; yet residents are still wary of proximate density and of homes that do not fit the traditional single-family format. Knowing that single-family homeownership can be difficult to achieve for a significant number of people, ULI San Antonio and Local Initiative Support Corporation–San Antonio (LISC) partnered to create a survey tool that would expose community members to a wider range of housing typologies and gather feedback on potential housing types of interest.
Report Summary: The Urban Land Institute’s (ULI) Homeless to Housed (H2H) initiative focuses on identifying best practices and effective solutions for addressing the needs of unhoused people through research, local engagement, and awareness-building activities. With support from the H2H initiative, ULI San Antonio embarked on a Homeless to Housed journey to enhance education around the range of housing types San Antonians must begin to embrace to ensure that everyone in the city has a place to call home. Homelessness in San Antonio is a community challenge, with 3,155 people living unhoused in the city using 2023 point-in-time calculations.
Housing every San Antonian, however, will require systemic change that will need to include emergency shelters and more transitional housing as well as additional affordable, attainable, and accessible housing units built across its landscape. In a city quite comfortable with the traditional single-family home, new housing policies are finally taking hold and stretching building configurations to accommodate new modes of living, owning, and renting in San Antonio. A recent accessory dwelling (ADU) ordinance gained approval, representing significant progress for the city; yet residents are still wary of proximate density and of homes that do not fit the traditional single-family format. Knowing that single-family homeownership can be difficult to achieve for a significant number of people, ULI San Antonio and Local Initiative Support Corporation–San Antonio (LISC) partnered to create a survey tool that would expose community members to a wider range of housing typologies and gather feedback on potential housing types of interest.