Project Marvel and the Future of San Antonio

Just suppose someone gave you the opportunity to invest $500 with the knowledge that you would make $9,000 in 30 years. Sounds pretty attractive, doesn’t it?

Well, what if I sweeten the pot by your uncle giving you $350 of the $500? Now you haven’t even invested all your own money. Wow, sounds pretty awesome, don’t you think?

Here’s the analogy.

The City of San Antonio is you; the $500 is the $489-million the city would invest to make Project Marvel happen. The rich uncle is the State government providing $350-million of our investment through a Project Finance Zone, funded through the state’s share of the hotel-motel tax.

Essentially it is coming from hospitality operators within 3 miles of Convention Center, and it is designed to help cities fund venues, like Project Marvel.

If we don’t take it, it never comes to us and it can’t be used to repair pot holes or help the homeless.

The City Council is still debating on whether the city will support Project Marvel, but its complicated.

Let me try to lay out some points which I feel compel us all to get behind this project which is a generational opportunity to move our city ahead. To fail to seize this opportunity would be highly detrimental to our entire metropolitan area.

San Antonio is truly one of the fastest growing cities in the United States, 3rd fastest in 2023, but we also have the highest poverty rate of any large city, about 17%.

Unfortunately, this figure has gone down very little over time, as generationally low-income families are not making much progress. As a consequence, San Antonio also has one of the poorest health ratings among large cities.

Factoid: San Antonio was the largest city in Texas 100 years ago, until the 1930 census when Houston passed us.

Population and GDP

Mayor Jones made a point that San Antonio is the seventh largest city in the U.S. and “we should act like it.” True, but let’s look at the bigger picture. San Antonio is the largest city in the metropolitan area, but our metropolitan statistical area (MSA), the geography that functions as one single entity, includes Boerne, New Braunfels, Seguin, Pleasanton, to the dozen smaller municipalities like Alamo Heights and Kirby.

Population is one measure, but we can also look at Gross Metropolitan Product, like GDP for metros. By this measure our rank in the US is 33rd, behind Austin at 22nd.

The difference is that income and production in Austin is much higher than San Antonio, $248-billion to $182-billion. Austin passed San Antonio about 20 years ago and is still growing at a faster rate.

City Health and Job Growth

Another measure of a city’s health is how attractive it is to businesses. This is important because it is an indicator of job growth potential. San Antonio has many small businesses and some grow into large organizations providing thousands of jobs.

Locally grown success stories include Frost Bank, Valero Energy, HEB Grocery, and USAA. However, we have not been good at attracting corporate headquarters to relocate here, because we lack the skilled labor force upon which businesses survive and thrive.

Think AT&T, which relocated here in 1996, providing a huge job boost downtown. But then they relocated to Dallas in 2008, primarily because their global business needed access to an airport like DFW with many more direct flights, and access to better quality executives.

Another example is Rackspace, locally born in 1996, a technology phenomenon, that boomed and has now withered away. One of their biggest problems was hiring qualified employees. San Antonio did not have a pool of talent to draw from so they had to go nationwide to find young folks who were qualified to make the company grow. However, very few candidates wanted to move to San Antonio; instead, they wanted to be in Austin because it has a better vibe. These folks have now gone on to become top executives at the numerous technology companies throughout Austin or started their own companies.

Corporate Relocation

Just how is San Antonio doing on the corporate relocation front? In the past five years, especially since Covid, Texas has been a real magnet for corporate relocations, with Dallas at 100, Houston at 31 and then Austin at 81! Huge successes in the Texas Triangle! What about San Antonio? Sorry, zero.

In fact, we lost NuStar Energy when they were bought out by Sunoco.

Why do we need big corporations? They provide opportunities for big corporate salaries and they provide great career paths for our young folks.

When your children or grandchildren graduate, don’t you want them to find good jobs here, rather than having to move off to Dallas, New York or LA to pursue careers?

It’s very unlikely someone can start a hugely successful enterprise right out of school. They need some time to learn real skills in the marketplace and learn how things really work in the world and it takes time and good workplace mentors to train them for bigger and better things ahead. San Antonio lacks this depth and breadth of expertise, unfortunately.

Charitable Giving

Another reason that high incomes help a city is charitable giving. We are a very charitable and generous town, but if you ask anyone at a non-profit, we just don’t have the depth of wealth that Dallas, Houston or even Austin has when it comes to supporting the many great organizations that help the low income and highly challenged citizens in our metro.

What exactly will Project Marvel do for the Alamo City?

Of course, there is a Spurs arena in the plan, as we all know, but there is so much more.

You may have thought, “What we will do with the old Frost Center?”

Well, the Stock Show and Rodeo have big plans to expand from just one month a year in February. They have plans for a year-round event center for many western events, like team roping and other programs related to our western heritage and South Texas roots.

Looking at what Ft. Worth has done with their Stockyards, and other programs around the country there are immense opportunities to create a world-class event center, ALL YEAR LONG!

Originally, locating the AT&T Center there 25 years ago was the county’s Hail-Mary to keep the Spurs in San Antonio, when the city didn’t step up. It was hoped that there would be more development in this by-passed part of town, which we all know didn’t really happen.

It did however, give new life to the Rodeo, and that delivers millions of dollars in scholarships to young folks all over our region. Now, the Rodeo organization sees the potential to ramp up their operations to an entirely new level, which will benefit tens of thousands in our community and draw visitors from all over the United States. For more information, go to the pod-cast at “greater 210.”

Then, there is the need to enhance our convention center. True, we added 100,000 square feet about 10 years ago, but we have fallen behind other cities, and even Austin is larger.

San Antonio’s Largest Event Centers

The Convention Center and Visitors Bureau sees the largest conventions not booking here, because they are not large enough and do not have the up-to-date facilities that are now REQUIRED.

Consequently, they report we lost 634,251 room nights in local hotels which equates an economic loss of well over $431-million. Some say $700-million.

The positive economic impact of building the next 150,000 square foot expansion to the convention center with a new convention center hotel will be over $1-billion over the next ten years.

Then, there is the venerable Alamodome, maligned that it failed to bring us an NFL team. Nevertheless, the Alamodome stays mostly booked throughout the year with many events, including housing the Spurs for a time when the Hemisfair-vintage convention center arena was torn down, to now becoming the homefield of the UTSA Roadrunners football team.

We have watched the New Orleans Saints, Astros baseball and the Valero Alamo Bowl there. In fact, the Alamodome was too booked up to accept Taylor Swift’s famous ERAs tour. That would have been sold out and a huge economic benefit for San Antonio.

We just hosted the NCAA Final Four, and we were told that will be the last one, because we desperately need to update the facility.

Final Four is a three-day event with a big rock concert and may other associated events combined into the weekend, with a $440-million impact. A great showcase of San Antonio that will never be again without Project Marvel.

Educational Benefits to Moving Forward with Project Marvel

Then, there is also education.

Project Marvel will build a 20,000 square foot home for UTSA’s School of Hotel Management, providing educational opportunities for many of our young people. It will also take the obsolete, circular John H Wood Federal Courthouse and turn it into a 5,000-seat concert venue.

Also, Project Marvel is creating an estimated 3,000 jobs.

Project Marvel is a good deal for all of San Antonio, as I hope this demonstrates.

There is a Roman maxim that says, The One who does not move forward, moves backward.

San Antonio will never stand still. Which way do we go? Forward or Backward?