With redevelopment of its original site nearly complete, Brooks is looking outside its borders to keep growing
Finally out of space on the century-old air base it’s been redeveloping, Brooks is jumping its fences.
Two decades after the city of San Antonio took over the former Brooks AFB, its 1,300 acres has been nearly filled with housing, manufacturing plants, schools, hotel rooms, restaurants, a hospital, offices and parks.
Now, its leaders are looking outside the base’s borders to keep its economic engine pumping on the South Side.
“Our mission and our vision is really about regional prosperity, not just redeveloping the former base,” said Leo Gomez, who has been Brooks president and CEO since 2013. “If we wake up someday and we’ve done a great job of redeveloping 1,308 acres, but it’s an island of prosperity in this corner of San Antonio, we have failed.”
Only about 300 acres of land is left within the base’s original footprint, and while completion of its redevelopment is still years off, plans for those acres’ use have been made and approved. Like most of the rest of the former base, they’ll be filled with a mix of housing, industry, office, medical and retail space, and parks.
With those plans set, the Brooks Redevelopment Authority is moving off base to the first chunk of its expansion. It plans to purchase part of a closed golf course next to Brooks where a nonprofit founded by former Mayor Henry Cisneros wants to build an arboretum.
It’ll be the next step in an effort that’s seen more than $1.3 billion invested since 2002, when the authority was created to remake the base. As the final 300-acre plan is built out, an additional $426 million of development will be added.
Brooks leaders are proud of the former base’s metamorphosis and the effect it’s had on the area’s economy.
In the five years through 2020, poverty in a 7,500-acre region that includes Brooks has declined 7%, household income has increased 24% and the high school graduation rate has increased 8% — all outpacing citywide changes, according to a Brooks analysis of census data.
“Are those all due to Brooks?” Gomez said. “No. But Brooks has been an influence.”
Slow transformation
The base’s transformation into a mixed-use community has happened slowly, its leaders say, because they’ve been picky about how it’s progressed. Early proposals from operators of car lots and manufacturing facilities that would employ dozens of people while taking most of the land were nixed, for example.
“We could have been complete with redeveloping (Brooks), depending on how we define redeveloping, very quickly,” said Chief Strategy Officer Connie Gonzalez. “And it would have been something that this community was unfortunately used to — not getting the quality of development that they deserve.”
Instead, Brooks has become a true mixed-use development focused around housing. More than 1,100 apartments already have been built, and more than 1,900 apartments, single-family rental homes and for-sale homes are in the works. Upward of 50 businesses have opened their doors and now employ 5,300 people, a workforce that’s expected to surpass 6,500 as more companies move in.
It’s not been easy. Convincing investors to finance projects and battling negative perceptions about the South Side have been challenging. So has securing funding for infrastructure such as roads and utilities and grappling with the effects of the pandemic on demand for office and other commercial space.
And though it’s also happened gradually, Brooks is increasingly a magnet for types of development long missing from the South Side.
In 2017, for example, Embassy Suites opened the area’s first full-service hotel, conference and event center there. And last year, construction began on the first-ever high-end office buildings in the area, a type of development Brooks long had sought to attract more of the high-paying jobs largely missing in its region.
The development authority, which is taking about a quarter of one building for its offices, so far is the only tenant.
Of the remaining 307 acres, 44% is to be used for housing; 26% for office, medical and industrial space; 21% for stores, restaurants and entertainment options; and the rest for green space and educational institutions, according to a plan approved recently by the development authority’s board.
Remaking bases
It’s taken more than a century to get here.
Brooks Field opened in 1917 as a flight training base where noteworthy aviators such as Charles Lindbergh and Claire Chennault learned to fly.
It later became a hub for aerospace medicine. The scientists there were at the forefront of research and testing on aviation and space medicine to make flight safer. Their work included developing a capsule that carried the monkey Sam into space Dec. 4, 1959, inventing a gold visor that protected astronauts’ eyes on the moon and space ice cream.
The base’s employment peaked at about 4,000 military members and civilians.
But it started changing in 1995, when Brooks AFB and Kelly AFB were targeted for closure as part of a Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, or BRAC, round. Brooks ultimately was spared and Kelly closed instead, decimating a workforce of about 10,000 at that Southwest Side base.
Soon after, local leaders sought to protect and refashion Brooks by creating a “city base” structure under which the city would own the base, lease buildings to the Air Force and commercially develop parts of it.
The Air Force handed over Brooks to the city in 2002. That provided a head start on its redevelopment, as Brooks in 2005 was part of another base closure round. The Air Force officially departed in 2011.
‘Jobs, few careers’
Kelly AFB has been remade, too. It’s now known as Port San Antonio.
Today, the 1,900-acre campus is home to more than 80 companies with 18,000 workers, a tally Port CEO Jim Perschbach wants to double in the next five to 10 years. Many of those are in cybersecurity, aerospace, defense and manufacturing, and some companies moved to the port to be closer to Air Force cyber units based at nearby Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland. About 800 acres has yet to be redeveloped.
Many of the jobs at the port are higher-skilled and come with higher salaries and more career advancement opportunities than those at Brooks. Brady Alexander, president of the Hot Wells Mission Reach neighborhood association near Brooks and a former employee at Kelly, said that’s a drawback.
“The deal at Brooks is there’s plenty of jobs, few careers,” he said.
At Brooks, major tenants include Cuisine Solutions, which makes gourmet entrees, sauces and other items; Okin Process, which handles customer support, billing, project management and other services; Mission Solar Energy, which manufactures solar power equipment; Mission Trail Baptist Hospital; the University of the Incarnate Word School of Osteopathic Medicine; and Nissei America Inc., which produces injection molding machines.
Some of those are expanding as newcomers steadily are added.
Among the latest, produce grower Soli Organic Inc. is building an automated indoor farm and packing facility, and an unidentified electrical vehicle parts manufacturer is planning to open a facility.
With such businesses, the average annual salary at Brooks is $55,000, just above last year’s average for the San Antonio-New Braunfels metro area.
Brooks has lured tenants in part because its land is exempt from property taxes, and it is designated as an opportunity zone, a program that provides tax breaks on capital gains if investors put their capital in long-term investments within the zones. It is also a tax increment reinvestment zone, which reimburses developers for infrastructure improvements from property tax revenue.
“There are many places where we can meet their numbers, and we make the short list because of the numbers,” Gomez said of Brooks’ ability to compete with other areas for projects.
Seeking residents
Gomez said he wants to sell residents on being part of Brooks, too.
In addition to multiple apartment complexes already there, 494 single-family rental homes are under construction. The first affordable housing is in the works, with units for residents earning up to 30%, 60% and 70% of the area median income. Local company Terramark Urban Homes is building the first for-sale housing, and recent listing prices have been as high as $500,000, Gonzalez said.
“Do you want to live here, would you bring your husband, your wife, your kiddos and make this your home and your community?” she said. “That’s what we’re pitching.”
The notion grew from a thought-process shift at Brooks in the past few years.
As the pandemic began to ease, Brooks leaders decided it was time to revisit the land use map for the former base. They spent nearly a year talking to tenants, developers and board members, discussing what was missing and what to do with the remaining acreage, and they approved revisions in September.
Adding more for-sale homes is a big focus, and a boutique grocery store, rooftop bar, dry cleaning service and day care facility are on the wish list. Because there weren’t options available previously, employees at Mission Trail and UIW with the means to purchase homes bought in other areas — “Lesson learned for us,” Gonzalez said.
The median value of a home within a 3-mile radius of Brooks surged from $90,300 in 2017 to $171,880 in 2022, an increase of 90.3%, according to the Bexar Appraisal District.
Building more housing is sensible because Brooks will maximize the amount of retail business it can draw if there aren’t enough families there to support it, said Ernest Brown, vice president of investments at Rohde, Ottmers & Siegel Realty Services.
“That’s necessary in order to create the population to support the retail and the services,” he said.
Jumping fences
With additional acquisitions outside its boundaries, the development authority soon may be partnering with more developers, employers or nonprofits such as Arboretum San Antonio, the group spearheading the nearby golf course’s conversion to a botanical garden and educational site.
“We have our eyes set on more properties within the greater region,” Gonzalez said.
Brown said redevelopment of Brooks already has had “a significant impact” outside its boundaries as it’s brought new businesses, housing, shopping and services to the area.
“It’s rippled out,” he said, with more restaurants, grocery stores and medical offices built and apartments renovated outside of but near the former base.
It’s evidence that the South Side — and perceptions about it — are changing, he said.
Years ago, investors didn’t think households there had enough disposable income to support a host of stores and services, but they do, Brown said. Builders and retailers are constructing homes and stores for families that are moving to the area for jobs and lower housing costs than elsewhere in the city.
“The South Side now has all the services and amenities that you need, and Brooks is benefiting from it,” he said. “I would also say that the South Side is benefiting from Brooks. There’s synergy there.”
Article originally published here: At the former Brooks Air Force Base, a metamorphosis is nearly complete. Or is it?