Monday Musings #47: Making Lone Star the People’s Pearl

It’s a new year, and that means yet another developer has announced plans to bring the long-dormant Lone Star Brewery Complex back to life. The 33-acre blighted site was once home to a brewery that, like the Pearl, was synonymous with San Antonio.

Lone Star Beer was produced at the site for six decades until 1996. Before then, the brewery operated out of locations on South Flores Street and in the complex now occupied by the San Antonio Museum of Art. 

This time, its redevelopment might actually happen. 

New Braunfels-based Southstar has purchased the property from San Antonio’s Gray Street Partners and Houston-based Midway, whose development plans for Lone Star never materialized. Instead, the two entities apparently will participate with Southstar as financial partners, and according to an article in the San Antonio Express-News, see a version of its original plan for housing, mixed retail, a hotel and public spaces realized.

Southstar has a strong track record of taking properties where other would-be developers have come up short and finding ways to make their plans work. It purchased the undeveloped property north of the Texas A&M-San Antonio University campus from Verano, a Las Vegas-based company, and built the Vida master plan community, designed to be a walkable neighborhood of housing, retail, hiking trails and public spaces. Southstar also developed the Mission Del Lago master plan community on the Southside. 

Southstar’s plans would be considerably enhanced by the city offering to partner with the company to create a more ambitious linear park on both sides of the San Antonio River. This property, like the once-abandoned Pearl, an eyesore with great potential, is a clear example of where a public-private partnership should trump a purely for-profit, private development.

I’m suggesting the City of San Antonio use its authority to buy CPS Energy’s defunct Mission Road Power Plant and, across the river, the utility’s 17 acres of vacant land that abuts Lone Star and the Newell family’s property that has housed recycling operations for several decades. 

The city can partner with a private developer to convert the power plant into housing with ground-level retail, as it will do in Hemisfair with the federal office building at 727 East César E. Chávez Boulevard that it is acquiring from the U.S. General Services Administration.

The city could use its newly acquired property on both sides of the river to expand the 38-acre Roosevelt Park. While Southstar undoubtedly wants all of the available 70 acres in and around Lone Star for private development, the city would benefit more from a public-private partnership. So would Southstar. Such public investment would increase the value of whatever they do with Lone Star, and public infrastructure investment in an expanded linear park would probably reduce the developer’s infrastructure costs.

The Lone Star neighborhood residents would see their own property values soar if Lone Star is finally developed, especially if residents there and in Southtown and along South Flores Street can walk to an expanded park with a much-needed dog park. 

A Lone Star project that expands urban green space and public access to the river would serve as a complementary development to the new Spurs arena and other improvements coming to the southern reaches of Hemisfair. For Mayor Gina Jones and City Council, it could represent the first consensus initiative under her so far chaotic and ineffective mayoral term.

Southstar is not going to give up its riverfrontage, which is key to any successful private development, but a publicly-owned path along the river would guarantee pedestrians, cyclists and others unimpeded access to the river. The partnership could help create “the people’s Pearl” with expanded public park amenities along the river, maybe even a public parking garage that would save tens of millions of dollars for Southstar. VIA Metropolitan’s planned Green Line bus route would bring people north and south to the area without having to get there in a vehicle.

Long-term, we can begin to see a city that offers enviable living and work spaces stretching from River North, through downtown and Hemisfair, into Southtown and Lone Star, inching closer to San Antonio’s UNESCO World Heritage Mission District.

All we ask of Southstar is to design a project with a good mix of housing and retail that avoids fast food franchises, box stores, national discount brands and other tenants otherwise found in San Antonio’s sprawling outer rings. And partner with the city to create yet another truly transformative stretch of the San Antonio River.