By Tony Cantú
Contributing Writer

The rate of residential demolition in Alamo Heights – a divisive community topic pitting preservationists against expansion-minded property owners – is actually lower than previously estimated, according to a newly developed study.

Alamo Heights City Council member Bill Kiel said articles in the North San Antonio Times detailing residential teardowns prompted him to do his own research.

Resulting findings – exhaustively researched through examination of Bexar Appraisal District records, on-site visits to demolition sites and dissection of the city’s own less-than-accurate estimates – yield a decidedly different demolition landscape than one previously presented by the city, with just over 50 property demolitions in the past four years.

From 2004 to the end of May this year, 53 single-family homes have undergone demolition, with an additional two pending, according to Kiel’s research. That total represents just 1.8 percent of Alamo Heights’ total housing stock in a 4-1/2 -year period, or less than half-a-percent per year, Kiel said.

Responding to a previous North San Antonio Times request for information, the city previously provided a tally of 86 demolitions. The total was given after the newspaper culled garage demolition permits from the city-provided list – entries for which were annotated by city officials. Kiel said some of the entries without such annotations might still have included those for garage demolition.

What’s more, the city’s tally did not account for duplicate permits on file – such as when a property owner renews a demolition request from one year to the next – which helped inflate the previous estimate provided by the city, Kiel said.

So Kiel decided to crunch the numbers himself, focusing on address-driven entries accompanied by city software code alerting to added revenue from bolstered, post-demolition assessed values – a surefire city gauge, the councilman suggested – thus arriving at the total of 53 teardowns since 2004.

The resulting data represents the first in-depth study of its kind for Alamo Heights, which Kiel hopes will be utilized as the staff hammers out an ongoing Comprehensive Plan for the city. Towards that end, Kiel provided the internal study to newly hired Community Development Director Ann McGlone, and shared his findings with the North San Antonio Times.

Because the total 53 structures included both single-family and multi-family properties, Kiel extrapolated only single-family residential structures to arrive at his matrix, resulting in a further distilled list. “It doesn’t do any good to mix single-family with multi-family, so I go one step further and cook it down to 26 properties which are single-family.”

It was at this level of research that findings took surprising turns in terms of resulting economic data, Kiel said. Prior to demolition, the median value of a home targeted for demolition was $67,410, growing tenfold post-demolition to a median of $657,350, the study found. Taken collectively, replacement homes added $20.1 million to the city’s tax rolls, versus just $2.1 million before demolition, according to the study.

In terms of their post-demolition dimensions, replacement homes grew in size from a citywide median of 1,500 square feet to 3,700 square feet, according to the study. Kiel even broke down median sizes pre- and post-demolition to individual neighborhoods: In the Blue Bonnet neighborhood, median square footage grew from 1,692 to 4,077; in the cottage district 1,299 to 3,192; and in Montclair 1,493 to 4,798. The Cambridge/ Patterson neighborhood saw the biggest jump, with replacement homes there reaching a median 5,029 square feet, up from 2,297 square feet before demolition.

The collected data buttressed Kiel’s idea – first proposed about a year ago – to encourage construction of larger one-story homes rather than the two-story replacement structures increasingly dotting the landscape, he said. Toward that end, he said he plans to continue pushing for more flexible lot coverage allowances for property owners enabling them to construct bigger one-story homes.

“The code permits 35 percent lot coverage, and you have to take 500 square feet of that for the garage,” he said. “In the cottage district, the median size is 1,500 square feet, which is a little short of what people need today.”

His proposal would call for a sliding scale depending on the size of the lot on which a home is located. Although not a part of the study, his proposal hinges on suspicions that residents – particularly older homeowners – would opt to build larger, one-story homes rather than two-story replacements demolition opponents decry.

Citywide hemming and hawing over demolition usually centers on the prevalence of two-story replacement homes with oversized dimensions, which offer an architectural contrast to established neighborhoods. Changing lot coverage guidelines could go a long way to quell the demolition debate, Kiel suggested.

“I would like to see more one-story houses because you don’t ever hear anybody squawk about one-story houses,” he said. “One-story houses can be very popular if they can be of a certain size. This will be type of proposal discussed in comprehensive plan.”

Even without city prodding, the real estate market itself may offer incentives for one-story construction, Kiel said. In some city blocks, such as on Retama and Lamont, a handful of two-story replacement homes languish unsold after years on the market, he said.

Another intangible benefit to the study is to provide residents with factual data from which to arrive at their conclusions, rather than relying on emotional debate or anecdotal evidence in decrying a perceived demolition trend.