Introduction 

This week, the Civic Tech Scholars with Better Futures Institute hosted a panel of experts in quality of life - people working in healthcare, development, affordable housing, and homelessness prevention. We spoke with Mark Carmona, Rita Espinoza, and Carol Huber as a part of our series of conversations to gain a further understanding and development in San Antonio. 

Background on Experts 

Mark Carmona is the Chief Housing Officer for the City of San Antonio. His focuses are strategic housing and housing affordability. Through him, we gained significant understanding and insight on the homelessness issue and solutions for it. He is a passionate advocate for a housing-first approach to tackling homelessness. He has gained his expertise from a background in human and behavioral health services fields, which gives him an insight on the root causes of community issues. 

Rita Espinoza is the Chief of Epidemiology at the City of San Antonio. Having studied public health at Tulane University, she has dedicated her career to uplifting the health industry in San Antonio to improve general quality of life for all. 

Carol Huber is the Deputy Chief Public Health and Equity Officer for University Health. She has been involved in medical academia in many ways, for example being an Assistant Professor and a MPH/MBA Program Director at UT Health Houston, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Texas A&M. 

Key Insights and Takeaways 

During our conversation, we led an open discussion on the topic of Quality of Life with a focus on public health. We give speakers room to speak to what they feel most passionately about to reveal the most prominent issues in their field, while also asking questions to gather cohesive answers to our biggest questions. We have divided our findings into three categories. 

1. Key Themes & Opportunities for Further Exploration

An essential question we asked our panelists was: what is quality of life? To this, we received a series of important factors: 

• Financial comfort 
• Housing
• Access to healthcare
• Safety
• Community

Along with these factors, Rita Espinoza also clarified that 1) all of these things are connected, and 2) quality of life differs from person to person. From this conversation, we have developed the following questions as areas of further research: 

1. What would equitable transit oriented development look like in San Antonio? 
2. How can we better leverage technology and data science for equitable housing? 
3. Which social determinants of health are more critical to target in San Antonio? 

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2. Promising Practices 

While we discussed a lot of barriers and areas of improvement, the great thing is that there are already lots of programs and systems in place that are actively helping, or in the works of being implemented. 

Beat the Heat is a campaign implemented by the City of San Antonio. It is aimed at educating the population on the threats of heat on health, safety tips, resources for both information and help, as well as public places to go to cool off. 

There have been pushes to put a cap on housing prices in developing areas experiencing gentrification in order to prevent displacement. While this has not been implemented yet, the efforts to do so are a promising practice. 

The Twin Town Village is a promising housing development fighting against homelessness by providing safe, beautiful, and permanent housing options for hundreds of people. Their efforts are based on research of homelessness prevention, using data based decision making. 

Another homelessness housing provider is Haven for Hope, which is a shelter focused on meeting people where they are. They reach out to people in jail and on the streets, and have a campus in South and North San Antonio. 

Mark Carmona emphasized a “housing-first” approach, which is a promising philosophy based on the idea that housing is an essential human need and provides the security and safety for other factors of quality of life to thrive in. 

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3. Critical Challenges 

Our understanding of critical challenges is essential to creating more promising practices, and making sure we are tackling the right issues. We were able to pinpoint several key challenges from the conversation. 

1. Climate change

Climate change poses a significant quality of life threat when it comes to illness and transportation developments. Many people’s jobs are primarily outdoors which causes significant health issues. It is difficult to promote more talking and biking to save the planet and promote urban density with the increasing heat. 

2. Outreach and accessibility 

There is an issue of accessibility despite the promising programs in place. For example, many homeless people do not have IDs which prevents them from accessing help options. Additionally, there are many student scholarships that go unapplied for because people are not aware of opportunities. There is always an issue of meeting people where they are, especially considering the digital divide.

Conclusion 

From our conversation, we can hear the stories of those witnessing the inequalities and difficulties that cause poor quality of life for some San Antonians, and the frustration they feel on how issues are handled and the barriers in the way of solving them. This is essential to our image of San Antonio, because at the end of the day a good quality of life for all San Antonians is the ultimate goal we have been working towards through several lenses. We can take away that accessibility is a crucial issue in San Antonio, and we are being faced with significant consequences of climate change and significant homelessness issues. If you are interested in collaborating or participating in further developing this research with us, sign up below to learn more about how you can contribute and benefit from this ongoing research.

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