New San Antonio community on the Southside provides affordable internet

August 31, 2022

San Antonio City Council already anticipated SouthStar Communities would breathe new life into 600 acres near Texas A&M University’s Southside campus when it approved a development deal in November 2019. Now, with the first apartments and homes being built this year, Southstar Communities is also tapping into existing infrastructure help bridge the digital divide on the Southside.

How? The New Braunfels-based developer will provide accessible, affordable internet to the VIDA San Antonio community that will have 4,000 residential units that include single family for-sale and for-rent homes, apartments, duplexes, townhomes, and student housing. The homes will be handled by national homebuilders like Lennar, Highland Homes, and Perry Homes.

Gretchen Howell, senior vice president of community development with SouthStar, says this is done by using a private company that specializes in micro trenching, which is where 10-gigabyte capacity fiber is laid in existing trenches. This provides for greater efficiency and less digging. Such a high gigabyte capacity is highly irregular in a residential space, Howell says.

The infrastructure could be used for something as ambitious as autonomous vehicles, or to just provide a higher bandwidth for students and residents of VIDA.

“We look at it and said, ‘Why wouldn’t we deliver that now if we could?'” Howell says. “Knowing that we will likely have a need sooner than we would have imagined.”

The need for access to internet on the Southside, where VIDA is being built, is great with 30% of households in that area are not connected, according to SA Digital Connects. The group is working to provide access to those households across all of Bexar County by 2025. It does this partly by enrolling those households in the federal Affordable Connectivity Program, which provides monthly discounts for internet service.

“I think there’s something powerful about how the private sector can play a role in how we how we create a more broad effort for digital inclusion in San Antonio,” Howell says.

SouthStar already has another community on the Southside called Mission Del Lago. It also has three others in New Braunfels including Vintage Oaks, The Crossings, and the recently announced Mayfair.