A Greener City: S.A. just keeps on sprawling

We would become a city of responsible urban design and protected natural and culture resources, with the foresight to build infrastructure ahead of new development.

Our community would become pedestrian friendly and decreasingly car dependent.

It all sounded very nice on paper.

Then San Antonio's economy took flight. New residents — many of them from California and South and West Texas — poured into San Antonio and its suburbs.

The region went on a record-breaking home-building spree, adding more than 123,000 single-family houses in the years following the adoption of the master plan, according to data from the housing research firm Metrostudy.

That's a quarter of all single-family homes in the entire metropolitan area, which includes Bexar and its surrounding counties.

Job growth and an affordable housing market — kept affordable, in part, by few limits on development — have combined to power San Antonio's growth, and continue to help buoy the city through these rocky economic times.

But at the same time, nearly all of those 123,000 homes sprouted in traditional suburban neighborhoods on the edge of Bexar County and beyond, where people typically commute long distances to work and drive for every errand.

A report from the Texas Transportation Institute last year estimated that residents spend 39 hours a year stuck in rush hour, twice as much time as they did in 1995. More tree canopy has been lost, and as early as 2002 the Bexar Appraisal District estimated that more than half of the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone on the North Side already had been developed.