On New Braunfels Avenue, just west of her home, there was a First Mate seafood store, five-and-dimes such as Winn’s and TG&Y, pharmacies, barber shops and more barbecue joints than she can remember. 

“Everybody had a barbecue place,” said Miller, a 60-year-old middle-school science teacher.

She stayed in the community because several generations of her family called Harvard Place home. Her grandmother lived down the street from where she grew up, and today Miller owns both that house and her childhood home, which she rents out.

But most of the businesses Miller remembers are long gone. By the 1980s, heavy industry had taken over, with warehouses and plants popping up as companies gobbled up land with easy access to Interstate 10. The flight of families, mostly white, to the suburbs only accelerated the decline.

When the Frost Bank Center opened to the east of her neighborhood in 2002, many area residents thought that the restaurants, bars and new houses and apartments that often follow the arrival of an NBA team would help revive the area.

Very few of them ever came. 

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Now, as the Spurs look to move downtown, a proposal to use tax dollars to revitalize the arena, the Freeman Coliseum and surrounding grounds has once again raised the possibility of delivering economic growth to a part of San Antonio that residents feel has been neglected.

But 26 years after the Spurs arena first stirred those hopes, they’re skeptical.

While Proposition B, the referendum to use county tax dollars to fund a Spurs arena downtown, has drawn the most attention in the run-up to the Nov. 4 election, many on the East Side have their eyes on Proposition A. The measure would raise the county’s hotel and rental car tax to fund a $192 million redevelopment of the arena grounds, allowing the nonprofit that runs the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo to host Western-style events there year-round instead of only during the rodeo’s three-week run every February.

Prop A is a bid to prevent the Bexar County-owned coliseum site from becoming a wasteland if the Spurs move downtown. 

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But will the rodeo’s plan bring long-hoped-for economic growth to an area currently flanked by warehouses and industrial operations, such as the Coca-Cola bottling plant?

Miller doesn’t think a series of Western events, such as bull riding competitions and concerts, alone could pull off such a feat.

“It’s not dependent on the rodeo or the Spurs. It’s a city issue,” said Miller, the president of the Harvard Place Eastlawn Neighborhood Association. “This side of town has not seen any development since the ’60s and ’70s. You can’t have a community sitting still for 40, 50, 60 years and blame one organization or one industry.”

Early voting runs through Oct. 31. Election Day is Nov. 4.

Past promises

The Frost Bank Center opened as the SBC Center in 2002. Voters had approved an increase in the county’s hotel and rental car taxes to help pay for it three years earlier.

The Spurs previously played at the Alamodome for nearly a decade. Team officials said they wanted a new arena because the city-owned facility, where a massive blue curtain cordoned off separated Spurs fans from empty stadium seats, was too big for basketball.

Before that, the team played at the HemisFair Arena, near the former Institute of Texan Cultures site where the Spurs plan to build a new arena if Prop B passes.

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Since 1950, the rodeo has hosted its February livestock show, live music and carnival extravaganza at the Freeman Coliseum. When the Frost Bank Center opened, the rodeo staged its biggest events there.

During the 1999 campaign to pay for the East Side arena, county officials made no explicit promises of development beyond the new venue. Still, the campaign offered up vague hints about growth.

In 2000, County Judge Cyndi Taylor Krier and Precinct 4 Commissioner Tommy Adkisson signed a “community commitment” that promised to “maximize economic development opportunities” in the area. The document stated that the arena could be part of a commercial corridor stretching along Houston Street from downtown, the San Antonio Express-News reported at the time. 

Even then-Spurs chairman Peter M. Holt — whose son now holds the same role — alluded to such promises in an interview with the San Antonio Business Journal weeks before the Frost Bank Center opened.

“We have purposely tried not to overpromise. People’s hopes do get raised. We can’t change this neighborhood overnight,” Holt said. “However, there is the beginning of some momentum here. Now we have to keep it going.”

The rodeo plans to reconfigure existing buildings and build several new ones, renovate the arena and the coliseum and turn the exhibit hall into a 2,800-seat venue. It plans to host a variety of events all year long, including a county fair, conventions, gun and car shows, and bull riding and livestock competitions.

San Antonio Livestock Exposition Inc., the rodeo nonprofit, developed the plan after the Spurs and City Manager Erik Walsh and his staff had already started behind-closed-doors discussions about building a downtown arena for the team. The arena would be the crown jewel of a planned sports and entertainment district, known as Project Marvel, that would be developed around the facility.

County Judge Peter Sakai and Coliseum Advisory Board members have said they wanted to ensure the Frost Bank Center grounds won’t go dark from a lack of events if the Spurs move. Sakai often warns the arena could end up like Houston’s infamous Astrodome.

Supporters are promoting the rodeo plan as a potential fresh start for economic growth around the county coliseum grounds — an opportunity to bring the businesses that residents thought would follow the Spurs to the East Side. 

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“I think those of you who have been around the city of San Antonio for a number of years and/or in this district have felt that things have not always been clear. Promises that have been made were not supposedly lived up to,” state Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins told hundreds of East Side residents at an October town hall at the Freeman Coliseum.

“It’s the East Side’s time to be able to benefit from some of these opportunities out there,” she said. 

Frank Dunn, a longtime East Side businessman who grew up in Denver Heights, has been campaigning for Propositions A and B. Noting the proposed site for the new Spurs arena and the East Side grounds are less than four miles apart, he describes the two plans as a “win-win” for the East Side.

He said the new arena in the southeast corner of downtown could bring development to the near East Side, while the rodeo’s expansion can bring the same to the area around the Frost Bank Center. 

“The new stadium will be a connector to the rodeo,” Dunn said. “It will not only branch out into the downtown area, but it will reach back over across the highway.”

But there’s currently no plan — by the county, city or Spurs — to help foster development beyond the arena grounds.

READ MORE: San Antonio rodeo pitches $197M plan for year-round events, new facilities

By contrast, the city’s designs for a downtown district includes renovating the Alamodome, expanding the Convention Center, building a second Convention Center hotel, turning the John H. Wood Jr. Federal Courthouse into an event venue and partnering with developers to thread the area with restaurants, bars and shops.

East Side residents and county leaders are trying to lay the groundwork to attract development. 

Members of a homeowners association northeast of the Frost Bank Center are pushing the city to rezone roughly 470 acres from heavy industrial to lighter uses, hoping to curb pollution and draw long-promised businesses. City Council is scheduled to vote on the measure in early November.

And the Coliseum Advisory Board, which oversees the Freeman Coliseum, put out a request for qualifications in June asking developers to pitch ideas for a mixed-use district near the coliseum grounds. Sakai has said he wants the city to transfer the municipally owned Willow Springs Golf Course to the county, and he’s talked about using it to attract a resort-style hotel. 

But the county has laid out no such plans as voters go to the polls. 

“Asking people to wait, if you ask me, is a setup for failure and disappointment,” Miller said.

‘It can’t hurt us’

Nevertheless, Miller plans to vote yes on Prop A, saying that the worst-case scenario is the status quo.

The rodeo’s plan hinges on bringing a different type of visitor than basketball games. Spurs fans usually park, watch the game and leave. But rodeo CEO Cody Davenport said he expects the average person visiting the city for rodeo events to stay up to four days. And some of them, with show animals in tow, probably wouldn’t be able to take long excursions to the Hill Country or other regional destinations. 

ALSO READ: ‘Broken agreement’: Many on East Side feel betrayed by talk of moving Spurs downtown

“If you have that type of person that is essentially trapped there with us because they’re from out of town and we’ve got them kept here for multiple days, we’re now bringing in the type of client that there’s traction,” he said on a recent episode of the Express-News’ ENside Politics podcast. “And hopefully the developers will recognize it.”

San Antonio for Growth on the Eastside, an economic development nonprofit, is staying neutral on Props A and B. Economic development in the area shouldn’t hinge on voters approving a referendum, said James Nortey, SAGE’s CEO.

“It is not simply enough to say build it and they will come,” Nortey said. “I do think a plan is a good first step, but we’ve seen our fair share plans come and go.”

Still, he said the increased foot traffic from year-round rodeo events would likely help nearby businesses more than Spurs games do now.

That possibility has gotten the attention of business owners currently operating near the coliseum grounds.

Earlier this year, John and Laura Flores were looking for a place to roast coffee beans for their family’s new business. The couple started importing beans from Laura’s father’s coffee farm in El Salvador, planning to sell them online and at farmer’s markets. 

They were looking for warehouse space where they could roast their beans when they leased a storefront in The Andy, a complex of residential lofts, office and retail space that opened in 2022 across the street from the Frost Bank Center. They chose the location because it was an easy drive down I-10 from their home in Converse.

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The couple initially had no plans for a brick-and-mortar shop. But the space is zoned for commercial use, not industrial. So, to sidestep those rules while still being able to roast beans, they’re opening a coffee shop called Flor de Café next month.

A long table by the front window offers a view of the Coca-Cola plant across the street and the Frost Bank Center just to the left. The couple said employees from both the arena and the plant have stopped by hoping to get a cup of coffee, only to find out the shop isn’t open yet.

As a new East Side business owner, John Flores hadn’t thought much about the rodeo’s plan until the election neared. Then he thought of Fort Worth, which rodeo leaders cite as a blueprint for what the expansion could look like in Bexar County.

At the Fort Worth Stockyards, what was once a livestock center is now surrounded by hotels, bars, restaurants and nightclubs, most of them Western-themed. The stockyards host more than 1,000 events and attract roughly 10 million visitors each year.

“If you think about the Fort Worth Stockyards, if you’ve ever been there, the surrounding businesses are doing pretty good,” John Flores said. 

He said it would help to have people who are either staying on the East Side for a few days or need a morning or midday pick-me-up. Spurs fans attending games at night provide neither, he said. 

“They’re waiting to get in there to get beer. They’re not here for coffee, and I’ve seen this parking lot completely full for Spurs preseason games,” he said. “So I don’t know if it’s gonna help us, but it can’t hurt us.”