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The Spanish Trail is a bottom-end apartment complex where South Fourth Avenue meets Interstate 10. Decades back, the apartments were a motel, part of the broader Spanish Trail complex that included a stylish restaurant, nightclub and pool.

That part long ago crumbled, leaving an eyesore along the interstate, but the apartments live on as first-rung housing for people climbing out of homelessness, or last-rung housing for those sinking toward it. Drug-dealing and prostitution are common, residents told me, and police calls are frequent.

“You call the cops and all they do is drive by, look and leave,” Ortiz said. “I don’t even call them anymore. It’s futile.”

As to the complex, “They ought to raze it and bill him,” Ortiz said of the owner, Brian Bowers.

In fact, the city of South Tucson is considering taking legal action. One idea is to pursue an injunction that would force Bowers and his wife Margeaux to deal better with the criminal problem at that property and another they own nearby, the South 6th Avenue Suites. The other idea is to pursue a legal action that declares the apartments blighted properties and allows for their redevelopment.

The council didn’t make a decision when given these options by their attorney July 18. But the bigger question is a constant one these days in South Tucson, a square-mile city with maybe 5,000 residents and a budget of just $11 million:

Should they seek development, or should they try to sustain the city’s low-end housing for existing, mostly low-income residents?

Three of the seven council members won election last year on a platform of resisting feared gentrification and displacement of long-time residents by newcomers and developers. But they are a minority bloc, with most council decisions favoring the other four.

Resisting development could keep revenues down in the cash-starved city, with a few, low-paid police officers and bare-bones services. And it wouldn’t necessarily stop the bigger market forces from driving up housing prices beyond what people can afford.

Even at the low-end Spanish Trail, the price for renting a small studio apartment is $800 per month.

Focus on affordability

The three new council members — Brian Flagg, Roxanna Valenzuela and Cesar Aguirre — also work for Casa Maria, the longtime charity for the poor that straddles the South Tucson-Tucson border.

Their joint campaign focused on keeping housing affordable and preserving the culture of the town, with its Mexican and indigenous roots. The threats, as they saw them, were outside homebuyers coming and flipping properties, making them unaffordable, or developers putting up projects that also drive up prices and change the local culture.

“A lot of developers are trying to come in here, trying to make a quick buck displacing people,” Valenzuela told me. “A lot of these investors from out of town buy all these lots and park their money there. Or they buy vacant units and hold them or flip them.”

The idea they’re trying to implement, both at Casa Maria and on the City Council, is to grow the town from the bottom up, by taking care of its residents’ housing needs first.

In their day jobs with Casa Maria, they have successfully raised money to buy three old motor courts in South Tucson, with plans to bring them up to habitable condition and rent them out to lower-income people. They’re pursuing a fourth.

The problem is, the city has little money to take care of the residents, because it is dependent on scant sales-tax revenue.

That’s the reality Mayor Paul Diaz thinks about when he considers people’s ideas for South Tucson. He’s a member of the council’s four-member majority and has little interest in new apartment complexes or other new housing developments.

“Those concepts are not for us,” he told me, seated in a booth at Micha’s Restaurant, a South Fourth Avenue landmark. “Our lives depend on sales tax in South Tucson.”

Greyhound Park opportunity

The different visions for the city often come to rest on a key property at South Fourth Avenue and East 36th Street. That’s where Tucson Greyhound Park sits abandoned, with a large parking lot next to it — about 17 total acres.

Those, like Valenzuela, who favor more housing in the city imagine more housing there. Those, like Diaz, who favor more retail businesses imagine events and food trucks — something that brings in tax money.

The owner, Equilibrium Properties, hasn’t decided what to do with the property purchased last year for $9 million.

“The thing I can tell you is there are a lot of ideas we’ve pored over. At this point, our main focus is to get the main building operational,” managing partner Sofonias Astatke said. “Our biggest goal is to get it operational, then work through how we can make it useful and a solid space.”

In other words, at this point there’s no real movement toward using the property that became vacant in 2022, six years after greyhound racing ended.

You can see why. It could be hard to raise the financing for a big, splashy investment that would make a developer money, and there’s no political will for such a project anyway.

Morgan Abraham, whose company sold the Spanish Trail Suites to Bowers in 2020, told me big development interest is unlikely.

“You’re not seeing a lot of developers or capital wanting to go to that city,” he said. “It’s really challenging working with that mayor and council, and then the services are lacking.”

‘Give something back’

It’s possible that the difficulty of doing any significant project in South Tucson puts its own brake on gentrification pressures. That doesn’t mean housing prices won’t go up, but it won’t be due to splashy new apartment complexes like the ones on North Fourth Avenue, near West Congress Street, or in downtown Tucson.

“We aren’t against development — we invite development,” Valenzuela said. “What we’re asking is that the people who come in give something back.”

Her idea is to use “community-benefit agreements” or other conditions that ensure South Tucson residents get jobs or other benefits from projects, or that city services are better funded.

In the meantime, the city is left to wrestle with relatively minor opportunities, like the future of the Spanish Trail. Bowers, the owner, told me he was never even made aware by the city that they were discussing taking action against him, possibly even pursuing seizing the property.

“The way I see it we’re helping a lot of people down there,” Bowers said. “We’re trying to protect the residents the best we can, keeping people off the property that don’t belong.”

He also found it unfair that Flagg, Valenzuela and Aguirre are working against him on the council while also getting into the affordable-housing business themselves at Casa Maria.

But Valenzuela sees their dual roles as a benefit.

“The council is just something else that we do,” she said. “We’re activists. We’re trying to do things right for the poor people of South Tucson. But there is power in the city. We want to tap into that, into all those resources, and give back.”

Maybe that will mean that the Spanish Trail gets cleaned up — that’s about the scale of achievement that South Tucson seems capable of. And it would be meaningful for those living there.

“Affordable housing does not mean living with indignity,” the former resident, Ortiz, texted me after I visited his apartment. By then he had moved out of the little square-mile city and across the border into a nicer four-plex in Tucson.