San Antonio Food Bank*
San Antonio, TX
Our NMTC allocation is funding the construction of new 60,781 SF facility for the San Antonio Food Bank that will house a production kitchen, an expanded area for culinary training, a vegetable prep plant and a seasonal venison processing plant.
MBS Urban Initiatives CDE funded a $9 million New Markets Tax Credit (‘NMTC’) investment to fund the project. PeopleFund CDE and the Texas Mezzanine Fund CDE funded $10MM aggregately to the project. Without NMTC’s the project would have been delayed for at least a year. That delay could also increase construction costs, ultimately preventing the project from coming to fruition.
With the new facility, SAFB will increase food prep and distribution to more than 10,000 meals a day. The facility will also allow SAFB to offer more education and job training certification programs and classes, which will double the number of participants each year (each class will go from 8-10 students to 16-20). The new facility includes a new “Grab-and-Go” salad prep plant where volunteers will wash, store, prep/chop and assemble healthy salads (with as much of the produce as possible coming from SAFB’s farms) for distribution via its social enterprise efforts and mission programs. Lastly, the new building will expand SAFB’s existing “Hunters for the Hungry” program that allows individual hunters and ranch owners to donate harvested deer to be processed for free, with the venison going to SAFB and its clients as a source of high-quality protein for its meals. SAFB plans to expand this processing plant to allow for the processing of feral hogs, which cost Texas neighborhoods, farms and ranches hundreds of millions of dollars in damage each year.
SAFB has run a highly successful culinary training program for more than a decade focuses on training unhoused people, people with disabilities and the long-term unemployed to take jobs in the culinary and hospitality fields. The greater San Antonio region has hundreds of unfilled positions in the hospitality industry and this expansion would allow SAFB to double the number of participants per class. Classes run in 18-week blocks and will soon be offered with a guaranteed job and stipend. The culinary training program will drive ancillary job creation in the form of 120+ positions for low-income persons over the first three years.
This institution is an equal opportunity provider.
Quick Facts
Square Footage: 60,781 sf.
Total Project Cost: $19,364,178
Developer/Owner/Leverage Lender: San Antonio Food Bank, Inc. (‘Sponsor’)
Allocatees: MBS Urban Initiatives CDE, People Fund CDE and Texas Mezzanine Fund
NMTC Equity Investor: US Bank CDC
Architect: RVK Architects
Projected Construction Jobs: 250
Projected Permanent Jobs: 25 FTEs created and 234 FTEs retained with an additional projected 120+ jobs created over 3 years.
Community Partners: Texas Mezzanine Fund and PeopleFund.