"I'm not gonna be able to see that sky anymore."
Betty Gerlach said that after leaning back in her rocking chair on Arcadia Place and looking up at the same stretch of sky she'd watched for years. On September 14, 2026, the Alamo Heights City Council decided that view would change anyway, just not by quite as much as her neighbors had spent months fighting to prevent.
The council granted developer Embrey Partners a special use permit to build a five-story, roughly 300-unit apartment complex called Grove Place on the 100 block of Arcadia Place, on the site of the 106-unit Treehouse Apartments and the adjacent, closed St. Peter Prince of the Apostles Catholic Church school. The permit allows construction up to about 65 feet, with an additional 12 feet cleared for stair and elevator towers. Standard multi-family buildings in Alamo Heights top out at 35 feet, or three stories. Grove Place is being built at nearly double that.
If you've driven past the yard signs reading "Height(s) Matters. Stick to the Code" along Arcadia Place, Grandview Place, and Cleveland Court, you already know a fight happened. What most coverage skipped is what the fight actually produced, and it's smaller than the size of the campaign suggests.
What the Code Says, and What the Permit Grants
Alamo Heights' Code of Ordinances caps standard multi-family construction at 35 feet or three stories. Section 3-82 gives the City Council a specific tool to go beyond that: a special use permit for buildings taller than two and a half stories, following review by the Planning and Zoning Commission. That's the mechanism Embrey used, and the one the Planning and Zoning Commission had already recommended before the council took its Monday vote.
Embrey isn't an outside operator testing the neighborhood's tolerance. The company keeps its own corporate headquarters inside Alamo Heights, at 7600 Broadway, in a 216-unit mixed-use building it finished in 2022. Ridgemont Properties, which owns and manages several apartment properties in the city, brought the Arcadia Place opportunity to Embrey in 2025. Embrey is developing the project on its own rather than as a joint venture with Ridgemont. The design work went to Lake Flato, the San Antonio architecture firm known for work that leans into materials and massing rather than glass-tower height, which is presumably part of why the council found the proposal easier to sit with than the raw number suggests.
The Four Stories That Became the Compromise
Here's the part that got lost between the pre-vote coverage and the after-the-fact headlines: the height reduction residents won applies to one corner of one building, not the corridor.
At the request of neighbors and Mayor Al Honigblum, Embrey executive vice president Brad Knolle told the council the company would cut the height to four stories directly in front of 115 Arcadia Place, a home that has stood for roughly 130 years. Everywhere else along the site, the building keeps its full height allowance.
Councilman Karl Baker asked the obvious follow-up: if a one-story reduction was possible at that corner, why not extend it across the rest of the residential frontage? Knolle's answer was financial rather than architectural. He said the lost rentable square footage across a longer stretch would have an "enormous" effect on the construction budget, to the point where the project wouldn't be financeable at that scale.
Councilman Trey Jacobson, weighing both sides, called the approval a "monumental" shift for the city. That's a fair word for it. A single four-story concession at one historic address is a meaningfully different outcome than the full-height, 300-unit building that was on the table when the yard signs went up, but it's also a much narrower win than "we got them to lower the building" implies.
A Neighborhood That Has Said No Before
Casey Thomas, who has lived in the neighborhood for 30 years, framed the stakes for residents in terms that went beyond this one address.
"If this happens, if they break the code, if they go over regulations, they can do that anywhere in Alamo Heights, and they should not be able to do that."
That worry has a specific precedent behind it, and it cuts the other way. In 2022, the Alamo Heights Board of Adjustment denied Ridgemont Properties, the same landowner behind the Grove Place site, a much smaller request: a variance to raise a proposed Katherine Court project from 27 to 35 units while reducing required parking. Residents at the time argued the increase ignored neighborhood context and strained parking and circulation, and the board sided with them.
Set the two outcomes next to each other and the pattern isn't about height alone.
| Katherine Court (2022) | Grove Place (2026) | |
|---|---|---|
| Requesting party | Ridgemont Properties | Embrey Partners, on a Ridgemont-sourced site |
| What was asked | Increase from 27 to 35 units, reduced parking | Special use permit for roughly 300 units at nearly double the height cap |
| Standard code limit | 35 feet, three stories | 35 feet, three stories |
| Outcome | Denied by the Board of Adjustment | Approved by City Council, with one four-story concession |
A smaller ask, decided by a board, got turned down four years ago. A far larger ask, decided by the full council, got approved this month. The code bent further this time than it did in 2022. The two decisions also came through different channels. The Board of Adjustment ruled on a variance in 2022, and the City Council ruled on a special use permit in 2026, with the Planning and Zoning Commission's recommendation behind it. Both measured the request against the same 35-foot, three-story standard.
The homes most exposed to the outcome sit close to the ground. Arcadia Place includes structures dating to the late 19th century, and several Alamo Heights homes nearby have stood for more than a hundred years. Gerlach's concern about sunlight wasn't only about the view. Longtime owners in the area have also raised the impact on home solar installations, which lose efficiency fast once a five-story shadow lands on the panel.
What Still Has to Happen Before Ground Breaks
A special use permit isn't a shovel in the ground. Before Embrey can start construction, CPS Energy, San Antonio Water System, and Alamo Heights Public Works all have to sign off on the project's utility plans. Embrey's own public timeline points to a construction start in early 2027, which means the corner of Arcadia Place that's been arguing about rocking-chair sightlines for months has a few more months of the same view before anything changes.
Whether Grove Place becomes the template Casey Thomas is worried about or a one-off shaped by this specific site's odd geometry (a shuttered school lot next to an aging apartment complex, both ready to be replaced at once) is something only the next application will answer. If another developer comes to council next year pointing at the 65-foot Arcadia Place permit as precedent, that's the test of whether this month's vote was a single exception or the new floor.
If you're watching this corridor because you own on it, or because you're weighing whether a five-story neighbor changes anything about your own corner of the 09, Trinie Ortiz Johnson tracks Alamo Heights zoning outcomes the same way she tracks comps, because both shape what a property is worth years after the vote. Request a Confidential Consultation if you want to talk through what Grove Place actually means for your specific block.
