Whatever Happened To The Farm In Steubing Farm?

Ask a longtime resident of Meadows at Steubing Farm where the farm is, and you'll get a shrug. There's no barn on the community map, no fence line past the clubhouse, nothing marked with a plaque at the entrance. The name just sits there doing nothing, the way a street called Cottonwood sometimes has no cottonwoods left on it. But there was a farm. It had a name, three generations of one family working it, and a City Council vote in 2021 that decided, on purpose, none of it was worth keeping.

The Bacons, the Steubings, and nearly a century on the same twelve acres

The land sat at the corner of De Zavala Road and what's now J.V. Bacon Parkway, a road named for the man who bought the property in the first place. Joseph Vinson Bacon held the land from 1917 to 1947. His daughter Bernice married Raymond Oscar Steubing in 1938, which is how two family names ended up fused into one dairy operation and, eventually, one neighborhood name.

Three generations of the Bacon-Steubing family ran cattle and processed milk on the site into the mid-1980s, with other family members keeping some version of the operation going until 2012. The land changed hands that year, then again in 2017 when an investor group called DeZavala Ventures LLC, led by developer Darren Casey, picked it up. Bexar County tax records cited during the 2020 historic review valued the 12-acre parcel at $3.1 million. By then, all that remained of the actual farm was a barn, a feed room, and a milk house, dating to somewhere between 1948 and 1954, sitting at a sharp bend in De Zavala Road that most drivers barely notice.

Seven votes for, then a different room decides

In late 2020, the buildings got a hearing. San Antonio's Historic and Design Review Commission voted 7-1 on December 2 to find the site historically significant, which sent the question of a formal landmark designation to City Council. A Conservation Society of San Antonio librarian had argued the farm met four separate criteria under the National Register of Historic Places and the city's development code, and pointed out that the Bacon-Steubing dairy actually outlasted the older Voelcker farmstead, whose barn and houses were preserved and now sit inside Phil Hardberger Park as a protected landmark.

That precedent didn't hold. On March 4, 2021, City Council voted against landmark status for the Bacon-Steubing barn, clearing the way for demolition and commercial redevelopment. District 8 Councilman Manny Pelaez, whose district includes the site, told the San Antonio Report that homeowners nearby were split roughly down the middle, and that part of the opposition wasn't really about history at all.

"The other camp ... felt that this was a good vehicle for stopping the rezoning or stopping future apartments from being built on the property."

Pelaez also described the condition of the abandoned buildings by that point, noting they'd become a magnet for squatting and had grown into enough of a nuisance that he called the barn "a little crack house on the prairie." Without landmark protection, no commission approval was needed for whatever came next.

What sits on that corner now

What came next was retail. A commercial listing for the property describes a new retail center at the hard corner of De Zavala, with Shipley's Donuts, Great Clips, and Domino's Pizza as co-tenants, and notes that J.V. Bacon Parkway funnels traffic from Hausman Road straight past the center on its way to De Zavala, the same route that runs past the old farm site. A few hundred feet away, an apartment community called Tacara at Steubing Heights now stands at the intersection of J.V. Bacon Parkway and De Zavala Road, marketed on its proximity to UTSA's main campus, USAA's headquarters, and the South Texas Medical Center.

The buildings that gave the neighborhood its name aren't there anymore. What's there instead is the kind of retail corner that shows up at nearly every busy Northwest Side intersection, doing its job quietly while the name upstream keeps referring to something that no longer physically exists.

The corner earns its keep now, just differently

None of this means the area went quiet. A few minutes from that same stretch of De Zavala, Chicken N Pickle's San Antonio location at 5215 UTSA Blvd has become one of the more reliable weekend anchors for people living in and around Steubing Farm. The property runs six indoor and four outdoor pickleball courts, with Open Play starting every morning at 8 a.m. on the indoor courts. Outdoor court time runs $5 an hour plus $5 for equipment rental during the seasonal daily window from May 26 through September 7, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The weekly calendar leans social rather than purely athletic, with recurring nights built around Brunch & Bingo and Trivia. This month brings a couple of named events worth putting on a calendar: today's date, August 4, is a Pickleball Scramble billed as one of the city's larger pickleball networking meetups, and the Transplants for Children Charity Pickleball Tournament follows on August 23. Neither requires you to be any good at pickleball. Both are the kind of thing that makes a Tuesday or a Saturday feel like it has a shape.

It's a strange kind of continuity. The dairy cows are long gone, the barn is gone, the council vote that could have kept a trace of it standing went the other way on March 4, 2021, and the neighborhood absorbed a donut shop and a pickleball complex instead. That's not a loss dressed up as progress. It's just what happens to land at a busy corner in a growing part of Bexar County. The name stays behind as a kind of fossil, pointing at something the pavement paved over.

Why this is worth knowing if you already live here

Most guides to this pocket of San Antonio talk about square footage and floor plans, which is fine, but it skips the one fact that actually explains the place: the "Farm" in your neighborhood's name is a memory now, not a location you can drive to. Knowing that changes how you read the rest of the area. The retail pad at De Zavala and J.V. Bacon Parkway isn't generic sprawl. It's a specific outcome of a specific 2021 vote, on a specific 12-acre parcel that three generations of one family worked until the math on urban dairy farming stopped making sense. The apartments at Tacara aren't just new construction, they're built on the same corner where the argument over apartments versus preservation played out in a council chamber a few years earlier.

Understanding a place usually means understanding what used to be there and why it isn't anymore. In Steubing Farm's case, the answer is on the record: a commission that voted to protect it, a council that voted not to, and a stretch of road that now sells donuts where cattle used to graze.

If you're weighing a move into this part of Bexar County, or you already call it home and want a clearer read on where the area is headed next, Adele Huerta knows this stretch of San Antonio block by block. Schedule a free consultation to talk through what's actually happening here, not just what the listing photos show.