Lorenzo Rivera stood outside his house on a recent morning as the mosquitoes nipped at him and workers gathered to fix his home’s ailing foundation.

Without the repairs, Rivera’s house would have started to slide down the sloped lot on Melridge Place in the Zilker neighborhood, where he has lived for nearly 50 years. But the faulty foundation is only one of myriad problems with his home. The roof on the northern end of the house leaks, leading to extensive water damage near his bedroom. Pushing down the carpet there reveals a gap in the floor about 2 inches wide.

Rivera, a 75-year-old Vietnam veteran, raised his two daughter in this brightly colored home that’s painted calypso blue with teal accents on the windows. Without financial assistance, there is no way Rivera would be able to afford the repairs to his home. "I like the colors," he says. "I’m a Tex-Mex man."

The repairs underway at Rivera’s house were funded by a $65 million affordable housing bond Austin voters passed in 2013. At the time, the price tag on the bond looked to be ambitious, since voters had turned down a $78.3 million housing bond in 2012.

This November, though, Austin voters will be asked to approve a proposition calling for a $250 million affordable housing bond, which is by far the largest housing bond ever put before the city’s electorate, more than doubling the total of all previous passed housing bonds combined.

"The need for this type of investment has never been any greater than it is today," said John Lawler, the campaign manager for Keep Austin Affordable. "We don’t want to be a city just for the upper income, and this housing bond will help prevent that from occurring."

Detractors say housing bonds are largely inefficient, and that the city should stay out of a business better left to private interests. Opponents say calling for the city to possibly increase taxes to support the financing of its debt is a mistake.

"I think that we know that we can’t subsidize our way out of problems, we have with the lack of affordable housing in this city," said Ellen Troxclair, an Austin City Council member opposed to the bond. "The reason we are in this position is it is so expensive and cumbersome to build to begin with. I honestly think it is a little disingenuous to ask voters for a quarter of $1 billion when it is really not going to address problems were are trying to solve."

The housing bond is styled as Proposition A on the ballot. It is the largest of seven voter propositions being put to Austin voters that carry a total price tag of $925 million. The other propositions include calls for debt to be issued for transportation projects, parks and arts facilities and public safety concerns. The city already has broadly outlined how the money authorized under the housing bond would be spent, with the largest portion going toward buying land. The breakdown:

•$100 million for land acquisition.

•$94 million for rental housing development assistance.

•$28 million for a home ownership program.

•$28 million for a home repair program.

Local political consultant and pollster Mark Littlefield told the American-Statesman that despite the housing bond’s price tag, he thinks it is headed toward passage. Littlefield expects the midterm congressional races to fuel an increase in voter turnout among younger, progressive Austin voters. The challenge will be convincing those voters to get past the partisan congressional elections to the local propositions. If they make it that far down the ballot, he expects them to favor the housing bond.

"They want to vote for anything that might send some sort of message to others — that they see an affordable housing bond as part of our shared values and something Trump would hate," said Littlefield, who supports Prop A.

Previous housing bonds focused more on creating affordable housing in Austin directly through awards to dozens of developers, who committed to build apartments for low-income residents under restrictions that guaranteed that rents would remain at affordable-housing levels. A $55 million housing bond approved in 2006 led to the construction of 2,569 housing units generally priced for people making less than 50 percent of Austin’s median family income, according to records from the city’s Neighborhood Housing and Community Development department.

The 2013 bond helped fund the creation of 2,253 housing units at rates affordable for people with incomes less than 80 percent of the median for Austin. About $2 million also was spent on land acquisition, and nearly $12 million went to programs like the one that brought the Easterseals work crew to Rivera’s house, which are designed to help keep low-income residents in their homes.

"I’m glad for this," Rivera said as two workers with Easterseals burrowed under his home to hammer away. In a neighborhood where the land value of a single-family lot is consistently more than $500,000, a low-income resident with a fixed income like Rivera is an outlier, but one who has no plans to leave his home.

"It’s like the Alamo," he said. "It’s cracked here and cracked there, but it is still standing."