If you build it, they will come. Eventually.

That was the basic strategy former mayor Julián Castro laid out when he proclaimed this to be the Decade of Downtown in 2010, a plan to lure developers, residents and businesses back to San Antonio’s urban center with a mix of tax incentives, road improvements and cultural events.

Among the foreseen benefits of a rejuvenated center city: retention of San Antonio’s young talent, while, at the same time, drawing young professionals from other cities.

Taxpayers, developers and philanthropists have sunk more than $1.7 billion of public and private money into reviving the city’s aging urban center since then. The progress, albeit slow-going, is open for debate and criticism.

Most of the new money and development projects have revived neighborhoods just outside of downtown instead of the city core itself — where sidewalks remain empty on many weeknights. Some of the restaurants on Houston Street are regular favorites of locals, but once they’re done with their meal, they get back in their cars and go home.

Retail on Houston Street, decades ago the hub for all of San Antonio, is nearly nonexistent.

Some residents worry that there’s been too much emphasis on luxury real estate projects that are pricing middle-class residents out of the housing market.

Despite the complaints, downtown leaders say the urban revival is at least moving in the right direction.

“This is a journey,” said Pat DiGiovanni, the CEO of Centro San Antonio, a nonprofit group that represents downtown business owners. “This is a movement and it transcends time.”

The strategy

Castro’s strategy was simple: add enough apartments to the downtown core to draw residents and shops, restaurants and, eventually, higher-paying jobs will follow.

To that end, in 2012, the City Council streamlined its incentives program for multifamily housing. The program provided $69 million in tax abatements, fee waivers for city and water services as well as forgivable loans for mixed-use projects that included retail space. The county also pitched in with tax abatements for 12 residential projects since 2011.

The move resulted in $776.9 million worth of residential development — 4,629 units — that are built, under construction or in the works. The goal is to build 7,500 units by 2020, more than doubling the 3,300 multifamily units already in place in the downtown area — a 5.2-square-mile zone that encompasses the Pearl in the north and the Lone Star Brewery in the south.

Other private projects include the Rivercenter mall expansion, H-E-B’s South Flores Market and the refurbished Rand building, which is home to Geekdom and pocket-sized tech companies.

On the public end, the largest investment has been the $325 million Convention Center expansion, scheduled to open Tuesday. Future projects include a new $135 million federal courthouse, the $125 million San Pedro Creek project and $48 million for Alamo Plaza.

To entice developers closer downtown, officials offered more incentives for rebuilding in the city center than they have for development along the outskirts. From the 2012 bond, $86 million was allocated for upgrading downtown streets and sidewalks.

The city also added more cultural events and upgraded city parks to help lure people to live and play downtown.

More than $8 million, taken from the 2012 bond program, was spent to create the Yanaguana Garden at Hemisfair. The garden, which opened in October as the first phase of the redevelopment of Hemisfair park, had drawn 120,000 visitors through December.

Travis Park, once a haven for homeless, was cleaned up and now frequently hosts movies in the park and benefit dinners.

The Tobin Center for the Performing Arts was completed in September 2014 and so far it has attracted 296,113 arts patrons and concertgoers to 583 events.

Planners say there’s demand from residents who want to be able to live within walking distance to work, grocery stores, cafes and entertainment.

But only one new residential apartment complex has been built in San Antonio’s core since Castro’s pronouncement.

Greystar, a South Carolina developer, demolished the former Univision TV station site — on South St. Mary’s St. just inside East César E. Chávez Boulevard — and recently built the upscale Agave 350-unit apartment complex that caters to the younger, hipper and more well-to-do kind of taxpayers city officials hope to attract.

The Agave also is one of downtown’s trendiest and most expensive apartment complexes. The project tries to sell residents on the Southtown neighborhood and proximity to trendy restaurants and coffee bars as much as its “spectacular skyline views,” electric car charging stations and off-leash dog run. Rents in the luxury building range from $1,135 for their smallest one bedroom to as much as $2,725 for a 1,277 square-foot, two-bedroom apartment, according to its website.

Builders have, by and large, steered clear of downtown in favor of less costly land along the outskirts. The city and county spent $85 million to extend the River Walk to the north (Museum Reach) and the south (Eagleland) and have helped fuel the Pearl and Southtown as up-and-coming hip, culinary destinations. Developers have built or are planning to build more than 4,200 new residential units in those two areas just outside of downtown.

“The Pearl and Blue Star are successful because you have the San Antonio River extensions,” Assistant City Manager Lori Houston said. “We will be improving two miles of San Pedro Creek and we anticipate more housing development along that creek.”

Desire for urban living

But some question the placement of the apartments, their quality, design, and effectiveness.

“We are using incentives for housing, but part of the issue there is some of that housing would have likely happened anyway,” said Heywood Sanders, a UTSA urban studies professor who says he still has yet to see any tangible change to downtown proper. “Part of the problem is those housing developments, aside from their numbers, are widely dispersed and, by in large, on the fringe.”

But the rising tide is raising a lot of other boats.

The new apartments command some of the largest rental rates in the city — at roughly $2 a square foot, a little more than $1,000 a month gets you a studio apartment — and yet they’re generally between 90 and 100 percent occupied, city officials estimate. Houston said the apartments’ popularity proves to developers that there is an appetite for urban living, and therefore, building closer to the core is worth the risk.

Up north, a pair of apartment projects — one by a Dallas developer Alamo Manhattan and another by SCB Bodner Co. of Indianapolis — will soon start construction on 400-plus apartments on the river’s east bank between West Jones Avenue and 9th Street. The apartments are about midway between downtown and the Pearl, or a 10-minute walk.

“It sends a message to developers that there’s a market here, that there’s activity here, that there’s value and amenities here that’s not somewhere else,” Sanders said. “So it shouldn’t surprise us that folks want to build townhouses and condos and rental units along the Museum Reach and in the immediate vicinity of Pearl Brewery.”

Residents complain about the lack of affordable housing. “We need to improve transit, have more artistic co-ops, better jobs well-lit streets, paved sidewalks, bike lanes,” Hailey Laine Johnson complained on Facebook, giving the “Decade” an “F” so far. “Not just a playground for the already upwardly mobile.”

Centro, the downtown business group, is teaming up with a Minneapolis-based nonprofit builder called Artspace to look at adding some unique live/work space units for artists and other creative professionals downtown.

The Decade of Downtown, so far

Since the so-called Decade of Downtown began in 2011, 4,629 residential units — mostly apartments — have been built or are in the works in the downtown area. While the growth has mostly occurred north and south, projects are starting to slowly creep closer to downtown proper. Use the slider to see downtown housing projects — units, total cost and incentives — for the past five years.

Most of publicly funded housing projects have income requirements as well. At HemisView, a San Antonio Housing Authority project completed in 2010, 24 percent of the units have been set aside for low-income residents. At Hemisfair’s first development, still in the planning stages, 50 percent of the 163 apartments will be reserved for low-income residents.

This relative lack of affordability, DiGiovanni said, is purely market driven. As an area becomes hot for its restaurants, bars, galleries and scene, the appetite for that area spikes and rents follow suit. Jobs will eventually follow, he said. Companies are attracted to neighborhoods that have a kind of consistent vibrancy.

“The more housing starts to come about and more and more young people are living in our urban core, employers are going to say the opposite of what they told us years ago: ‘Well, my employees don’t live there,’” DiGiovanni said.

Where are the jobs?

Attracting employers downtown, however, has been a harder sell.

Other than H-E-B, San Antonio's largest employer with 1,800 at its corporate campus downtown, few corporations are located within the city center. USAA purchased the 18-story One Riverwalk Place in 2014 and placed 150 employees in its enterprise affairs and general counsel departments there.

Others, however, have fled downtown for wider spaces in the suburbs. Valero Energy Corp. moved from its downtown headquarters at McCullough and Navarro streets in the late 1990s out to U.S. 281 and eventually at the Interstate 10/Loop 1604 corridor in 2004.

Downtown office space — 66 percent of which is categorized as Class B and C — is the lowest occupied of any area in the city. In the third quarter of 2015, downtown’s vacancy rate was 27.7 percent of unoccupied office units, compared with the citywide rate of 18 percent. With a vacancy rate of about 13 percent in 2015, however, Class A space is among the best performing in the city.

“If you look only at Class A, the Northwest submarket (frequently touted as the most vibrant) has a Class A vacancy rate almost double that of the (central business district),” said Randy Smith, president of Weston Urban, which is in the process of designing downtown’s first office tower, for Frost Bank, in more than 20 years.

Frost Bank is expected to occupy 250,000 square feet of the 400,000-square-foot total, with the remaining 150,000 square feet being rented to other companies.

The transit challenge

Public transportation and parking remain problems.

San Antonio is one of the largest U.S. cities without some form of rail transportation. Dallas’ light rail system launched in 1996 and boasts 90 miles of track. Houston expanded it’s budding system in 2014. In Austin, voters shot down a $1 billion light rail system in 2014, though it’s MetroRail commuter line began rolling in 2010.

The demise last year of the $280 million streetcar plan was a big setback for the downtown project, officials concede. It was supposed to make the city more walkable for pedestrians and would have helped shuttled workers downtown and spur development along that route, promoters said.

Among the myriad reasons streetcar failed, most observers said, was planners never fully explained how the starter system would benefit all of San Antonio, and the program became a political football.

The new E bus route circulates through arts venues and restaurants. Instead of the streetcar, officials extended the blue trolley line to the Pearl. New car sharing services Uber, Lyft and other companies offer new transportation options that didn’t exist five years ago. The city is looking to add a valet service at key locations in the core that residents can use so they don’t have to worry about parking.

In an analysis by Centro San Antonio, there are 18,927 parking spaces in the public improvement district — 23 garages and 68 lots. The total does not include parking meters. Centro’s analysis, which is not yet finished, will determine whether the parking total is ample or scant. According to city data, 1,930,377 vehicles were parked in city facilities in 2015, up from 1,896,605 in 2014 and 1,587,264 in 2013.

On the housing end, city officials anticipate adding another 1,428 apartments, or have them in the planning stage, by 2020 — 663 units at Hemisfair, 265 units that will come as a result of the Weston Urban/Frost Tower deal, and an estimated 500 units from properties on the near West Side.

This shot-in-the-arm combined with developers inching closer to the core from the outlying areas will result in an apartment boom for the core, downtown planners hope.

Some of those apartments may come on Houston Street, once San Antonio’s retail spine, where local developer Kevin Covey purchased nine properties in 2015 that include historic buildings Kress and Vogue with unused space for offices and possibly apartments or lofts.

City officials expect the Broadway corridor — near the Pearl and home to many old car dealerships that runs parallel to the Museum Reach stretch of the river — to also be redeveloped.

Iconic properties include the former Cavender Cadillac dealership, where there is speculation that a major development deal is the works, as well as 3.13 acres of land at the former San Antonio Light properties that are being sold by Hearst Corp., the Express-News’ parent company.

“It’s a process and it’s coming,” Houston said. “We will see the downtown core residential population increase and it will increase as a result of the success of the 4,300 housing units we have online or under construction.”

bolivo@express-news.net

Twitter: mySAdowntown