SAN JOSE — It was at a similar moment more than three decades ago — with a new mayor just settling into City Hall — that a grand plan was devised for reanimating the decaying corpse of the city’s once bustling downtown. A river of redevelopment money that would swell to nearly $2 billion flooded into projects that would be pillars of a glittering new downtown.

The missing teeth of empty downtown storefronts, the rotting flesh of porn and prostitution, the curdled smile of drug dealers: All of those would be swept away by the San Jose Arena, a massive convention center and the upscale Fairmont Hotel — plus an encircling “transit mall” to bring residents flocking back from the ‘burbs to inhabit the city center’s billion-dollar bones.

So the planners planned, and the builders built. But the people have mostly stayed away, leaving a corpse with elegant bone structure.

Now, with Sam Liccardo taking office, and huge cranes raising the roof on a high-rise housing boom, downtown San Jose once again appears poised for renewal. Unlike his predecessor, Liccardo seems disinclined to wait for the Oakland A’s to move downtown and save the day. “We’re on the brink of something pretty extraordinary if we can keep this momentum going,” he says, “whether you believe in stadiums falling from the sky or not. The path to revitalization of urban cores is not with public dollars, and it’s not with big buildings. It’s with people. You have to have a critical mass of people.”

Liccardo points to the 2,500 housing units that will come on the market in the next two years, with developers of high-rise towers such as One South Market and Centerra “making significant bets on the viability of downtown as a residential neighborhood,” he says. “These are folks who don’t make bets foolishly.”

Civic leaders have been clucking optimistically about an imminent influx of urban hipsters for decades, and at long last they sound confident that box has been checked. “If this were a jigsaw puzzle, several pieces are snapped firmly in place,” says Carl Guardino, CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and a close confidante of Liccardo’s. “But we have to make sure we complete the puzzle.”

The last time developers attempted to anticipate a downtown renaissance, they “walked into a buzz saw” caused by the Great Recession, says commercial real estate broker Mark Ritchie. Buildings such as Axis and The 88 took years to fill up, and the developer of 360 Residences was forced to sell the property at a loss.

Further fueling the grim narrative of a city with a failing heart was the absence of jobs: Downtown San Jose has a base of about 36,000 jobs, compared with downtown Oakland’s 80,000, and San Francisco’s more than 300,000 — even though it is the Bay Area’s most populous city. San Jose remains the only large U.S. city that is a net exporter of workers, according to the urban think tank SPUR.

Job growth has languished downtown for decades because companies didn’t feel the area offered a vibrant environment that would help attract top-notch employees. “Companies in Silicon Valley are having a difficult time recruiting because young, creative people are choosing where they want to live before they choose who they want to work for,” Liccardo says.

And even with incentives and bargain rents widely available, companies hoping to build signature skyscrapers were scared off by a downtown that lies almost directly beneath an airport flight path. “Downtown will never be a huge job base,” says Leah Toeniskoetter, director of SPUR San Jose. “It just doesn’t have the land or the verticality.”

Adobe took advantage of a large loan from San Jose’s redevelopment agency to build its headquarters here in 1996, but almost none of Silicon Valley’s other elite companies followed. That began to change last year, when the number of tech companies downtown increased from 70 to 110. “Downtown San Jose offers the urban alternative to the suburbia around us,” notes Liccardo. “That’s where we can really shine.”

Downtown San Jose’s turnaround is underway by some other measures, as well. From 1998 to 2014, sales tax receipts nearly quintupled, from $714,500 to $3.2 million, and the office vacancy rate plummeted from 33.5 percent to just 13.6 percent during the same period. Office rents here that have remained stuck at “Detroit levels” for 25 years — with a brief blip upward during the dot-com boom — have started to rise, Ritchie says.

But the number of residents who could be counted on to fill cafes and theaters — those that are left after San Jose Repertory Theatre closed in last summer — has remained stubbornly low, increasing from 25,101 in 1990 to only 39,185 in 2010, based on U.S. Census Bureau figures that incorporate an expansive downtown, bounded by Taylor Street on the north, Keyes on the south, Bird on the west and 11th on the east.

People still go downtown, of course, usually to attend a show at the Center for Performing Arts, or visit the Children’s Discovery Museum or the Tech. And then they leave, quickly.

Large institutions have been equally skittish. Even City Hall abandoned downtown for an office park in 1958, as the Mercury News did when it fled downtown in 1967. Both have since come back. Downtown never really did.

By the time Tom McEnery was sworn in as mayor in 1983, San Jose’s unchecked appetite for expansion — driven by City Manager A.P. “Dutch” Hamann — spread the city like a virus into the Valley of Heart’s Delight, annexing orchards and canneries to make apartment complexes and strip malls.

“Downtown was a place where people’s hopes and dreams were fulfilled to an extraordinary level,” McEnery recalls. “And then it disappeared in the flickering of an eye. The growth machine — a coalition of ignorance, apathy and greed — had run amok. They didn’t know where they were going, but they were making a lot of money. And downtown was kind of left behind.”

The destruction of downtown San Jose was purposeful, part of a headlong rush to transform the city from sleepy agricultural center to America’s 10th-largest metropolis. “In many ways, public policy sort of destroyed the city,” says Scott Knies, who as executive director of the Downtown Association has led a three-decade effort to revive the city’s core.

Guardino says Hamann’s strategy “hollowed out” downtown, a mistake that has taken a generation to fix. “We are the overnight sensation,” he says, “that’s taken 30 years to develop.”

San Jose’s centrifugal sprawl left it with a relatively puny heart — 8 million square feet of habitable space, according to Ritchie. “That’s the size of a business park in San Ramon,” he says. “It’s a tiny downtown.” Compared to downtown Oakland, with 20 million square feet, there’s no there here.

The city has offered developers willing to build downtown a 100 percent waiver on construction taxes, which Kim Walesh, San Jose’s director of economic development, says could represent an incentive of up to $1.5 million. “It’s turning right now,” she says, referring to downtown dead spots that will soon be construction sites, “and I think three years from now it will feel like a very different place.”

Until Gov. Jerry Brown shut them down in 2012, San Jose had the state’s reigning RDA powerhouse, disbursing a $2 billion flood of money into downtown projects such as the convention center, the Fairmont and the Tech Museum. Without the vast sums spent on redevelopment, Ritchie says, “this place would look like Merced.”

Even under the energetic leadership of Liccardo, government is unlikely to devote the money or the tools required to complete the task downtown. Despite San Jose’s long-standing claim to be the capital of Silicon Valley, for the city to become “the Florence of the digital world,” as Ritchie refers to the rest of the Bay Area, downtown will have to resurrect itself by itself.

“In retrospect, redevelopment was like riding a bicycle with the training wheels on,” Walesh says, “and maybe the wheels stayed on a bit too long. Great cities and great downtowns are not made with government in the driver’s seat. They’re made because companies, and the arts community, step up and make things happen.”

Contact Bruce Newman at 408-920-5004. Follow him at twitter.com/BruceNewmanTwit