Let’s not kid ourselves — the neighborhood that’s budding around the Museum Reach is one of affluence.

“When you’re charging $2 a square foot, how many people would you have to have living with you? For me, it would be three,” Mark Dotzour, chief economist for the Texas A&M University Real Estate Center, said in a speech this month.

Glad I’m not alone.

Since 2010, nearly 1,000 apartments have been built in the area — the 1.3-mile northern River Walk extension between Lexington Avenue and Josephine Street. By the end of the year, the apartment count in that area is likely to grow to 1,700 units. The waves of new dwellings seem destined to become a tsunami in a few years.

But those rents …

Many hit $1.90 a square foot. The downtown average, by comparison, is $1.54, according to the latest data by Austin Investors Interests.

Developers point to a handful of reasons, but mostly it’s the rising cost of construction. The single-family industry has been hit by the same hammer, which is why starter homes have become nearly extinct — it’s no longer profitable for builders to build affordable homes.

But so what? The high rents seem moot because the demand is undeniable — most projects have occupancy rates in the 90 percent range.

However, the problems actually are many. This emerging area is being subsidized by tax abatements, city and SAWS fee waivers, along with other incentives.

The rebuttal to this, of course, is that if those carrots aren’t dangled in front of developers, the blight isn’t reversed. And local government spent $72 million in public dollars to revamp that stretch of the river — to attract developers — so dangle away.

And although the area may be unaffordable for many San Antonians, it’s not inaccessible. The Pearl does a good job of hosting concerts and culinary events, all of which are free and open to the public.

But visiting the area a couple of times a month and truly enjoying the area as a resident are two different things.

There has to be a way to infuse rent diversity into the formula.

By having a specific class of people living in this area, the retail options will stay monotonous. So do all the other amenities that come as a result of more apartments. As anyone who’s read Jane Jacobs’ 1961 classic “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” monotony of any kind in a neighborhood— too rich or too poor, too many apartments or too many jobs, too many new buildings or too many old ones — stymies life. Vibrancy and stability are grounded by choices, Jacobs wrote.

The big incentive is low-income housing tax credits from the state that can make a dent in developers’ pro formas. The problem is that these applications are so extensive, costly and competitive that developers often don’t pursue them, says Christine Drennon, Trinity University Professor of sociology and anthropology.

In a perfect world, as city policy, developers would be required to pursue these incentives as a way to lower rents. Or, the city could designate someone whose only job would be to assist developers in this pursuit.

Recycling older buildings, a strategy sometimes less costly than building from the ground up, is another way to introduce cheaper rents, suggests some experts.

The city is in the process of beginning its vacant building plan, which would encourage owners of older buildings to act — by either rehabilitating the buildings themselves or selling to a developer. The outcome of ths could lead to the development of more affordable apartments. In fact, the few relatively affordable apartment buildings that exist today — buildings such as the Brady Tower and the Exchange Building — were at one time office buildings or hotels.

Something needs to be done in order to make this area truly interesting. Anything other than rent diversity would render the area kind of boring.

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bolivo@express-news.net