In northwest downtown, workers are at work renovating a 120,000-square-foot, century-old former department store into the new home for Geekdom, a communal workspace for tech professionals, which has 800 members. The building will eventually have a cafe, a rooftop bar, and other amenities "that the geeks want," said Randy Smith. Mr. Smith is the president of Weston Urban, a real-estate development company founded in 2012 that aims to "create the ecosystem for tech entrepreneurialism" in San Antonio, Mr. Smith said.

Mr. Smith co-founded Weston Urban with Graham Weston, a native of San Antonio who is the chairman and chief executive of Rackspace, a cloud-computing company valued at $4.5 billion. Over the next five years, Weston Urban plans to develop a downtown district using four surface lots the group bought last year, along with three buildings it already owns, and by buying other properties. The plan includes 1,000 rental apartments plus restaurants, shops and other businesses designed to create a lively downtown.
This is the area that will be transformed by this urban village.


In the same Wall Street Journal feature, it is noted that residential demand in the Pearl District (about a mile north of central downtown)has nearly doubled to 1,500-units.

Mr. Goldsbury then began building a new neighborhood called Pearl. Today it is home to 11 restaurants and bars, a campus of the Culinary Institute of America, and 320 units of rental housing, the bulk of which were completed late last year. Apartments rent at averages of $1.80 a square foot, Mr. Shown said. A Kimpton hotel is under construction, as is high-end rental building The Cellars, where the 124 units will be priced at 40% more a square foot than existing Pearl apartments. The district has room for 1,500 more apartments, said Mr. Shown. But everything, including future apartments, is for rent.
This is the Pearl District.