San Antonio barely has a functional downtown, there's a grim shell of tourist oriented restaurants and hotels immediately around the river walk but really struggles to be a center of business. There are few condo buildings downtown. Unlike Dallas and Austin San Antonio hasn't really seen a resurgence of it's downtown region.

Furthermore the river walk was built in the 1930s as a way to improve property values, and remodeled a handful of times over the decades, that's not a recent innovation