In 1995, the Tacoma City Council created a lucrative incentive – a big 10-year property tax break – to expand “market rate” housing in the city’s urban core.

It may be time to rethink the goals of this controversial ordinance.

The tax credit has been a spectacular success, helping achieve just what it was designed to do.

In the early 1990s, much of downtown Tacoma was deserted after dark. Some nearby neighborhoods were scary, slum-ridden or both. The urban decay was a deadly obstacle to the city’s revitalization.

Thanks in part to the tax abatement policy, once-blighted areas – such as the Foss Waterway, the Theater District and the south end of the Hilltop – now boast thousands of attractive new condominiums and apartments. It has been a remarkable transformation.

But a newly released housing study by NewHomeTrends shows that the chief beneficiaries of the trend are an unusually affluent class of people.

The price of the new condominiums averaged $348 ,893 as of December. That’s well over the median home-sale price of $270,000 in Pierce County. And only an estimated 27 percent of the county’s residents – a little more than a quarter – have the $75,000 annual incomes needed to swing even $270,000.

The vast majority of the new condominiums are beyond the reach of people of decent but ordinary incomes. The NewHomeTrends study identifies their likely buyers as young professionals, empty nesters and other people with plenty of discretionary income.

What’s happened so far has been healthy and necessary. The influx of people has helped reverse the decline of these urban neighborhoods.

But the City Council has reason to consider targeting the tax credits to projects designed to accommodate more buyers and renters whose incomes are less than affluent.

The existing tax abatement policy has done its job. The abundance of new condominiums is so great that a seller’s market has become a buyer’s market. The purpose of the policy was to jump start residential development in the core, and that has happened.

This isn’t a reason to abandon the credits that have served the city so well in recent years. There’s plenty of redevelopment and new housing yet needed in Tacoma. But sooner or later it will be time to start steering more credits in the direction of the less affluent. Those condominium prices are an argument for sooner rather than later.