It’s America’s Seventh-Largest City. Why is San Antonio Still So Poor?
The city’s leadership is focused on making poverty more livable, not less common.
In 1968, CBS opened its documentary Hunger in America with a scene from San Antonio’s West Side, showing footage of deprivation so shocking that it helped push Congress to create the modern food-stamp program. This spring, nearly six decades later, the New York Times revisited the same question: “San Antonio is Booming. Why Are Many Still in Poverty?”
In fairness, San Antonio’s poverty is surprising. Texas is in the midst of an economic boom so extraordinary that it has transformed Austin into a global technology hub and catapulted Dallas and Houston to new heights. Yet just down the road, San Antonio—America’s seventh largest city—ranks among the poorest major metros in the country. And while the poverty rate has improved slightly in absolute terms, its rank among the poorest major cities has barely changed in decades.
I edit a new local media outlet in San Antonio called The Civic, which means I’m very familiar with the long tradition of San Antonio poverty pieces. The genre generally treats San Antonio’s poverty as a mystery, explained by everything and nothing at once. Segregation, proximity to the border, and the very culture of the city are all commonly cited. And the solutions are always the same: sympathy and government programs.
What these pieces almost all ignore is the simple answer: San Antonio is poor because its leaders would rather subsidize poverty than make the hard choices required for growth.
At the risk of stating the obvious, cities become rich when something in the economy makes people a lot of money. Take Austin’s software industry, Houston’s energy industry, or Dallas’s headquarters towers. Meanwhile, San Antonio’s economic base—tourism, hospitality, call centers, distribution, back-office operations, military bases, and so on—does not produce significant wealth.
The numbers reflect that fact. The average hourly wage in San Antonio is more than five dollars below the national average. Only 32 percent of metro adults hold a bachelor’s degree, compared to 38 percent nationally (and 51 percent in Austin).
San Antonio also has few vehicles for opportunity. The city has no flagship university, just a score of small colleges, a large public university trying to escape its commuter-school reputation, and a relatively unknown liberal arts college. While Texas now leads the nation in Fortune 500 companies, San Antonio recently dropped from three to two.
In this environment, it is difficult to obtain a nationally competitive education without leaving San Antonio and just as difficult to find a nationally competitive job without doing the same. Every San Antonio parent eventually asks some version of the same question: where are my kids going to work when they grow up? The answer, overwhelmingly, is “not San Antonio.”
What confuses the casual observer (it’s right there in the New York Times’ headline) is that San Antonio really is booming, at least in population terms. We posted among the largest population gains in America in 2022, 2023, and 2024, and are about to pass Philadelphia to become the sixth-largest city in the country. With the median household income creeping steadily up, it surprises many to hear about the city’s persistent, multi-decade poverty.
But when a city adds people without generating new wealth, it is merely expanding poverty. San Antonio has been doing this for decades. While its poverty rate is only a few points lower than it was in 1980, the city has more than doubled in size—meaning there are more poor San Antonians today than at any other point in its history.
In particular, San Antonio has not added new industries to follow this growth. While Austin, Dallas, and Houston have attracted dozens of corporate headquarters, San Antonio has watched businesses like AT&T, Rackspace, USAA’s banking division, and Tesoro relocate away or cut back their presence.
Confronted with all of this, San Antonio’s leaders have traditionally chosen to subsidize poverty rather than position the city for meaningful growth. The flagship civic initiatives of the past 15 years include: a sales tax for universal pre-K, a $235 million workforce development program that primarily places graduates in jobs paying below the national average wage, a $150 million housing bond producing subsidized units in one of the cheapest big-city housing markets in America, and even $800 million for two rapid transit bus lines in a city built entirely around the car.
Any one of these projects may be defensible on its own terms. Taken together, however, they reveal a civic leadership interested in making poverty more livable, not less common.
Subsidizing poverty is, frankly, the easier job. Economic growth can be complicated. Government programs are visible and morally comfortable, and they do not require the city to compete with other cities for business, talent, or capital—and sometimes lose.
But a city cannot indefinitely fund the amelioration of poverty from a low-wage tax base. Eventually, the down years come. San Antonio is now facing a projected $152 million budget gap next year, and the city council is considering its first property-tax increase in over three decades. On top of those property-tax hikes, nearly every other municipal authority is looking at raising rates and taxes. That includes the city-owned power and water utilities, community college district, and the surrounding county.
San Antonio’s pressing challenge for this decade and beyond is to create the conditions for prosperity that it currently lacks: industries that pay well, a labor market that retains its own graduates, and a government whose central function and main goal is prosperity and growth. Growth, after all, determines how much of everything else the city can afford.
Essays like this, meanwhile, will keep coming. In another year or so, an editor will get the next “why is San Antonio poor” pitch; we have seen it since 1968. The only way to end this tradition is to spoil the story, and San Antonio has everything it needs to do so, except for the will and the decision to.
Philip Reichert is editor and executive director of The Civic San Antonio, an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet covering San Antonio.
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