For the San Antonio area, 46% of households — more than 240,000 households — can't afford the essentials such as housing, child care, food, transportation, health care and a basic smartphone plan.
This data from ALICE, which stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. It's a stubborn number that hasn't budged in over a decade. About half the city really struggles to make ends meet.
If you go by the federal poverty rate, the rate is 14%, which is about average for the US.
I'm not saying it wouldn't be hard raising a family on $68K here. I think it would be challenging, especially factoring in childcare, but the ALICE budget gives you $819/month for transportation. This seems excessive given you can get a $10k used car for about $228/month (I think). The pickings aren't amazing at that level, but I regularly drive a car that would currently be valued around $6-8k. It's safe and reliable. I haven't broken down other parts of the budget.
Statewide, the percent above ALICE threshold matches exactly that of California, at 57%, although there are slightly more in poverty (lower threshold than ALICE) in Texas: https://www.unitedforalice.org/national-overview
Is there data on what % of those are single earner households?
Does the $228/month number include maintenance + fuel or is it just financing/depreciation?
The main point I wanted to bring up with my comment was that San Antonio is just about average nationally wealth-wise, but the original comment I was replying to made it seem like half the population was living in very dire straits.
It seems better to bring up the state as a whole. 12.2% of Californians are living in poverty and 14% of Texans are.
If a few cities are having issues it seems like there are issues in those cities, not necessarily the state. That is not to say the state can't do anything to help, but if other cities are not experiencing those same issues then it seems like it is a different issue going on.
Texas does have higher poverty as a whole than California so there is a possibility that Texas is doing something wrong. All I am saying is selectively choosing a city to prove a point doesn't actually prove the point about the whole state.
In a large enough geography there can of course be both dynamics at play.
If a place's population increased and the impoverished population shot up, then, at first, it would give me pause that perhaps people were getting stuck there. It wouldn't be the first time that brain drain happened in advance of urban retooling and job loss. Witness the great brain drain from the rural US into inner city manufacturing neighborhoods while factory jobs were already beginning to leave those city centers. The successful cities of England's North endured something similar at the same postwar moment in their much longer history.
That Texas keeps showing this behavior of parallel growth in popularity and poverty for decades on end, though, makes much more explanatory the latter idea -- that e.g. metropolitan San Antonio is popular and a ladder for the underdogs of both the American economy and several Central American ones. California had a very similar and bipartisan growth dynamic in the 1910s-1980s before some Californians started pulling up the ladder behind them. Would be interesting to see a trajectory of housing costs near job growth in that state over time and whether land offers Texas any real buffer against such a trajectory.