America's 'poorest large city' is now booming with 'gawking tourists'... but locals feel left behind

San Antonio has long been known as one of the most impoverished big cities in the America and leaders have been trying to pull it out of its doom loop for decades .

These efforts have largely involved gentrification - trying to attract big business to improve the labor market and initiatives to redistribute city tax dollars to the poorest Texas neighborhoods.

Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who took office in 2017, said San Antonio has narrowed the wealth gap between the richest (disproportionately white) and the poorest (mostly Latino) citizens faster than any other city.

In 2022, San Antonio was the poorest major city in the US . Last year, it improved to become the third poorest, something Nirenberg said is a sign of 'the work we have been doing.'

Ambitious development plans all over the city offer a modicum of hope to San Antonio native Mimi Swartz. She cataloged all the latest projects to revitalize the struggling metro in her latest piece in Texas Monthly .

New hotels like the Kimpton Santo are moving into the urban center. There are also rumblings of a new stadium for the Spurs, the city's only professional sports team , and a new ballpark for the Missions minor-league baseball team.

The historic Pearl Brewery Complex has been revamped and is home to countless 'gawking tourists', Swartz writes. Alamo Plaza, which houses the famous Spanish mission where Texan revolutionaries fought and died in 1836, is getting a $550 million cash injection. And the airport is undergoing a $2.5 billion expansion.

But for many residents living in this boomtown , things haven't improved despite all the economic activity.

The city's poverty rate has remained stuck between 17 and 18 percent for the past decade. In 2023 it was 17.7 percent. That is much higher than the national average (11 percent) and the Texas average (14 percent).

A large number of residents are also food insecure, a problem that has got worse since COVID-19.

Before the pandemic, the San Antonio Food Bank served roughly 60,000 residents a week.

That number jumped to 120,000 during the pandemic - about eight percent of the city's population - and today it sits at around 105,000.

Across the US as a whole, 12.8 percent of people needed food assistance in 2022. In Bexar County, where San Antonio is, it was 17.4 percent.

The food bank's CEO, Eric Cooper, told Texas Monthly: 'Today's food bank has become part of the benefits package of a low-wage employer.'

Many San Antonians work for minimum wage, which remains $7.25 per hour in Texas.

United Way of San Antonio and Bexar County reported that 46 percent of households were unable to make ends meet in 2022, with a family of four needing a yearly income of $80,988 to do that.

Instead, the median household income in the city is $59,593.

There's also a racial income gap. In 2019, the median household income for white residents was $64,000, while for Latinos it was $43,000.

All of this hardship exists while some parts of the city are more beautiful and better off than ever.

Take for example the prosperous old neighborhoods of Alamo Heights, King William, Monte Vista, and Olmos Park. All of which have dozens of gorgeous stucco mansions with Spanish roofs, pristine lawns and towering gates.

You'd be hard pressed to find a home in these areas for less than $600,000.

The even wealthier live in gated communities along Interstate 10, northwest of the city. These are home to Spurs players and other multimillionaires.

Much of the blame for San Antonio's failure to thrive has been laid at the feet of the supposedly large stream of poor, uneducated immigrants from Mexico who came to improve their lives.

Others say 'cultural' differences between Latinos and Anglos (white English-speaking Americans) are the culprit. Though, fewer than 22 percent of the Latinos in San Antonio are foreign-born.

Historian Christine Drennon, who is originally from Rochester, New York, told Texas Monthly that inequality of opportunity between racial groups was 'very much engineered.'

As early as 1883, the city declared land being lived on by Mexican immigrants as 'real estate deemed useless,' which it could then sell to Anglos.

The Mexican Revolution of 1910 gave rise to more educated and prosperous Mexicans, prompting some Anglo leaders to put up deed restrictions in their neighborhoods, allowing sales only to white buyers.

By the 1920s and the decades onward, the only parts of city open to nonwhites were on the West Side and sections of the South and East sides.

The federal government was involved in upholding this segregation, classifying many nonwhite areas as lending risks, making it incredibly difficult for Latinos to qualify for mortgages.

Once the federal government began building the interstate highway system in the 1960s, it had the effect of further isolating the West Side, which to this day is mostly poor and Latino.

The same is true for the East Side, with the only difference being most residents are black. The South Side is a mixture of blue-collar Latino and white residents who at one point or another were tied to the military bases.

The year 1968 was a turning point, as it was the start of grassroots organizing that would begin to help catch the poorer neighborhoods up.

That was the year activists formed MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which has now fought for decades to make funding equal for city public schools.

In the mid 1970s, Ernesto Cortes created COPS, Communities Organized for Public Service, which successfully pushed for infrastructure on the West Side that the North Side had received long ago.

This included things like flood prevention, sewers, and improvements to streets.

COPS later won a lawsuit that forced the Anglo-dominated city council to replace its at-large seats with single-member districts that represented different parts of the city.

At-large voting systems, banned by Congress at the national level in 1967, simply means that voters in a city or county all vote for a candidate to represent them.

In areas like San Antonio where there were ethnic minorities, it could lead to a plurality of voters dictating policy for vast swathes of the population.

Switching over to single-member council districts allowed Latino voting power to grow, culminating in the 1981 election of Henry Cisneros as the city's first Latino mayor since 1842.

In Cisneros' view, most of his successors are trying to do much the same thing he did.

'Do the things to create jobs and grow so that we can tap those jobs and make them work for those who are marginalized. That's kind of the basic essence of San Antonio,' Cisneros said.

During his tenure throughout the 1980s, Cisneros believed the four (now three) military bases in the area, as well as the Brooke Army Medical Center and cyber warfare commands could attract tech-based industries.

Some biomedicine and cybersecurity companies have set up shop but not nearly enough to class them as major employers.

Cisneros also thought bringing major league sports to San Antonio would save the city. But back when he was mayor, he tried to get an NFL team to occupy the Alamodome.

The Alamodome opened in 1993 with no NFL team. Instead the Spurs moved there, from the HemisFair arena.

But since watching basketball in a stadium designed for football lacked appeal, the team relocated once again in 2002 to a basketball arena on the East Side.

That arena likely to be replaced by yet another one in downtown.

San Antonio is trying the same sports revitalization strategy again, this time with the city's minor league baseball team, the Missions. But some residents feel this is little more than gentrification that will push out the working class.

There are plans for $160 million downtown ballpark for the Missions, which are co-owned by Cisneros and mega-developer Graham Weston.

The city council approved the ballpark in mid-September to the dismay of many who were opposed the proposed demolition of the Soap Factory, an apartment complex in the same area.

The complex was built in 1979 and bought in 2023 by Weston Urban, Graham Weston's real estate company.

It has apartments that service workers can afford, with units ranging from $757 per month to $3,147 per month, according to Apartments.com .

James Boscher and his girlfriend Brooklyn Ramos live in one of the complex's 381 units, telling KSAT in September that they pay $800 per month for their 360-square-foot studio.

The couple, along with hundreds of people, will be displaced once the demolitions begin between October 2025 and September 2029.

'The city they want to build isn't really for me,' Boscher said.

One pro-ballpark councilman who's running for mayor in 2025, Manny Pelaez, said the complex is 'held together with duct tape, bailing wire, and string.'

As developers continue reshaping the city for wealthier and wealthier clientele, Nirenberg, the current mayor, has also promised to take on San Antonio's extreme poverty.

Though his efforts have also been a mixed bag, according to some.

The 47-year-old introduced an 'equity framework' in the 2018 city budget, meaning that dollars would go where they were needed most instead of being distributed equally among council districts.

During that fiscal year, four historically underserved districts received only the baseline amount for needed street repairs. Little to nothing has been done since, Texas Monthly reported.

Nirenberg created an affordable housing plan, with voters approving a $150 million housing bond to pay for it in 2022.

He also rolled out a Ready to Work initiative, funded by a sales tax that is supposed to bring in $240 million from December 2021 through December 2025.

The initiative's website promises everything from child care to education to free transportation to job training in order to help applicants 'find and keep the job you love.'

The program's enrollment has been low because many of the available jobs are in high-tech fields requiring college degrees. This doesn't match up for the lower-skilled workforce in San Antonio.

So, the city switched up its mission. Instead of serving job seekers, the program now uses $3 million in local tax dollars to help 31 companies train employees they already have.

To María Berriozábal, who was a frequent critic of Cisneros as mayor while she was a councilwoman in the 1980s, this retreat from helping those she believes need it is typical of the city's leadership.

'These businesspeople created a path ... and it was a powerful thing,' she told Texas Monthly. 'The aim was to have San Antonio be a city that has as its priority growth and expansion. But what does it take to grow?'

'We have never changed. We grow simply to grow, without questioning what that means and who benefits and who pays.'