In the last decade, companies have flocked to San Antonio, making it an economic center rivaling Houston and Dallas. With that business expansion has come energetic population growth: according to United States Census numbers, in the past 10 years, San Antonio has added more people within its city boundaries than any other major city in the state. It has all attracted demographers’ attention, at home and across the nation.
“San Antonio is sometimes seen as that sleepy southern city of Texas,” said Steve H. Murdock, a former director of the United States Census Bureau and Texas state demographer. “If you look at its growth, if you look at its changes in the last two decades, it is a city that may be changing more in nature than the other two larger cities.”
San Antonio recently topped the Milken Institute’s annual list of the best-performing cities, a ranking that measures American metropolitan areas based on their ability to create and sustain jobs. The city, which for the past five years has made it to No. 7 among the largest metropolitan areas in the country, has been “incredibly resilient” in the economic downturn, said Kevin Klowden, an economist with Milken, a California-based economic think tank.
Houston and Dallas, ranked fourth and ninth respectively among the top cities in the country, have seen their development gradually slow. And the jobs that those cities have added, Mr. Klowden said, have tended to be lower paying. By contrast, San Antonio has attracted high-wage jobs, capitalizing on its booming medical research industry.
“This is San Antonio’s finest moment,” said Henry Cisneros, the city’s former mayor and the secretary of housing and urban development in the Clinton administration.
Part of that is good fortune. The 2005 Base Realignment and Closure proposal, which consolidated military bases across the country, has greatly benefited San Antonio’s Air Force and Army bases. It has brought more than 10,000 jobs and $13 billion to the city’s economy, according to numbers from Joint Base San Antonio, which includes the country’s largest military battlefield health and trauma research hospital. That comes as the University of Texas Health Science Center to the north is rapidly growing, adding more than 225 new faculty members a year and deploying more than $230 million in annual research financing.
Mr. Cisneros, who is now the founding chairman of BioMedSA, a nonprofit organization of community and business leaders that promotes medical research in the city, said the current momentum in San Antonio has been a long time in the making — a result of “about 40 years of refining and honing economic cooperation.”
He said that in addition to its thriving medical research community, the city is poised to benefit from the South Texas Eagle Ford Shale energy boom, the relocation of Mexican professionals with significant capital to invest, increased tourism because of extensive civic improvements and a growing aerospace industry.
San Antonio aggressively courts the business of top companies. The city is home to the world headquarters of Valero Energy, Clear Channel Communications, USAA and H-E-B supermarkets.
In recent years the city has focused on luring biomedical firms.
InCube, a life sciences research lab, chose San Antonio over Houston and Dallas for its first expansion outside of Silicon Valley. It joins Medtronic, a medical technology company, as two of the latest bioscience firms to move to the city.
msmith@texastribune.org
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