Río Grande Municipio, Puerto Rico

• Income gap: Households earn meaningfully less than the national median, which directly affects retail demand, housing absorption, and tax base.
• Elevated poverty: At 33.8%, the rate is in economically distressed territory and supports federal funding narratives (CDFI, NMTC, EDA).
• Talent gap: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment trails the national average by 9.0 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.
• Aging population: Median age of 45 is materially above the U.S. norm; succession planning and senior-services demand are real factors.

• Largest private-sector industry: Accommodation and Food Services employs 1,392 workers (32.1% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $27,508. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 1,041 and is counted separately.
• Wage stratification: Real Estate and Rental and Leasing averages $54,954 while Other Services (except Public Administration) averages $24,583, a 2.2x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Health and Personal Care Retailers concentrates at 5.79x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 9 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 97.4% of the employment across them depends on one source of demand: resident household spending. Read the count as depth within that single demand base rather than as spread across separate ones.

• In line with national: Home value to income ratio of 4.5x sits near the ~4.1x national average; affordability is neither a clear advantage nor a recruitment friction.
• High home ownership: 71.1% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Elevated vacancy: 26.7% of housing units are vacant, above the Puerto Rico rate of 21%, and down from 31.6% in 2019.
• Mostly second homes: seasonal, recreational and occasional-use units are 40.7% of vacant units, so the headline rate is not available supply.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 6.2% of the vacant stock, or 1.7% of all housing units against the 26.7% headline vacancy rate. Absorbable supply for an incoming employer is thin, and the gap between the two is the redevelopment and conversion opportunity.
• Rent affordability gap: None of the 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $17,665 can pay without cost burden (~$442/mo), and 33.2% of renter households are already cost-burdened, 18.4% severely so; workforce housing cost burden warrants attention.

• Low participation: 52.3% labor force participation. The labor force itself fell 3.4% between 2019 and 2024, from 21,671 to 20,932.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in Río Grande Municipio per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Río Grande Municipio shows strong potential for health and personal care retailers attraction, with a 5.79x concentration and 239 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally.

Most of the employment across the concentrated sub-sectors traces back to a single source of demand. Resident household spending accounts for 97.4% of it, with food and beverage retailers the largest single sub-sector at 26.5%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.