Brooks County, Texas

• Income gap: Households earn meaningfully less than the national median, which directly affects retail demand, housing absorption, and tax base.
• Below the state median: Median household income runs $30,712 (39.1%) under the Texas median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Elevated poverty: At 19.4%, 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 18.7 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Health Care and Social Assistance employs 424 workers (53.8% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $23,491. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 923 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $312M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Transportation and Warehousing averages $184,564 while Health Care and Social Assistance averages $23,491, a 7.9x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Support Activities for Mining concentrates at 6.84x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 3 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 80.7% of the employment across them depends on one source of demand: visitor economy. Read the count as depth within that single demand base rather than as spread across separate ones.

• Affordable market: Home value to income ratio of 1.7x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• Elevated vacancy: 23.4% of housing units are vacant, above the Texas rate of 9.4%, and down from 32% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is other vacant at 81.1% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 14%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 4.9% of the vacant stock, or 1.1% of all housing units against the 23.4% headline vacancy rate. Absorbable supply for an incoming employer is thin, and the gap between the two is the redevelopment and conversion opportunity.

• Low participation: 57.8% labor force participation against a labor force that grew 10.6% between 2019 and 2024, so workforce development programs may unlock additional supply.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in Brooks County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Brooks County shows strong potential for support activities for mining attraction, with a 6.84x concentration and 18 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. Visitor economy accounts for 80.7% of it, all of it in food services and drinking places. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.