Karnes 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 $18,262 (23.3%) under the Texas median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Elevated poverty: At 19.1%, 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 21.4 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction employs 700 workers (20.8% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $89,724. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 1,629 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $7B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Transportation and Warehousing averages $94,363 while Retail Trade averages $33,759, a 2.8x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Pipeline Transportation concentrates at 36.10x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 10 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, and no single source of demand accounts for more than 29.2% of the employment across them, the largest being freight and distribution. Demand reaches this base from more than one market rather than from a single one.

• Affordable market: Home value to income ratio of 2.5x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• Elevated vacancy: 20.8% of housing units are vacant, above the Texas rate of 9.4%, and down from 28.6% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is other vacant at 45.2% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 19.5%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 29.4% of the vacant stock, or 6.1% of all housing units against the 20.8% headline vacancy rate. That is the figure to plan an incoming employer's housing against, 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 $31,771 can pay without cost burden (~$794/mo), and 38% of renter households are already cost-burdened, 21.6% severely so; workforce housing cost burden warrants attention.

• Low participation: 44.7% labor force participation. The labor force itself fell 0.9% between 2019 and 2024, from 5,559 to 5,509.
• Short commutes: 20.9-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in Karnes County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Karnes County shows strong potential for pipeline transportation attraction, with a 36.10x concentration and 68 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally.

The concentrated base spans pipeline transportation, rental and leasing services, and heavy and civil engineering construction, and no single source of demand accounts for more than 29.2% of the employment across them, the largest being freight and distribution. Supply-chain recruitment has more than one demand base to work from.