Reeves 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 $14,179 (18.1%) under the Texas median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Elevated poverty: At 16.8%, 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 28.3 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.
• Young population: Median age of 34 is materially below the U.S. norm, a workforce pipeline asset.

• Largest private-sector industry: Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction employs 1,484 workers (30% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $109,384. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 1,640 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $14.3B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Construction averages $110,658 while Retail Trade averages $41,542, a 2.7x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Support Activities for Mining concentrates at 86.96x 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 36.2% of the employment across them, the largest being resource and agricultural commodities. Demand reaches this base from more than one market rather than from a single one.

• Affordable market: Home value to income ratio of 1.8x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• High home ownership: 73.7% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Elevated vacancy: 18.3% of housing units are vacant, above the Texas rate of 9.4%, and down from 24.2% in 2019.
• Mostly second homes: seasonal, recreational and occasional-use units are 27.4% of vacant units, so the headline rate is not available supply.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 15.5% of the vacant stock, or 2.8% of all housing units against the 18.3% headline vacancy rate. Absorbable supply for an incoming employer is thin, and the gap between the two is the redevelopment and conversion opportunity.
• Affordable rent tiers: 3 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $44,196 can pay without cost burden (~$1,105/mo), and 51.2% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Low participation: 56.7% labor force participation. The labor force itself fell 14.4% between 2019 and 2024, from 6,496 to 5,559.
• Short commutes: 18.0-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 Reeves County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Reeves County shows strong potential for support activities for mining attraction, with a 86.96x concentration and 1,094 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally.

The concentrated base spans support activities for mining, pipeline transportation, and heavy and civil engineering construction, and no single source of demand accounts for more than 36.2% of the employment across them, the largest being resource and agricultural commodities. Supply-chain recruitment has more than one demand base to work from.