Zapata 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 $39,237 (50.0%) under the Texas median, so statewide income averages overstate local household buying power.
• Elevated poverty: At 38.4%, 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 20.5 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.
• Young population: Median age of 32 is materially below the U.S. norm, a workforce pipeline asset.

• Largest private-sector industry: Health Care and Social Assistance employs 821 workers (61% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $20,488. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 1,122 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $668M (2024).
• Wage stratification: Manufacturing averages $58,219 while Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting averages $18,792, a 3.1x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Ambulatory Health Care Services concentrates at 5.55x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 5 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 71.5% of the employment across them depends on one source of demand: health care 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 2.5x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• High home ownership: 72% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Elevated vacancy: 27% of housing units are vacant, above the Texas rate of 9.4%, and down from 30.2% in 2019.
• Mostly second homes: seasonal, recreational and occasional-use units are 45.7% of vacant units, so the headline rate is not available supply.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 4.4% of the vacant stock, or 1.2% of all housing units against the 27% 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 $17,011 can pay without cost burden (~$425/mo), and 27.4% of renter households are already cost-burdened, 15.7% severely so; workforce housing cost burden warrants attention.

• Low participation: 52.8% labor force participation. The labor force itself fell 9.2% between 2019 and 2024, from 5,828 to 5,293.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in Zapata County per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Zapata County shows strong potential for ambulatory health care services attraction, with a 5.55x concentration and 689 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. Health care economy accounts for 71.5% of it, all of it in ambulatory health care services. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.