New Study Ranks McAllen Area Last in Access to Basic Needs
By Nick Pipitone | The Monitor
February 28, 2010
A new study aimed at measuring the nation’s health and well-being ranked the McAllen metro area dead last among U.S. cities in residents’ basic access to needs for a healthy life like food, medicine and health care.
The study —the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index — renewed calls among local leaders and community activists to fix the substantial social and economic problems in the area.
“It’s not surprising to hear that the McAllen area is last in basic access. It speaks to the larger issue of income inequality,” said Neha Singhal, spokeswoman for the advocacy group La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE). “I see this report as an indicator of how much work we have ahead of us to combat structural discrimination in the allocation of resources.”
The study measured several metrics relating to the overall quality of life in 162 U.S. metro areas such as work environment, emotional and physical health, healthy behaviors and life evaluation. Eric Nielsen, a Gallup spokesman, said the venerable polling service and Healthways, a health consulting agency, will publish the study annually for the next 25 years as a research tool for policy makers and community leaders.
The McAllen area ranked exactly in the middle overall and rated in the top 35 in emotional health and work experience. But the metro area ranked low in physical health and healthy behaviors at 106 and 100, respectively.
“There’s no doubt that McAllen and our metro area have plusses and minuses,” McAllen Mayor Richard Cortez said. “We’re multicultural, we have warm weather and we’re very family-centric. However, we have a high incidence of obesity and diabetes and some health issues that concern us.”
Singhal said the responsibility to improve the conditions of the metro area and the many impoverished colonias starts with county government and its allocation of state and federal grants and funds.
But Chad Richardson, a sociology professor at the University of Texas-Pan American, said many of the area’s problems such as the high rate of medically uninsured people fall outside the reach of local government.
“It’s a general problem of the borderlands,” said Richardson, the director of UTPA’s Center for Border Economic Studies. “The decisions that most affect us are not made here, like the border wall. They’re made at the centers of economic and political power” at the state and federal level.
Cortez said elevating the level of educational attainment in the area is something local leaders can do because it will increase household incomes and, subsequently, quality of life.
He was also quick to point out that the McAllen metro area is part of a region that is still emerging.
“We were country ranches and farms not too long ago,” he said. “I’d like to believe that our quality of life today is better than it’s been in the past.”
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