San Antonio, the Family-Friendly City? Nah, Not So Much, a New Study Says

San Antonio loves to see itself as a family-friendly place with a high quality of life, but a new study from personal economics site WalletHub paints a substantially different picture.

WalletHub compared 182 U.S. cities to determine their family-friendliness and slotted the Alamo City near the bottom, at No. 125. The three top cities, in order, were Overland Park, Kans.; Irvine, Calif.; and Fremont, Calif.

The report determined overall rankings by comparing 46 data sets across five categories: Family Fun, Health & Safety, Education & Child Care, Affordability and Socio-economics.

San Antonio landed near the middle of the pack for Family Fun — determined by factors such as playgrounds per capita and number of families with young kids — and Socio-economics — including foreclosure and unemployment rates. But our scores on Health & Safety and Education & Child Care were near the bottom. Try 149 and 151, respectively.

Data factoring into the Health & Safety score included access to healthy foods, violent crime rates and pediatricians per capita and others. Among other things, the Education & Child Care factors included dropout rates, school quality and parental-leave policies.

If you've been following issues of institutional discrimination and generational poverty, the poor scores in those areas probably come as no shock.

The Wallet Hub data serves as one more reminder that for all San Antonio's charms, it's hard to rise above the pack when it can't meet basic health, safety and educational needs of all citizens — not just the ones in the most affluent zip codes.

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