Boston vs San Antonio: which should you move to?

Violent Part One offences fell from 3,636 in 2023 to 3,615 in 2024 and 3,409 in 2025 on BPD's own year-end counts, and property offences went 12,777, then 13,354, then 13,120, so the three-year direction is down on both. Homicides moved the other way and are the number people argue about: 36 in 2023, then 24 in 2024, a low the city had not seen in decades, then 31 in 2025. Even at 31 the count sits below the 38.2 five-year average, and BPD reports shootings still more than 30% under that average. All of these are preliminary until UCR coding is complete, and BPD's violent crime definition runs below the FBI's, which recorded 4,138 violent offences in Boston in 2024 against BPD's 3,615.

What the rates cover: Computed: Boston Police Department counted 3,409 Part One violent offences between 1 January and 28 December 2025 (31 homicides, 150 rapes, 760 robberies, 914 domestic aggravated assaults, 1,554 non-domestic aggravated assaults), divided by the 672,973 Vintage 2025 city population. The FBI's 2024 file for Boston gives a higher figure, 4,138 violent offences and 628 per 100k, almost all of the gap in aggravated assault; BPD's counts are its own and are preliminary until UCR coding is complete.

Homicides: City of Boston, 31 homicides in the 1 January to 28 December 2025 count, up from 24 in 2024 and down from 36 in 2023. Three of the 31 were deaths from earlier years ruled homicides in 2025. That is about 4.6 per 100,000. Commissioner Michael Cox put the 2025 total 16% below the five-year average of 38.2, and 19 of the 31 victims were shot.

On the FBI's definitions, violent offenses in San Antonio went from 11,219 in 2021 to a peak of 13,105 in 2022, then 10,440 in 2023, 9,173 in 2024 and 8,241 in 2025, a 10% drop in the last year and 37% below the peak, and property offenses from 61,559 to 74,787 and a peak of 80,789 in 2023, then 70,657 and 60,693, 25% below the peak. Motor vehicle theft drove most of that swing: 8,912 in 2021, 19,090 in 2023 and 9,527 in 2025, half the peak. In 2025 the CDE shows aggravated assaults down 9% (6,037 to 5,506), robberies down 17% (1,656 to 1,380), rapes down 8% (1,354 to 1,249) and murders down 16% (126 to 106). SAPD's own January-to-November comparison points the same way: all reported crime down 13% (143,529 to 124,314), crimes against property down 18.1%, motor vehicle theft down 26.5% and robberies down 16.4%, while crimes against society rose 15.4%, which the chief put down to more drug arrests. A University of Texas at San Antonio evaluation of the city's Violent Crime Reduction Plan found violent street crime fell 22% in treated hot spots in 2024 against 9.6% citywide (San Antonio Report). The 2025 CDE counts were read on 30 September 2026 from a feed last refreshed on 15 September and can still be revised.

What the rates cover: Computed: 8,241 violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) in the FBI Crime Data Explorer's summarized data for the San Antonio Police Department (ORI TXSPD0000) in calendar 2025, divided by the 1,548,422 Vintage 2025 city population. On the CDE's own agency population of 1,549,306 the rate is also 532. No SAPD total on this definition was found in anything fetched. Its year-end report to the City Council's Public Safety Committee in December 2025 counted NIBRS crimes against persons, which include simple assaults, and put them at 28,361 for January through November 2025, down 9% from 31,179 in the same months of 2024 (KSAT).

Homicides: 106 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters in 2025 in the FBI CDE, against 126 in 2024, about 6.8 per 100,000 on the city population. SAPD's own count for January through November 2025 was 99 against 119 in the same months of 2024, a drop of nearly 17% (KSAT); a full-year SAPD figure was not found in anything fetched. The high point in the CDE series since 2021 is 233, in 2022, a year whose count includes the 53 migrants found dead in a tractor-trailer on the Southwest Side (San Antonio Report).

BLS counted 2,747,200 nonfarm jobs in the Boston-Cambridge-Newton MSA in July 2026, up 0.3% on the 2,739,800 of July 2025, so the metro job market is flat rather than growing. Inside the city the largest industries by employment in 2024 were health care and social assistance (68,674), professional, scientific and technical services (59,267) and educational services (50,798), and the best-paid were management of companies ($120,536 median), finance and insurance ($111,396) and professional and technical services ($104,866). Hospitals and universities are not a sideline here, they are the base of the economy, which makes the city unusually exposed to federal research funding and to international student flows. bls.gov answered 403 to the fetcher, so the employment counts come through FRED and the industry mix through Data USA, both of which restate Census and BLS series.

Main sectors: Health care and social assistance (Mass General Brigham, Beth Israel Lahey, Boston Children's), Higher education and research, Professional, scientific and technical services, Finance and insurance, especially asset management and custody banking, Life sciences and biotech, in the Longwood Medical Area and along the Charles.

Property tax is the local levy that matters. Boston's certified fiscal 2026 residential rate is $12.40 per $1,000 of full and fair cash value, and an owner who is domiciled in the home gets a residential exemption of $351,108 off the assessed value, worth $4,353.74 a year at that rate; it is not automatic on purchase and has to be filed for by 1 April. Proposition 2 1/2 caps the levy a municipality may raise rather than the rate, so a rate can fall in a year when every bill rises. Massachusetts reassesses the whole residential class at full value every year, with no cap, no freeze and no reset on sale, which means the seller's current bill is a fair guide to what a buyer will pay. Nothing is charged to take title or to borrow: no buyer transfer tax and no mortgage recording tax, only the deeds excise at $4.56 per $1,000, which MGL c.64D s.1 puts on the seller. Massachusetts does levy an estate tax, unusual among the states on this site: estates over $2 million file, and since the 2023 change a credit of up to $99,600 means only the value above $2 million is taxed, at 0.8% to 16%.

BLS counted 1,191,700 nonfarm jobs in the San Antonio-New Braunfels MSA in August 2026 (not seasonally adjusted, preliminary), up 6,100 or 0.5% on the year. Professional and business services grew fastest (+4.8%, to 162,400), then construction (+2.9%) and trade, transportation and utilities (+2.8%), while information (-7.7%), government (-3.1%, to 181,800) and private education and health services (-2.0%, to 180,300) shrank; federal government employment fell 6.7%, from 38,700 to 36,100. Trade, transportation and utilities is the largest sector at 216,300 jobs. The seasonally adjusted series (SMS48417000000000001) was 1,195,900 in August 2026, 0.8% above August 2025. BLS's federal line is far smaller than the base itself: the Texas Comptroller counts 74,713 direct employees at Joint Base San Antonio in 2025, 33,256 of them active-duty military, and estimates the base supported 223,349 Texas jobs and $33.9 billion of the state's GDP ($53.5 billion of output). Greater SATX, the regional economic development group, calls it the largest joint base in the US military. UT San Antonio, formed when UTSA and UT Health San Antonio merged in September 2025, calls health care and biosciences, a $44.1 billion sector, the city's largest industry. H-E-B, USAA, Valero Energy and iHeartMedia are all headquartered in the city.

Main sectors: Military and federal installations: Joint Base San Antonio (Fort Sam Houston with Brooke Army Medical Center, Lackland Air Force Base with the Air Force's basic military training and the 16th Air Force, and Randolph Air Force Base with the Air Education and Training Command), Health care and biosciences (the South Texas Medical Center, University Health, UT Health San Antonio and UT San Antonio, Methodist Hospital, the Audie L. Murphy Memorial Veterans Hospital), Tourism and hospitality (Visit San Antonio counts $23.4 billion of economic impact and more than 150,000 jobs in 2024), Trade, transportation and utilities, the metro's largest sector by payroll jobs (H-E-B, headquartered in the city; CPS Energy; San Antonio International Airport's cargo), Financial services, energy and media headquarters (USAA, Valero Energy, iHeartMedia).

Property tax is the local levy that matters. Tax Foundation puts Texas's effective property tax rate on owner-occupied homes at 1.40%, and school districts must exempt $140,000 of a homestead's value from their tax. On 17 September 2026 the City Council voted 7 to 4, with Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones in the minority, to raise the city's own rate for the first time since 1992, as part of a plan to close a $158 million deficit over two years that also includes cuts, fee increases and a second rate increase planned for fiscal 2028. The fiscal 2027 rate is 56.288 cents per $100 of taxable value: 35.138 cents for maintenance and operations, two cents more than before, and 21.150 cents for debt service. The two outlets that gave a figure for the average homestead disagree: KSAT put it at about $49 more a year on a taxable value of $231,356, and the San Antonio Report at $35.43 on a $234,000 home. Senior and disabled homeowners with a tax freeze, about 47% of the city's homesteads, are unaffected (KSAT). The county, school district, University Health, San Antonio River Authority, Alamo Colleges and other levies on the same bill belong to the housing layer.

Health care

Massachusetts has the lowest uninsured rate in the country, 2.8% in 2024 against 8.2% nationally, which is the legacy of its own 2006 coverage law and of MassHealth, the Medicaid program, expanded under the ACA. Care is still paid for through employer plans, ConnectorCare and marketplace plans, Medicare and MassHealth, and what a household pays out of pocket depends entirely on the plan. The teaching hospitals are the draw. Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women's were both named to the U.S. News 2026-2027 Best Hospitals honor roll, the top 20 in the country, with Mass General first nationally in psychiatry and McLean second, Brigham and Dana-Farber third in cancer, Brigham second in obstetrics and gynecology and eighth in neuroscience, and Mass General sixth in heart and vascular care. Beth Israel Deaconess, Tufts Medical Center, Boston Children's and the rest of the Longwood Medical Area cluster fill in the rest. Density of hospitals is not the same as an appointment: this file did not verify a wait time figure for primary or specialist care.

Education

Boston Public Schools enrolled 44,416 students in 2025-26 on the state's count, down 1,678 or 3.6% from 46,094 the year before, which itself was up from 45,742 in 2023-24. Address does not settle where a child goes. Assignment runs through a choice application, and the three exam schools, Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy and the John D. O'Bryant School, admit on a composite score that is 70% grade point average and 30% the MAP Growth test, with applicants competing only inside one of four socioeconomic tiers drawn from where they live. The School Committee voted 4 to 2 in November 2025 to set aside 20% of seats for the highest scorers citywide regardless of tier, and to drop the bonus points for students at high-poverty schools; the district's own simulation put Black students' share of invitations falling from 20% to 15% and white students' rising from 27% to 33%. Higher education is the city's other anchor and a large part of its economy: Boston University counted 37,737 students in fall 2024, Northeastern is the other large private university inside the city, and Harvard and MIT are across the Charles in Cambridge.

Living there

Boston is small, old and dense in a way no other city on this site is. The median home was built in 1947, 64% of occupied homes are rented, and a quarter of workers get to work on the MBTA, against about one in a hundred in Tampa. That buys a life much of the city can live without a car, and it costs the most money of the American cities here: Zillow's typical value for June 2026 is $791,816. Winter is the part people underestimate, a 49 inch snow normal and a January mean below freezing, and the housing stock that gives the city its look is the housing stock that has to be heated. The open question is on the waterfront. The Seaport was built out over the last twenty-five years on filled land at the harbor's edge, the January 2018 tide showed what a nor'easter can do at high water, and the city now designs its coastal defenses to 2070 sea levels.

Health care

Care is paid for through employer or marketplace insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, and Texas is one of the ten states that have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (KFF, August 2026). It had the highest uninsured rate of any state in 2024: 16.7%, or 5,152,427 of 30,799,312 people, against 8.2% nationally and 12.0% in Georgia, the next highest, on the ACS 2024 1-year estimates. The City of San Antonio's rate was 18.0% (268,665 of 1,496,335), Bexar County's 15.8% and the metro's 14.5%. The South Texas Medical Center on the Northwest Side covers more than 900 acres around the medical school that opened there in 1968 and holds the Audie L. Murphy Memorial Veterans Medical Center and a dozen other hospitals; a UTSA study cited by the San Antonio Report in 2022 put its annual economic effect on the region at $24.5 billion. University Health, the Bexar County Hospital District, runs University Hospital there, a 716-bed teaching hospital and a Level I trauma center for adults and children, and the 300-bed Women's & Children's Hospital that opened on the same campus in 2023; it plans to open two community hospitals elsewhere in the county in 2027. Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston has about 8,500 staff. UT Health San Antonio, the clinical arm of UT San Antonio, counts more than 2.5 million patient visits a year. This file did not verify a wait time figure for primary or specialist care.

Education

No single school district covers the city. Northside ISD, the largest in the San Antonio area with about 98,000 students, faced a $35 million deficit in March 2026, down from nearly $108 million, and its superintendent said closures were possible but not expected for 2026-27 (KSAT). North East ISD lost about 2,000 students in 2025-26, now serves about 55,000, closed three campuses the year before and will accept students from anywhere in the region from 2026-27 (San Antonio Report). San Antonio ISD has closed 25 schools in the last decade and in March 2026 voted to close Rhodes Middle School and hand three other campuses to a charter operator, Third Future Schools, citing falling enrollment and state accountability ratings. Districts say they cannot yet tell how many students the state's new education savings accounts, which help pay private school tuition from 2026-27, will draw away. UT San Antonio, formed on 2 September 2025 when UTSA merged with UT Health San Antonio, has about 40,000 students and 17,000 employees and calls itself the third-largest public research university in Texas by research spending, and the Alamo Colleges District runs five community colleges.

Living there

San Antonio is the second city of Texas and the seventh-largest in the country, and unlike Dallas it is still growing inside its own limits: it added 14,359 residents in 2024-25, the third-largest gain of any US city, and 8.0% since 2020. The military has shaped it for three centuries, and Joint Base San Antonio, with 74,713 direct employees, sits beside the South Texas Medical Center and a tourism trade Visit San Antonio values at $23.4 billion as the pillars of the economy. Household income is lower than in Dallas or Austin, and 18.0% of residents have no health insurance. VIA runs buses only, 2.4% of workers take them and 68.2% drive alone, and the Green Line along San Pedro Avenue, the city's first rapid transit line, is due in April 2028. Summers are long and dry rather than humid, with 122 days a year at 90F or above and 75 at 100F in 2023, and water is the killer: the creeks rise within minutes, and a single night of rain on 12 June 2025 drowned 13 people. The open questions are fiscal and civic: the council raised the city's property tax rate for the first time since 1992 on a 7 to 4 vote the mayor opposed, with a second increase planned, and the big school districts are shrinking, closing campuses and competing for each other's students as the state's education savings accounts begin.