El Paso vs Hialeah: which should you move to?

On the FBI's definitions, violent offenses in El Paso went from 1,794 in 2021 to 2,109 in 2022, 2,134 in 2023 and a peak of 2,170 in 2024, then 1,969 in 2025, a 9% drop in the last year that still leaves the count 10% above 2021. Property offenses went from 8,882 to 9,440 and a peak of 11,061 in 2023, then 10,246 and 9,152, 17% below the peak. Motor vehicle theft drove much of the swing: 994 in 2021, 2,314 in 2023 and 1,805 in 2025. In 2025 the CDE shows aggravated assaults down 10% (1,628 to 1,467), robberies down 11% (255 to 226), rapes down 6% (267 to 250), burglaries down 19% (959 to 773) and larcenies down 11%, while murders (20 to 26) and arsons (69 to 78) rose. EPPD's own count of the eight offenses, as reported to the state, fell 11% in 2025, but El Paso Matters found it was the only one of Texas's 25 largest law enforcement agencies to report more serious crime in 2025 than in 2021, after rises in 2022 and 2023. 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: 1,969 violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) in the FBI Crime Data Explorer's summarized data for the El Paso Police Department (ORI TX0710200) in calendar 2025, divided by the 683,012 Vintage 2025 city population. On the CDE's own agency population of 682,310 the rate is 289. That is the lowest of any US city this site compares, against 375 in Fort Worth, 532 in San Antonio, 577 in Dallas and 890 in Houston, and below Miami's 359. EPPD's own figures, as reported to the Texas Department of Public Safety and summarized by El Paso Matters, put violent crime 10% lower in 2025 than in 2024, in line with the CDE's 9% drop.

Homicides: 26 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters in 2025 in the FBI CDE, against 20 in 2024, about 3.8 per 100,000 on the city population, half Fort Worth's rate and a third of Houston's. El Paso Matters, reading the department's report to the state, also has murder rising in 2025, one of only two of the eight tracked offenses that did, with arson. The CDE series is small and uneven: 33 in 2021, 22 in 2022, 37 in 2023, 20 in 2024 and 26 in 2025.

Down for violent crime, and down for property crime by less than the FBI's totals suggest. On the FBI CDE's counts violent offenses went from 474 in 2022 to 431 in 2023, 415 in 2024 and 412 in 2025, about 210, 187, 178 and 178 per 100,000 on each year's Vintage 2025 population, and January to July 2026 brought 192 against 246 in the same months of 2025, a fall of 22%, mostly in aggravated assaults (165 against 214). Robberies halved, from 66 in 2022 to 31 in 2025. The CDE's property totals fell from 4,329 in 2022 to 3,273 in 2025, but about 500 of that fall is motor vehicle thefts the FBI's series stopped carrying in October 2023; without them property offenses went from 3,801 in 2022 to 3,621 in 2023, 3,610 in 2024 and 3,266 in 2025, a fall of 14% over three years, with larceny down from 3,565 to 3,018. FDLE's file, which kept counting car thefts, has them falling too, from 541 in 2022 and 566 in 2023 to 488 in 2024 and 337 in 2025. January to July 2026 property offenses (1,969) were level with 2025 (1,962). The CDE counts were read on 2 October 2026 from a feed last refreshed on 15 September 2026, whose August 2026 property count (139, about half a normal month) and September figures (none) are incomplete and are not used.

What the rates cover: Computed: 412 violent offenses (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) in the FBI Crime Data Explorer's summarized data for the Hialeah Police Department (ORI FL0130400) in calendar 2025, divided by the 230,968 Vintage 2025 estimate for July 2025; on the CDE's own agency population of 238,769 the rate is 173. The department has reported to the FBI through the incident-based system since January 2021 and the CDE has every month from then to August 2026. 2025 is the year the Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, Port St. Lucie and St. Petersburg profiles use. That is half Miami's 359, below Tampa's 376, St. Petersburg's 502 and Jacksonville's 514, and above Port St. Lucie's 130 and Cape Coral's 122 for 2023. Aggravated assault is 356 of the 412. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement's incident-based (FIBRS) file, which feeds the FBI and counts somewhat more broadly (its forcible sex offenses include fondling), has 432 violent offenses for the department in 2025, about 187 per 100,000.

Homicides: 3 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters in 2025 in the FBI CDE, about 1.3 per 100,000 on the city population; FDLE's file also has 3. The CDE series is 12 in 2021, 6 in 2022, 6 in 2023, 2 in 2024, 3 in 2025 and 2 in January to August 2026. Miami had 26 in 2025, Tampa 17, St. Petersburg 9 and Port St. Lucie 4.

BLS counted 363,500 nonfarm jobs in the El Paso MSA in August 2026 (not seasonally adjusted, preliminary), up 3,200 or 0.9% on the year. Professional and business services grew fastest (+3.5%, to 44,500), then leisure and hospitality (+2.5%, to 44,600), construction and mining (+1.8%) and manufacturing (+1.1%, to 18,400), while information (-4.5%) and local government (-1.3%, to 47,000) shrank and private education and health services held at 56,000. Unlike in Fort Worth and San Antonio, federal employment rose, 3.0% to 13,800; BLS's payroll count does not include active-duty soldiers. Trade, transportation and utilities is the largest sector at 80,200 jobs and government the second at 70,900. The seasonally adjusted series (SMS48213400000000001) was 365,200 in August 2026, 1.2% above August 2025. The Texas Comptroller counts 41,527 direct employees at Fort Bliss in 2025 and estimates the base supported 121,220 Texas jobs and $17.3 billion of the state's GDP ($29.1 billion of output). The border is the other half of the economy: in 2025 the Bureau of Transportation Statistics counted 13.1 million personal vehicle passengers and 5.4 million pedestrians entering at the El Paso port, second on the Mexican border only to San Ysidro for both, and 641,729 trucks at Ysleta-Zaragoza, fourth after Laredo, Otay Mesa and Hidalgo. The largest new investment is Meta's AI data center in Northeast El Paso, a $10 billion project as El Paso Matters described it in May 2026, which the city expects to become its largest property taxpayer, at about $15 million a year once fully built in 2028, with 300 permanent jobs (El Paso Matters).

Main sectors: Military and federal government: Fort Bliss, home of the 1st Armored Division, the largest installation in the Army's Forces Command, with 41,527 direct employees in 2025 (30,288 of them active-duty), and the federal border agencies (US Border Patrol's El Paso Sector, Customs and Border Protection, the El Paso Intelligence Center), Health care (University Medical Center of El Paso and the El Paso County Hospital District, Texas Tech Health El Paso, William Beaumont Army Medical Center), Cross-border trade, transportation and logistics with Ciudad Juárez and its export factories, the metro's largest sector by payroll jobs (80,200 in August 2026), The ports of entry: the downtown Paso del Norte, Stanton Street and Bridge of the Americas crossings, Ysleta-Zaragoza and Tornillo, which together took 842,659 trucks and 28.8 million people into the US in 2025, Education and local government (UTEP, El Paso Community College and the El Paso, Ysleta and Socorro school districts); government is the metro's second-largest sector at 70,900 jobs.

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 18 August 2026 a divided City Council adopted a $658.6 million general fund budget for fiscal 2027 and a rate of 79.8 cents per $100 of taxable value, both 6 to 2, which El Paso Matters says will raise the city's bill on the average-value home by about $105; the council had adopted the no-new-revenue rate every year before 2025, and the city manager's proposal at the voter-approval rate would have added $132. The county adopted its no-new-revenue rate of 45.1 cents, about $41 more on a $229,637 home, and the hospital district proposed its no-new-revenue rate of 23.7 cents. El Paso's rates are among the highest of Texas's big counties, but its home values are among the lowest: an El Paso Matters analysis of Tax Foundation and Census data found the county's median property tax bill took 6.1% of median household income in 2024, about the same share as in most large Texas counties and less than in Travis County, where the median bill was 111% higher. The county, school district, hospital district, community college and other levies on the same bill belong to the housing layer.

BLS counted 1,349,400 nonfarm jobs in the Miami-Miami Beach-Kendall metropolitan division, which is Miami-Dade County, in August 2026 (not seasonally adjusted, preliminary), up 6,200 or 0.5% on the year. Professional and business services (+5,300, or 2.5%, to 221,300), private education and health services (+4,600, or 2.0%, to 229,600), leisure and hospitality (+2,900, or 1.9%, to 153,400) and wholesale trade (+1,500, or 1.8%, to 82,800) added the most, while financial activities lost 5,100 (-5.0%, to 96,700), government 1,100 and transportation, warehousing and utilities 1,000. Trade, transportation and utilities is the largest supersector at 324,900, 24% of the county's jobs. The City's 2025 financial report lists its ten principal employers, led by Palmetto General Hospital (1,635), the City (1,492), UPS (1,119) and Hialeah Hospital (1,032), at 8,995 jobs, 7.8% of employment in the city on the City's count; six of the ten carry exactly the headcount they had in 2016, so the list has not been recounted for most of them. Most residents work elsewhere in the county: 61.8% of the city's workers (74,100 of 119,984) worked outside Hialeah in 2024, but only 9.8% (11,754) outside Miami-Dade. 13.2% worked from home, and the mean commute for the rest was 30 minutes, with 11.4% spending an hour or more (ACS 2024 1-year, B08007, B08008, B08013, B08101 and B08303).

Main sectors: Health care: Palmetto General Hospital (1,635 staff) is the city's largest employer, and Hialeah Hospital (1,032), Larkin Community Hospital's Palm Springs campus (683) and La Colonia Medical Centers (527) are also among its ten largest, in a county sector (private education and health services, 229,600 jobs) that added 4,600 jobs over the year, Shipping, wholesale and warehousing: United Parcel Service (1,119) is the third-largest employer, in a city beside Miami International Airport; Miami-Dade's wholesale trade employs 82,800 and its transportation, warehousing and utilities 98,400, Groceries and retail: Publix (771), Fresco y Más (741) and Sedano's (545) among the ten largest employers, the many independent shops and supermarkets on the main streets that Wikipedia describes, and Westland Mall, in a county with 143,700 retail jobs, City government: the City of Hialeah (1,492, down from 1,755 in 2016), which runs its own police, fire department, library and free bus service, Light industry: the garment and manufacturing plants that made Hialeah an industrial city in the 1970s and 1980s have mostly gone, replaced in part by electronics and technology businesses (Wikipedia); Miami-Dade's manufacturing employs 46,800, 3.5% of its jobs.

Property tax is the local levy that matters. Tax Foundation puts Florida's effective property tax rate on owner-occupied homes at 0.78%, and a homestead exemption takes as much as $50,000 off a permanent residence's taxable value and brings the Save Our Homes limit on how fast its assessment can rise (Florida Department of Revenue). A property in the City of Hialeah (Miami-Dade millage code 0400) paid 18.6468 mills for 2025 on the Miami-Dade Property Appraiser's adopted chart, down from 18.6638 in 2024: the City's own 6.3018 plus the 12.3450 of school, county and regional levies every municipality in the county pays. Hialeah runs its own fire department and its own library, so it pays neither the county Fire Rescue district's 2.3965 mills nor the library district's 0.2812. The City has held its rate at 6.3018 for at least ten years while taxable value rose 11.0% in fiscal 2025 to $22.2 billion (City of Hialeah financial report), and the appraiser's proposed 2026 table keeps it there, for a total of 18.6134. Miami-Dade is also the one Florida county with its own deed tax: 60 cents per $100 rather than the statewide 70, plus a 45-cent surtax that is not due on a transfer of a single-family dwelling only (Florida Department of Revenue), so a house at Hialeah's typical value of $445,331 carries about $2,672 and a condominium or duplex at the same price about $4,676, the seller's by convention. Zillow's typical home value for the city was $445,331 in June 2026, down 1.5% on the year, and its observed rent $2,374; the bills, insurance and flood exposure that follow belong to the housing layer.

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). 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 El Paso's rate was 20.8% (138,104 of 665,393), El Paso County's 21.5% and the metro's 21.5%. University Medical Center of El Paso, run by the El Paso County Hospital District, is the county's only public hospital and the region's only Level I trauma center; it has 394 licensed beds and in fiscal 2024 counted 97,326 emergency visits and more than a million outpatient visits. The district, which also runs El Paso Children's Hospital, has budgeted $136 million of uncompensated care for fiscal 2027 on a $2.1 billion budget, citing the end of the enhanced ACA subsidies, and voters approved a $397 million bond for it in 2024 (El Paso Matters). UMC is the teaching hospital of Texas Tech Health El Paso, formerly Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso, independent since 2013, whose Paul L. Foster School of Medicine was the first four-year medical school on the US-Mexico border; it also runs schools of nursing, biomedical sciences and dental medicine, the last of which took its first class in 2021, and is planning the Fox Cancer Center, which it calls the first comprehensive cancer center in far West Texas. William Beaumont Army Medical Center, the Army hospital at Fort Bliss, moved into a new 1.1-million-square-foot complex on East Fort Bliss in July 2021 and runs the emergency department for Northeast El Paso (Wikipedia). This file did not verify a wait time figure for primary or specialist care.

Education

Four school districts cover parts of the city, El Paso ISD, Ysleta ISD, Socorro ISD and Canutillo ISD, and nine serve the county (Wikipedia). All of them are shrinking: El Paso County lost almost 12,000 residents aged 5 to 18 between 2020 and 2025, 6.6%, and the three largest districts had about 124,000 students in 2025-26, 13% fewer than seven years earlier (El Paso Matters). El Paso ISD lost almost 1,900 students in 2025-26 against a budgeted 1,000, ran a $52.8 million deficit, and on 4 June 2026 its board declared financial exigency to cut about 410 jobs, after which two trustees resigned; it has postponed a bond election to May 2027. Ysleta ISD adopted a budget that nearly empties its savings. The University of Texas at El Paso, an R1 research university, has 26,297 students, 85% of them Hispanic and half the first in their families to attend college, and calls itself the leading Hispanic-serving university in the country. El Paso Community College, with five campuses, enrolled 25,563 credit students in fall 2024, 81.7% of them Hispanic (EPCC Fact Book). Texas Tech Health El Paso trains doctors, nurses and dentists beside UMC.

Living there

El Paso is the only city this site compares on the Mexican border, the only one in the desert, and the only Texas city here on Mountain time, an hour behind the rest of the state, half of a metropolis whose larger half, Ciudad Juárez, is across the Rio Grande: 28.8 million people crossed into the US at its three ports in 2025. It is also the one Texas city here that is not growing. It lost 2,219 residents in 2024-25, the most of any city in the state, and has grown 0.6% since 2020, as births fall, fewer people move up from Mexico and young adults leave for better pay; household income, at $59,932, is the lowest of any city this site compares, and 20.8% of residents have no health insurance. Fort Bliss and the border agencies anchor the economy, with health care, trade and the schools. Its violent crime rate, 288 per 100,000 on the FBI's counts for 2025, is the lowest of any US city here, with 26 homicides. It is built for the car, with 0.9% of workers on a bus network that runs four Brio rapid lines and a free downtown streetcar. The climate is the driest and sunniest here, with 8.78 in of rain a year, and the hottest summers are recent ones: 70 days at 100F in 2023 and 108 straight days at 90F or above in 2026. The open questions are water and money: the Rio Grande reservoir that supplies nearly half the city's water fell to 1.4% of capacity in July 2026, a divided council raised the city's property tax rate in August, El Paso ISD declared financial exigency in June as enrollment falls, and the city is counting on Meta's data center, due to become its largest property taxpayer, to take some of the load off homeowners.

Health care

Care is paid for through employer or marketplace insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, and Florida is one of the ten states that have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (KFF). The City of Hialeah's uninsured rate was 15.1% in 2024 (35,490 of 234,398, ACS 2024 1-year), above Miami-Dade's 12.4%, Florida's 10.9% and the national 8.2%. The city has two acute care hospitals, Hialeah Hospital and Palmetto General Hospital, which Steward Health Care bought from Tenet in August 2021 and lost in its bankruptcy: a court approved their sale to Healthcare Systems of America on 25 October 2024, and Hialeah Hospital is now owned by Medical Properties Trust and operated by that company (Wikipedia). Palmetto General is the city's largest employer (1,635 staff) and Hialeah Hospital its fourth (1,032), with Larkin Community Hospital's Palm Springs campus (683) and La Colonia Medical Centers (527) also among the ten largest (City of Hialeah). Wikipedia gives Hialeah Hospital 378 beds from the hospital's own site of 2015; this file did not verify a current bed count for either hospital, or a wait time figure for primary or specialist care.

Education

Miami-Dade County Public Schools runs the city's public schools. The district counted 18,910 fewer students on the first days of 2026-27 than at the end of 2025-26, a first-day snapshot it says the October count will refine, with private school vouchers, the cost of living and immigration enforcement among the reasons given; it had already closed or consolidated nine schools, and the 27 more it has put under review or reassessment do not include any named in Hialeah (WLRN; CBS News Miami). Wikipedia's list of the schools serving the city includes Hialeah Senior High, Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior High and Westland Hialeah Senior High, with the José Martí MAST 6-12 magnet academy and the City of Hialeah Educational Academy, a charter school (Wikipedia). Miami Dade College has had a Hialeah campus since 1980. The City runs its own public library system, founded in 1924, a year before the city was incorporated, and outside the county's library district, which is why the county library levy does not appear on Hialeah tax bills (Wikipedia; Miami-Dade Property Appraiser).

Living there

Hialeah is the most Cuban city in the United States. It was laid out in 1921 by the aviator Glenn Curtiss and the cattleman James Bright on a prairie between Biscayne Bay and the Everglades, incorporated in 1925, the year Hialeah Park's racetrack opened, and became a working-class city after 1959 as successive waves of Cuban exiles settled there (Wikipedia). On the ACS 2024 1-year estimates 95.3% of its people are Hispanic, 72.7% are of Cuban origin and 77.1% were born outside the United States, against 55.3% for Miami-Dade; 91.9% speak Spanish at home and 59.5% speak English less than very well (2020-2024 5-year). It is dense, about 10,700 people per square mile of land, and one of the few places in the county with a street grid numbered separately from Miami's. It has the second-lowest household income of the Florida cities this site compares ($57,151, above only Tallahassee's) and, after Miami and Orlando, the lowest share of owners (42.8%), but its unemployment is low (2.3% in July 2026) and most of its workers have jobs inside Miami-Dade. It is also older than its reputation, with a median age of 46.0. It barely grew from 2020 to 2025 (3.5%) and lost people in the last year, as Miami-Dade did. Violent crime in 2025 was 178 per 100,000, half Miami's, with three homicides. Its own government does more than most: it runs its fire department, its library and free buses, and its property tax rate has not moved from 6.3018 mills in a decade.