Commentaries at the San Antonio Report provide space for our community to share perspectives and offer solutions to pressing local issues. The views expressed in this commentary belong to the author alone.
On any given weekend in San Antonio someone is selling plates out of their kitchen. Someone else is fixing cars after hours. Someone else is trading childcare for help with repairs. This is a common hustle and grind in our city, part of how San Antonio works. But it doesn’t always show up in official counts.
The numbers, though, are starting to catch up to reality. A recent small business and personal finance survey conducted by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation San Antonio finds that nearly two-thirds of residents in our city would prefer to work for themselves, while fewer than three in ten have ever owned a business. Only one in ten knows where to find help to start or grow one.
Read that again. The desire is there. The knowledge of where to go isn’t. The institutions designed to help failed to close that distance.
The gap becomes more visible when we look at how people are already earning and surviving. Nearly half of respondents report trading or bartering for goods and services. Half. A parallel economy is already running alongside the official one — built on relationships and reciprocity, the kind of trust that doesn’t require a credit score.
Here’s what makes it interesting. This so-called off-the-books economy doesn’t exist in opposition to the formal system. It overlaps with it. Most of the same people have bank accounts. Most track their credit. Many say they trust financial institutions. Yet when it comes to day-to-day resilience, they rely on each other. The takeaway is more a mismatch than distrust.
That mismatch shows up in how people define something as basic as “local business.” More than 80% say they try to shop locally. Ask them what that means and they’ll tell you: food, groceries, basic services. Not branding. Not lifestyle. The traditional branding and preference logic misses the point, because neighborhoods have their own logic.
The system offers one thing. The neighborhood needs another.
What this tells us is that the line between consumer and entrepreneur in San Antonio is thinner than we like to admit. The same person buying tamales from a neighbor on Saturday might be selling something of their own by Sunday. The activity is already there. What’s missing is the recognition and the support.
So the policy conversation has to change. You can’t start by trying to create entrepreneurs from scratch. You have to start by seeing the ones who are already here, already working, already building something, without the paperwork.
That means three things.
Make it visible. People generating income through informal networks need to see that as a legitimate starting point, not something to apologize for or hide. If the word “entrepreneur” doesn’t feel like it belongs to them, they won’t walk through doors that were built for entrepreneurs.
Meet people where they are. The survey is clear, that financial information travels through family, through social media, through neighborhood relationships. Programs that only exist inside institutions will miss the people who need them most.
Build on-ramps, not walls. The path from informal to formal should feel like a next step, not a reinvention. Registration, credit-building, access to capital — these should extend what people are already doing, not demand they start over.
San Antonio doesn’t need to manufacture an entrepreneurial spirit. It has one. It’s been here, in the kitchens and driveways and front yards, in the exchanges and the favors and the handshakes that don’t make it into any official count.
The question was never whether the culture exists. The question is how we will work intentionally to support businesses.
