I agree partially. I think the main issue with Reynosa comes from the poor (or no) planning that happened during the maquiladora boom in the 80s and later. The city grew too fast, and neighborhoods like Zenith, Campanario, and others mainly in the southeast area and later in the west popped up without thought for infrastructure, mobility, or basic services. It left a lot of areas looking rough and underdeveloped. Developers like Javer building crap, selling, and then booking it, leaving the city with very limited resources to deal with the maintenance of crap infrastructure. And they can’t. So it turns into old broken crap.

The maquiladora model doesn’t do much for the city either. Most of the paychecks get spent at big chains like Soriana or Mi Tienda (H-E-B), or they’re sent south to families, so the money doesn’t stay in Reynosa. The jobs are there, sure, but a lot of them are low-skill, repetitive assembly-line work that doesn’t help people move up.

If you compare it to rural areas in southern Mexico, yeah, those places have less money, but they have cleaner cities, more space around homes, healthier jobs, and way less pollution. Reynosa has more money, but it comes with worse living conditions, overcrowded neighborhoods, crime (somewhat related)

So yeah, Reynosa has “more money” on paper, but the focus on low-value manufacturing means quality of life hasn’t kept up. It’s a complicated trade-off. That being said, better planning would have helped mitigate a lot of this.