Why El Paso Needs a Strategy to Preserve Housing Affordability, Prevent Displacement

In the Regular City Council meeting on September 3, 2025, my proposal for the development of a comprehensive anti-displacement policy framework was approved unanimously, though after much debate. The following represents the basis of my comments in support of the proposal made before the vote.

Cities across the country are learning a hard lesson: when growth comes without guardrails, longtime residents can be pushed out of the very neighborhoods they helped build. El Paso has a chance to do better than this. As our community grows and new investment comes in, we have to make sure those who live here now, particularly more vulnerable residents such as young families, seniors, and lower-income residents, are not priced out of their homes and neighborhoods.

When we invest in our neighborhoods, we want the people who live there now to benefit just as much as those who are building in those neighborhoods. We want stability, continuity, and trust that we have the best interest of the community in mind. Anti-displacement strategies are not just about housing. They are about justice, stability, and belonging. They are about keeping El Paso’s families in El Paso’s neighborhoods. Right now, too many of our affordable homes are affordable only by accident. They are not protected by subsidies or long-term agreements, which means rising rents or speculative purchases can quickly displace the people who rely on them. Tenants in Texas have relatively few legal protections, and homeowners in transitioning neighborhoods often worry about rising housing costs and losing their community’s character. In places like Chamizal, Segundo Barrio, and Rio Grande in my district, and countless other neighborhoods across the entire city, these pressures are already being felt, and people are telling us they want action.

It would be foolish for us to wait until the problem is too big to solve. Other cities have shown us that displacement isn’t inevitable; it’s the result of choices. We can choose a different path. A comprehensive anti-displacement strategy for El Paso will pull from the best ideas across the country but be tailored to our local context. That means looking at tenant protections where state law allows, preserving naturally occurring affordable housing, and designing zoning approaches that stabilize neighborhoods under economic pressure. It will also mean embracing models that put communities in the driver’s seat, such as community land trusts, limited-equity housing cooperatives, tenant opportunity-to-purchase programs, and community development corporations. These tools don’t just preserve affordability in the short term, they lock it in over time, and they give residents a real say in shaping the future of their neighborhoods.

I said at the start that anti-displacement strategies are not just about housing, they’re also about local small businesses. These policies are also focused on keeping them open and thriving in their communities. Larger franchise businesses and big box stores have their place, but we should take care to support and protect mom-and-pop shops, neighborhood scale businesses that directly serve neighborhood residents, and to make doing so a specific policy goal bolstered by specific policy interventions.

And, across all of this, it’s important to emphasize that one size will not fit all. What makes sense in Chamizal may not be the same as what’s needed in the Northeast or in the Lower Valley. The framework we’re talking about will need to be flexible – tailored to the context of each neighborhood, and guided by data like income levels, poverty rate, rent trends, location of new investment both private and public – and we will have to drill down to the neighborhood and census tract level and even block-by-block.

I’ll emphasize again that we are not considering any specific policy for implementation today; this isn’t like the zoning code amendments that we heard a few weeks ago that were at the very end of the process and were being considered for implementation. This is the very start of a process, the initial direction from the City Council to the City Manager to begin the steps required to develop a framework, together with the community and incorporating their input, for the Council to consider in the future. We are setting in motion the work of staff to research, engage the public, and bring back recommendations that reflect both best practices and El Paso’s unique needs.

The public input will be critical. Many of our residents, tenants, homeowners, and neighborhood leaders are already voicing concerns about affordability and the pace of change. This process will make sure their voices are heard in a structured, citywide way. There will be robust outreach, and there will be opportunities for communities to shape the strategies that come forward.

Done right, an anti-displacement strategy will sit alongside the housing reforms already underway as part of the City’s Strategic Plan implementation. It will be coordinated, proactive, and part of a broader shift toward equitable growth. Stable neighborhoods don’t just help the families who live there, they also strengthen our schools, keep our tax base resilient, and create healthier, safer communities across the entire city.

The benefits are clear. When we invest public dollars in a neighborhood, a thoughtful anti-displacement framework will ensure that the people who live there benefit from that investment. This strategy will protect housing stability, preserve cultural continuity, and strengthen trust between residents and their city government.

So today, we will move forward by giving direction to staff to work on this to get ahead of the negative trends we have seen in other cities. This is such a long time coming; it’s something that I can almost guarantee your constituents are almost unanimously in favor of; and it’s a rare time where I think it’s a positive that we’re a little bit behind many other cities in our development patterns and we can learn from them to implement something that is truly effective and works for the residents of our city. 

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Chris Canales represents District 8, encompassing the Southside, Downtown, and areas of the Westside and Central, on the El Paso City Council.

You can see the full text of Chris’s proposal and read the backup documentation here.

El Paso must reform zoning to tackle housing crisis and urban sprawl

Outdated parking mandates and limits on housing options are driving up costs and holding El Paso back. We can either modernize the zoning code or watch affordability slip away.

El Paso is at a crossroads in how our city grows. We can either choose to make thoughtful changes that keep our neighborhoods strong, or we can continue sprawling outward and watch the core of our city hollow out. An immediate, important step we can take is updating our zoning code to eliminate outdated parking mandates in certain areas and to allow more flexible housing options like accessory dwelling units, more commonly known here as casitas. The City Council will consider adopting these changes in our meeting on Tuesday, August 19.

The urgency of this could not be clearer. El Paso faces a deficit of 18,000 housing units. On top of that, more than 100,000 people sit on the waitlist for the Housing Authority. These aren’t just statistics; they represent thousands of families, seniors, and young people who cannot find a place to live in their own community. The scale of the crisis makes it irresponsible to keep outdated rules on the books that drive up costs and make it harder to build housing.

The first proposed reform would eliminate minimum off-street parking requirements in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding Downtown, contained entirely within my district. Right now, our zoning code mandates that every construction, whether it’s a new apartment building, a restaurant, or even a small shop, must provide a set number of parking spaces. These rules were written in an era when there was ample space and housing was readily available and affordable, but we now find ourselves in a very different context. Parking spaces are expensive to build, and when the law forces developers to include them even when they are not needed, those costs either get passed on to tenants and customers or make it so that entire types of developments aren’t financially feasible. Ultimately, parking mandates build pavement that often goes unused. By easing them in the urban core, we can lower housing costs and let businesses and housing grow in a way that fits neighborhood context. This change doesn’t ban off-street parking, it just leaves the decision in the hands of property owners; if they or their tenants need parking spaces, then they can build enough to meet that need. The market drives the decision, not City regulations tying people’s hands.

The other proposed reform would legalize accessory dwelling units (which you may alternatively know as casitas, granny flats, in-law suites, backyard cottages, or simply ADUs) on all residential lots across the city and make it easier to build them. Casitas offer families new options, whether it’s space for an aging parent, a returning adult child, or a renter needing housing close to school or work whose income can help the household pay the mortgage. They are a modest, practical way to add housing units without changing the character of a neighborhood. In fact, ADUs used to be common in El Paso before zoning rules made them far more difficult to build, which is evidenced by just how many of them there are in older neighborhoods. Restoring this option can help us meet today’s housing needs in a way that is relatively noninvasive and distributed instead of building giant apartment buildings that concentrate people and vehicles in one area.

The strongest argument for these reforms is this: the alternative is more sprawl, and sprawl is like a slow leak in our city’s resources and cohesiveness. It pulls residents, businesses, and ultimately tax dollars to the edges of El Paso, leaving fewer resources for streets, services, and infrastructure in neighborhoods in the core of the city. The larger the city grows geographically, the more new infrastructure we as a community will have to fund and maintain with our property tax bills, electric bills, gas bills, and water bills – and affordability will continue to erode. We have to do something to address this or we will get hollowed out.

Other Texas cities have already recognized this reality and acted. In 2023, Austin eliminated nearly all parking minimums. Earlier this year, Dallas followed with a City Council vote to reduce or eliminate mandates citywide. San Antonio and Houston have both rolled back requirements in their urban cores, giving more flexibility. Nationwide, more than 50 U.S. cities have done the same, including Berkeley, Minneapolis, Raleigh, San Jose, and Buffalo, to name a few. The imperative is clear: cities that want to remain competitive, affordable, and livable are leaving these outdated rules behind.

Of course, these reforms won’t solve our issues overnight. They are, however, a necessary step that will make it easier and cheaper to build new homes, create more choices for families, and help us grow inward instead of sprawling outward. I have heard some fear that these proposed changes will completely transform existing neighborhoods, but these kinds of policy shifts haven’t led to that kind of rapid, radical change when they have been implemented elsewhere. Instead, giving property owners more flexibility creates a smarter growth pattern for the long term, something we desperately need.

We have to get serious about addressing a housing crisis that already exists and making El Paso more affordable and resilient, rather than more expensive and stretched thin. We can either plan for the future, or we can let sprawl drain the life from the city’s core and, frankly, the hard-earned money from the pockets of El Pasoans. These reforms, both on parking mandates and ADUs, are a practical start in the right direction. If you want to share your thoughts, in support or otherwise, you can email your comments to me at District8@elpasotexas.gov and/or to CityClerk@elpasotexas.gov to be included in the official record (reference agenda items 48-50 in the subject).

Chris Canales represents District 8, encompassing the Southside, Downtown, and areas of the Westside and Central, on the El Paso City Council.