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.