When I lived in Las Cruces some ten years ago, we called it “Hell Paso,” “El Peso” and a bunch of other names that would get me banned from this bulletin board.
A little essay I wrote on El Paso a few days ago …
Less affluent municipalities tend to have fewer regulations that would lend themselves to promoting an attractive built environment. There’s also a collective mentality of desperation – job creation and preservation, or at least the perception thereof, is far more important than such luxuries as landscaping or architectural design control.
Nowhere is this attitude more evident than El Paso, Texas. The city is located in a spectacular setting, wrapped around the Franklin Mountains. Unfortunately, almost every textbook example of bad planning practice can be seen there, in great abundance and encouraged by city fathers.
El Paso has one of the most lenient sign codes in the United States. Portable signs are permitted on a temporary basis, “for no longer than 365 days in a year” according to the zoning code. Where other cities are successfully giving flashing arrows the boot, El Paso is where portable signs go to die – almost every business has one. The zoning regs also allow freestanding signs to be placed 60’ above the grade of the nearest limited access highway. There’s no small signs in the city – even in a residential area, a sign for a convenience store will tower forty feet above the parking lot – which won’t have any landscaping. Even in El Paso’s relatively affluent West Side, the silhouettes of what seems like a distant field of huge lollypops dominates the horizon, the effect of the hundreds of high rise signs lining I-10 and the city’s major arterials.
El Paso had few trees, but far more billboards. Supposedly thousands. You could literally read 'em in Juarez. Must be hell for someone living in a refrigerator carton a kilometer from the Rio Grande, looking across to “El Norte” and seeing a huge picture of a Lexus in the sky. “Hey, this is what you don’t have!” Even trashcans on street corners had officially sanctioned ads on them, much like bus shelters.
The attitude in El Paso is one that I’ve seen in many other cities. We’ll give Cracker Barrel a variance to put up a 100’ tall sign, so they can be seen from the Interstate, and we can get a few more jobs. Landscaping? Costs money to maintain, and there isn’t much of that around here. Rather have businesses spending the cash on workers than sprinkler systems. Architectural design regulations? Don’t want to do anything that could possibly ward off Wal-Mart or Lowe’s – and the jobs they bring.
Fortunately, I don’t live in El Paso. I did work as a planner in a city nearby, and struggled against that same sort of prevailing attitude to promote good design. Citizens and politicians liked my work, while I was labeled as a “communist” by the business community – and a fanatic by the planning director. I had some success, if you can say that a commercial strip filled with 30’ tall signs is any better looking than one filled with 60’ tall monsters with portables to boot, but relatively speaking, residents of that town to this day talk about how much nicer it is than El Paso. Frightening, when I think about it. People have become used to ugliness in the streetscape, and it’s as if someone thinks the Pacer is a beautiful car, because the only other thing they see on the road are Azteks.
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