The 5 Worst Things About El Paso Texas

The 5 Worst Things About El Paso Texas

Hi, and welcome to Living in El Paso, Texas. My name is John Peña, and in this episode we're going to talk about the five worst things about El Paso. Hi and welcome to the YouTube channel Living in El Paso, Texas.

My name is John Peña. I'm a real estate agent here, and on this channel we feature all things El Paso, eat, sleep, work, play. If this is the information that you are interested in, please consider subscribing to the channel

or sharing one of our videos with somebody you know. In this episode, we're going to talk about the five worst things about El Paso, and now this is not going to be some click-baity, you know, El Paso. One of the worst things about El Paso is, you know, don't, don't, don't move here if

you like people who are really, really nice, kind of nonsense. No, this is honestly the five biggest objections or worst things that I hear from people who live here or who even moved here. So without further ado, let's jump right into it.

Number one, dust storms. As you can imagine in a desert, there is a lot of dust and dirt and sand, and if it gets windy enough, this dust, this dirt, this sand will get picked up and, you know, and can turn into a dust storm.

So in the Chihuahuan desert where we are, we have what are called highly erodible playas, flat dried up land and desert basins. We have alluvial plains, large flat landforms created by the deposit of sediment from the Rio Grande River.

And so essentially we can see about 14 to 15 dust events per year. Now for the record, I've been here two years and I have not, I've maybe experienced one dust event and it was actually in March, April. I was in Horizon City where there's a lot of cleared land that's getting ready to be

developed and sure enough, it got windy and all of a sudden it was like, it was full on dust storm. It wasn't so crazy that we had to pull over and stop, but I could see how, you know, if you were out on the highway, say a little, maybe I-10 going west in New Mexico, there,

there can be some pretty serious dust storms. There's even signs on the side of the road that say, hey, in the event of a dust storm, pull over, wait it out, be safe. And so these can pop up really anytime, but primarily during the dry season, which is

November through May, the peak windy seasons kind of being March, April. And so, like I said, just to make sure that I don't downplay it, I found a little news article in July, 2017, there was a 25 vehicle pile up on I-10 in New Mexico. So you know, if you do find yourself, you know, anywhere in a desert and a dust storm

picks up, you know, you want to exercise common sense and be careful. I wanted to come up with a silver lining for each one, which I did for the other four. I really couldn't come up with this one. This one, if you like to have your windows open, which we do because the weather's great

here most of the time, your house can get pretty dusty because dust, you know, it's kind of blowing around and it blows into your house and all of a sudden like you do this across something and it like, it's like, okay, time to dust. All right, number two, we are the sun city.

In the summer, it can get a little hot here. All right. So summers are hot. And of course, over the course of the year, the temperature typically varies from about

34 degrees to 97 degrees and is rarely below 24 degrees or above 104. And so yes, it can get hot, but we're not talking crazy, you know, Phoenix, 120 hot. You know, we're talking essentially a hundred or maybe up to like, maybe like 105 ish more or less.

Today, September 10th, temperature is about 93 degrees right now. Had a high of 95, a low of 64. So everybody, you know, if you remember just a month or so ago, everybody on the kind of the lower half of the country was under this heat dome.

So if those events become a little more common, those might start to skew our numbers. But for the most part, yes, of course it gets hot. There's a joke here in El Paso. There's a shirt that says Hell Paso, and it has like flames, right?

Which is pretty clever use of words there. But yes, it gets hot in the summer. Does it get crazy hot? Like 120?

No, it does not. But there can certainly be times where it's a hundred or above. Our highest temperature ever recorded, 114 degrees. That was on June 30th of 1994 and our average number of days over 100 or over 15.4.

So you know, there you have it. Of course, yeah, it's El Paso and it gets hot here in the summers. The silver lining on this one is really easy because the sun is with us pretty much all year round.

And so we don't see a lot of these seasonal affective disorder, like say a place like Seattle might. So you know, you might have to suffer through some hot weather in the summer, but the rest of the year, the sun's going to be out and you're going to be able to take advantage

of just kind of the, what is it, vitamin A that the sun does for you. But it's just, I don't know, seems to keep everybody in good spirits and is nice. So silver lining on that one. If you like sun and bright kind of shiny weather, this is definitely a great place.

If you like solar, also a really good place as well. So that was number two. Number three, worst thing about El Paso, road construction slash traffic a little bit. Now I've lived in Houston, I've lived in Chicago, I've lived in Kansas City, I've driven all

the big cities in Florida. I know what traffic is. If you're from El Paso and you've been in any of these other cities, you're like, El Paso does not have traffic issues, right?

And that's true. But honestly, more people are moving here. And so of course, when there's more people on the roads, there's going to be more traffic, right?

More congestion. And so I've got a clip here of just yesterday, I was in the Far East. Sometimes the Far East is like our most popular area, very popular with military, it's close to the base.

But the only really real way to access it is on Loop 375 there. And so here's a little clip of me in that traffic. Okay, this is a perfect example, it is five o'clock on a Thursday evening, I am on 375, or I'm about to get on 375 off of 601, so I'm over kind of in the Far East.

So this is a lot of, I suspect, military folks who are leaving the base and heading home to the Far East. So as you can see, the on-ramp to 375 is, you know, a wee on the back-up side. Now, we're moving here just fine, but this is the type of congestion that sometimes I

talk about in the Far East that's becoming more and more common and quite honestly, Horizon City, Interstate 10 sometimes, over on the west side, Paseo Del Norte, that whole area. So, you know, traffic is, even in the two years that we've been here, is starting to get a little more congested.

Okay, so you can see that, you know, in the peak morning hours, peak evening hours when everyone's either trying to get to work or the base and get home, you know, these exit and on-ramps can get a little congested. You might sit through a light a couple of times.

Now, my wife and I, when we first moved here, we started seeing a lot of road construction and started joking about, man, El Paso really loves road construction. And so here's the three main road construction projects that have been going on. The silver lining on this is that the city is preemptively trying to, you know, make

sure that as the city grows, we can handle that increase of capacity in cars on the road. So, the first one is the Montana Freeway Project. This is going to hopefully alleviate some of that Far East traffic I was just talking about, right?

This is going to be a six-lane freeway, all right, and it's supposed to be completed by the end of 2022. This should definitely offset some of that congestion on 375, so, you know, nobody likes to deal with road construction, but once it's all said and done, we all get to benefit from

it. The second one, the project that I've been dealing with a lot because I live on the west side is the Mesa Street Rehabilitation Project. So I guess Mesa kind of served as an alternative route to I-10 for a while, but this one is

finishing up soon. Mesa is kind of like the road on the west side that, it's like the main road for the west side. You can either take Interstate 10 and kind of do the same kind of path, or you can go

in a little bit and take Mesa and tons of shops, restaurants, lots of fun stuff on it, but it's definitely been under construction for a while. And speaking of things that have been under construction for a while, Trans Mountain Road, otherwise known as Loop 375.

This is where 375 actually goes through the mountains, so you can travel from one side of the Franklin Mountains to the other. This has been under construction since I moved here, and so it's going to be awesome when it's done because this is one of my favorite drives.

I love going through here. Every time I drive through there, I just, I look at the mountains and you're right there. I always want to pull out my phone and take video, which is probably not the safest thing to do, but what they're trying to do here is just increase the longevity of the road,

and they're adding more robust drainage to help with rainwater. So you know, we had a ton of rain this season, and there was one time where I tried to take Trans Mountain and the other direction was closed because what happened, all that rain comes down off the mountains and it picks up rocks, gravel, and sediment, and all sorts

of stuff, and it inevitably dumps it into the road, and so then they have to come and clean it up, and so they're working on making that a little bit of a better situation. But nobody likes road construction, nobody likes traffic. The silver lining is at least the city is doing something about it, trying to increase

the capacity and hopefully kind of the effectiveness that our roads and our systems for transportation function. So, alright, number four. Now, this might be a bit controversial, and I mean, I guess in the age of social media,

everything can be controversial, so maybe this will just have at it. So now, I am not a snob, I am not some like spoiled brat who has to have my way or expects things to be a certain way. I do not expect people to cater to me in any way.

When I talk about service as being something that's not ideal or always great in El Paso, what I'm talking about is the service that you might receive from either businesses or from sometimes the employees that work for these businesses, as in the service industry remains very strong.

Lots of people are functioning in the capacity of waiters, all sorts of different service industry, whether you're working in retail and helping people or what have you. Now, it has been my experience that sometimes this level of service isn't always fantastic. Now, this is going to be the case anywhere, but I've noticed it several times.

For instance, we hired a gentleman to do a landscaping project. If you've been following the channel, you might remember that episode. Now, while the work was eventually finished, it took a while and there were some challenges and some bumps and some frustration along the way.

Dare I say, it was very poor service that we received from this company. We've also gone to restaurants and bars and different places like that and have had to sit around and wait a pretty long time before anybody came around. It's funny, my wife can't have limes, and so whenever she orders a drink, she always

says, please no lime. Now it's a running joke, we're like, all right, do you think we're going to get a lime or not? For the majority of the time, we get a lime, you know what I mean?

Like I said, I'm not trying to sound like a snob or a jerk, but I can honestly say that the quality of service that we've experienced at various times has been subpar. Now, again, this could be a little controversial, but I will say it anyway. Dare I say, the reason for this is that quite honestly, in Hispanic culture, there's more

of a mindset of being a little bit more relaxed, right? As Americans, dare I say, we can be a little impatient, we can be maybe on the demanding side at times, right? We want something and we want it now, right?

I think in Hispanic culture, it's a little more laid back, quite honestly, and this is a great silver lining because who doesn't need to be a little bit more laid back in this kind of stress-filled life in society that we live in right now. So, you know, I think it's kind of coming from there.

I don't think, I know that people aren't trying to be rude and not, you know, service us or provide us with, you know, whatever goods and services we're asking for. I think it's just more of a kind of a laid back kind of mindset. So I don't want to get too much into that one, but there it is, I've said it.

Last but not least, now most of you probably guessed what this one was, property taxes. As a real estate agent, this is the objection that I get the most, right? Because property taxes are about 3% of the appraised value of your home. If your home is appraised for $200,000, you could pay up to about $6,000 in property taxes.

Now there's nothing great about taxes other than the fact that it pays for all of the stuff that makes our city awesome, fire department, police, great schools, all that road construction, right? At the same time though, I understand nobody wants to give their money away.

So property taxes, there's nothing I can really say about them other than, you know, we don't have any state income tax. So if you're still drawing a salary, you know, you're going to save money there. So that's going to offset that property tax.

For those of you that are retired, I know that doesn't help you. So that's sort of a mute point. But finally, another thing, another agent actually was, was talking about this. The thing about a 3% property tax more or less is that it does sort of serve to keep

our home prices down, right? There's not a ton of million dollar homes here, right? Because even a millionaire who can afford a million dollar home is probably gonna really balk at the idea of paying $30,000 in taxes, right?

I mean, even for a millionaire, $30,000 a year in just property taxes is pretty insane. So in one way, you know, our average home price here in El Paso is still around $200,000. Those higher property taxes, they kind of keep our prices kind of down a little bit, right?

And so that is kind of a good thing because it sort of insulates our market from kind of this hyper price appreciation, right? So I suspect the city has a, you know, an understanding that, hey, look, you know, if we're going to charge these, these high property taxes, you know, we need to be appraising

these homes at a reasonable value. And so I'm sure that's actually probably a little controversial as well. And I'm not, I know, trust me that I'm not going to convince many of you that there's anything good whatsoever about property taxes and I hear you.

So those were our five things. I hope you found those educational or at least insightful. I would be super curious, especially if you, if you live here in El Paso of what some of the worst things that you are, the worst things that you think are in El Paso.

So by all means, don't be shy, comment below. What do you think are some of the worst things in El Paso? Really curious to see what kind of comments we get. Other than that, I hope that everybody is doing absolutely fantastic and we'll see you

next time.