Debbie Nathan on the PDNG and Plan El Paso

Lest We Forget

Here’s a piece local hero Debbie Nathan wrote for Texas Monthly back in 2013.

These days El Paso can feel like a big city (especially during rush hour on Interstate 10), but it’s still close-knit enough to retain the qualities, both good and bad, of a small town: there’s a coziness to it, which residents boast about, and yet also a fair amount of squabbling, the kind of brother-and-sisterly infighting that makes it hard to get things done. There’s no better example of this than Plan El Paso.

. . .

To understand why, you have to go back to 2006, the year that the city council adopted a precursor to Plan El Paso known as the Downtown Plan. Developed by the Paso Del Norte Group (PDNG), an exclusive association of private-sector leaders, this plan aimed to improve downtown by building a sports arena, a hotel, shops, and an “arts walk” resembling San Antonio’s River Walk. To make room for these changes, the plan also marked swaths of Segundo Barrio, a historic yet faded neighborhood, for razing.

Read the entire article at TexasMonthly.com.

Ms. Nathan has since left El Paso. That’s El Paso’s loss.