This from Jerry Kurtyka:
EL PASO – MASLOWPOLIS
# 6 – A Consciousness of Cities
The greater our need for food or safety or affection or self-esteem, the more we will see and treat the items of reality, including ourselves and other people, in accordance with their respective abilities to facilitate or obstruct the satisfaction of that need. – Abraham MaslowBack to Richard Florida and his thesis that making your city just like everyplace else is a sure way to kill its attractiveness and, hence, cut off a desirable influx of hipsters and cultural creatives. El Paso pursues a strategy of expensive vanity projects rather than focus on basic infrastructure improvement that today includes ubiquitous high-speed broadband and the ability of citizens to use it effectively in addition to good streets. Who are we trying to attract? Retain?
I see El Paso’s strategy as equivalent to a corporate “best practices” strategy which is to say, if you don’t do it, you fall behind but if you do it, it doesn’t get you ahead of the game. So what is the game? Is there one correct strategy for urban vibrancy?
My urban studies have pointed to two major factors that account for a prosperous and vibrant city: educational attainment and citizen participation. Both of these factors are easily measured, too, and if you have them everything else will fall into place. But not always, it seems.
By my standards, Portland OR ought to be an urban paradise of economic and cultural vitality, yet it has recently been called a place where the young go to retire (NYT Magazine, 09/16/14) because it is over-populated with college grads who live there for the brew pub and coffee house culture, but with few prospects of a professional career in the local economy. El Paso, in contrast, is catching up slowly on educational attainment but is downwardly off the scale in citizen engagement. That is one reason why vested interests have so much leverage over elected officials here. For example, consider a recent CC election in which only 1,000 voters turned out and the winning candidate was largely financed from the west side, not her own district.
In our region, Santa Fe is similar to Portland. I lived in Santa Fe for a year and never met so many PhD bartenders and concierges who came there for the music, literary and art scene. There is a thin line between funky and trashy, too, as I learned. Funky is when my next door neighbor with the 1966 pickup truck on blocks in the driveway and a backyard full of scrap iron has an MFA from Yale and calls himself a sculptor; trashy is when he is just a retired plumber. My favorite restaurant in Santa Fe, La Casa Sena, hires singers from the Santa Fe Opera as wait staff who serenade you with an aria while serving your Aztec-dusted filet. It must be a wonderful experience for them, but what happens when they grow up and want to have a family, steady job and a home for their kids with good schools nearby? They probably don’t stay in Santa Fe.
So, I would say now that my view of urban vibrancy has evolved to be that of a city that has a place for all comers, though it may have a boutique concentration for some. Like Austin does for young techies who want to make the music and food scene on 6th Street when they’re not coding Java for Oracle. Wouldn’t it be great if El Paso could do as much and also accommodate the salon workers and tradesmen and retirees with its affordable housing? There will always be places like Santa Fe and Aspen for a getaway to haute’ culture and skiing, but for me I do not want to feel a total let down when I land back in El Paso and think to myself, “Oh crap, I’m home.” No, I want to feel good about whatever place I call home.
We grappled with this at the Urban Systems Collaborative (USC) conference in London last year and settled on a familiar construct from Psychology 101 to help us organize our ideas as to what makes for quality of life in the city: Maslow’s Pyramid.
Maslow’s Pyramid tells us that we have to meet our needs on a spectrum from the basic upward, otherwise we live in a deficit situation. It’s like some poor kid in Darfur who gets up in the morning and is worried about whether he’ll be alive that evening. Until his needs for security and food are met, he is in no position to plan a future at Harvard. In the city, this means that we usually don’t build an opera house until we have good roads to it with water and sewer. The city has to meet its needs from the bottom up rather than the top down, which explains why so many of us are concerned with the condition of El Paso’s streets while the CC goes off on a debt-fueled trolley ride. We have different opinions about where El Paso sits on the Pyramid.
So, look at my expanded Maslow Pyramid and ask yourself where El Paso is and where it might go with the understanding that we will never be a boutique city like Mendocino or Sedona. But the boutiques are not necessarily friendly or affordable to all comers, either. The little craft homes in Rio Grande here that sell for $60K could easily cost $500K in boutique Aspen. Where is the value difference coming from other than what Aspen offers further up the Pyramid that very wealthy people are willing to pay for?
But the average El Paso family of mom, dad and 2.5 little ones earning $40K annually doesn’t necessarily need that space at the top of the pyramid as much as they need good schools and roads to get to work at ADP on time. The existential question for yourself then is, “What do I need in my city and will I find it here?” Where is the value coming from here in El Paso that our citizens do not vote, our CC is obsessed with vanity projects, and we are thrilled when ADP expands paper-smashing jobs?
NEXT – Some Affordable Steps to Renewal
elpasospeak 
Great piece! This guy needs a bigger audience! Meanwhile, even if we can find him a bigger audience, we still face this uphill battle of finding a way to light a fire under the collectives asses of local voters! Somehow, we have to find a way to remind them that their votes do count, and that their City needs them! Any ideas?
LikeLike
In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, El Paso is ok in physiological, safety, love/belonging and self-actualization. We were pretty good in esteem too until Richard Florida and the “progressives” began telling us we need to be like other cities. Those who know and love El Paso don’t want it to be like other cities. El Paso has a great asset that most cities lack. That asset is family. Most people stay here or return because of family and that’s something to brag about.
LikeLike
David Karlsruhe once posted that the reason he left El Paso was because Chico’s wouldn’t open a west side store:)
LikeLike
If that’s the case, God Bless Chico’s. Let’s hope they don’t open one anytime soon. They are providing a valuable pest control service.
LikeLike
??? Chico’s has a westside store. Mesa and Mesa Hills. Has been there for years..
LikeLike
LOL! Chico’s Tacos, Helen. Not Chico’s women’s clothing, unless of course you think DK was interested in women’s clothing. You’re definitely not from here if clothes are the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word Chico’s.
LikeLike
In many ways I am mystified by the problem. For me, El Paso has an active symphony and opera – the latter being most unusual in a city of this size (the opera in Baltimore, for example, is toast, as is the Duke City’s), and a truly world-class music festival in the Pro-Musica events. Younger people have all kinds of music attractions – i.e. the One Direction concert that drew over 50K a week or so ago. Dinner Theater. Some interesting restaurants – not enough variety, yes, but enough to get me out to dine once a week or so. Sadly, no Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, but really, is that how we measure a city – by shopping? (The problem there is not in fact El Paso’s but that of the models apparently used by these corporations, which refuse to consider the purchasing power of Juarenses in their calculations.) A good array of museums, most of which are free – granted, there could be more (and I won’t even raise the Insights disaster here). The airport is a manageable size and you can be just about anywhere in one or two hops.
That said, it is sad to me that El Paso’s leadership does not protect and promote the beauty of the mountain in its midst, nor try to right the imbalance in our subsidized farming (cotton and alfalfa, both among the highest water hogs of crops, and adding nothing to the locally-grown food supply) which leaves the river absolutely dry now for a good part of the year. Combined with the ugly fence that our militarized border requires, the river (or should I say dry bed) is no longer an asset but a black eye.
I’m happy to live here. But I’m not a native and my family is scattered across the country and globe; I don’t have children here and don’t have to worry about a job. The vast majority of El Pasoans did not come here from somewhere else, and have little experience of the rest of the cluntry or world – one of the key reasons why it is so easy to have bad political leadership making bad decisions. Citizens do not realize that other cities have found better ways.
PS – I would not want to live in Santa Fe, although I thought I would many years ago – it’s hideously expensive, overly conscious of how wonderful it thinks it is, and increasingly just an adobe theme park.
LikeLike
Streets are terrible in Santa Fe, some not even paved. And then there is your neighbor raising goats and chickens in his back yard next to your $1MM McMansion. There it is funky; here it would be trashy (and illegal).
Beyond that, however, there is the eclectic mix of artists, tourists, ranchers, State bureaucrats, movie stars, Nobel laureates and weird science…nothing like El Paso and the reason they call Santa Fe, “The City Different.” Me, I love Santa Fe. Portland and Seattle, too, though I have never had to spend a winter there.
There is no future in El Paso trying to emulate Santa Fe, even in its best aspects, of which there are many. You gotta be who you are and accept that for some of us it will never be who we are. For those, there is a Santa Fe or Portland of the mind that is probably a good deal more affordable, too. If you are trying to frame the question for yourself, Maslow’s Pyramid is a good starting point to ask those existential questions.
LikeLike
The very worst thing that can happen to El Paso is to become like other cities which are basically empty shells without a soul.
El Paso has the one thing any city of size would love to have and that is a small town feel in a large city. With a population in the 700.000 neighborhood El Paso feels like a city of less than 1.000. You cannot buy that no matter how many QOL bonds you float. You cannot plan that into existence.
The path we are heading down is going to destroy that uniqueness.
The city needs to concentrate on good streets, clean streets, efficient,open and honest government, public safety and education.
LikeLike
U; where does that “soul” reside in the city? How is it expressed such that someone not from here getting off a plane can say, “Oh yes; that is something we don’t have back in Omaha.”
You are talking culture. Give me some ideas that I can spin into another post here, assuming people want to read what I’m writing.
For me, the disconnect in El Paso with what I need in a city is at the culture level, not the streets or the water system. BTW, the streets in Santa Fe are horrible, and then there are the ones not even paved!
LikeLike
The soul of El Paso is the family. Those who don’t have family here get adopted.
LikeLike
Someone once told me that the reason traffic slows on the other side of the freeway when there’s an accident is because everyone’s trying to see if that’s their cousin.
LikeLike
The classical question of existentialism is actually a two-part question: (1) how and whether life has meaning, and (2) why we exist.
I’m going to skip ahead and start with part #2.
So, why does El Paso exist? It currently exists for a few reasons, not presented in any particular order:
— a military and government agency complex — Ft. Bliss, Border Patrol, DEA, etc.
— a bedroom community for U.S. citizens who work at plants in Juarez
— a bedroom community for Mexican business owners who no longer want to live in Mexico and who want their kids to be educated in our schools
— to provide limited support services to manufacturers in Juarez
— as a retail shopping center and medical center for many Juarez residents, including those who want a convenient place to birth a child who will have instant U.S. citizenship and all the benefits that come with citizenship
— a starter city or entry-level place for Juarenses who want to move to the U.S., particularly those who can buy their way into the country by opening a restaurant or small business in El Paso
— and to provide cheap labor, a one-time market advantage that has been almost totally co-opted by Mexico under NAFTA
The question of how and whether life has meaning is about more than a city, so I’ll pose the question in a tighter context: Can you finding meaningful work and a satisfying life in a city that exists primarily for the reasons stated above? Because like it or not those characteristics strongly influence our culture and influence who will or will not find El Paso an appealing place to live, work or invest.
Now for the “big question”: Why do we exist?
Times columnist Joe Muench recently referred to an up and coming developer as the “second coming of Paul Foster.” Whether he knew exactly what he was writing or whether it was a Freudian slip, that cute phrase is further evidence that the the Times worships the wealthy (remember the constant Bob Jones publicity before his fall) and considers Foster, Hunt and Wilson to be the Holy Trinity.
Speaking existentially, if you believe that you exist to serve God, then in the mind of Joe Muench & Friends, you exist to serve the needs of certain God-like developers and government administrators who wish to control our destiny from on high. Be sure to come bearing gifts in the form of higher taxes.
Is that the existence you want?
LikeLike
42
LikeLike
l’ve never understood the notion of nagging at people who are probably too ignorant, simple-minded and disconnected from local issues to go vote because this will create some form of prosperity? When you (the voter) are telling anyone/everyone to go vote, you are implying that the wrong people (the ones that YOU have been voting for) are being elected and that if enough people voted, then the “right” person would start to get elected. Does that mean that at least subconsciously you believe that you are an ignorant dolt? Hmmm. But lets say that twice as many 915ers go out and vote, what do you honestly think will happen? Well, probably the same kind of egotistical, slick, sharp-toothed huckster will now win by twice as many votes making them even more egocentric. Oh don’t worry, l’m even more “fun” at cocktail parties!
LikeLike
“Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”
LikeLike
Shortly after my “soapbox moment,” l realized that l might have come across as insulting to some of you. That was NOT my intent. To my fellow commenting comrades out there, l say to you that l should have made my point without demeaning anyone, but l was being too stupid and careless. Now it’s time to go out and par-tay!
LikeLike