The 5 Worst Things About El Paso Texas

hi and welcome to living in el paso texas my name is john tanya and in this episode we're going to talk about the five worst things about el paso [Music] hi and welcome to the youtube channel living in el paso texas my name is john pena 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 video one of our videos with somebody you know in this episode we're gonna 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 uh nonsense no this is uh honestly uh the five biggest objections uh or worst things that i hear from people who who live here or who even uh 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 um 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 um downplay it i found a little news article in july 2017 there was a 25 vehicle pileup 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 is great here most of the time uh your house 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 uh 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 el paso and it has like flames right um which is pretty uh clever use uh 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 100 or above uh our highest temperature ever recorded 114 degrees that was on june 30th of 1994 and our average number of days over or 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 the 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 um but it's just i don't know it seems to keep everybody in good spirits and is nice so uh 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 uh 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 the big cities in florida i know what traffic is you know if 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 um i've got a clip here of my 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 access it is on loop 375 there and so uh here's a little clip of me and 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 uh a lot of i suspect military folks who are uh leaving the base and heading home to the far east so as you can see the on-ramp to 375 is uh you know a wee on the back upside 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 um horizon city interstate 10 sometimes over on the west side paseo del norte uh that whole area so you know traffic is uh even in the two years that we've been here is starting to uh get a little more uh congested okay so you can see that you know in the 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 men 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 first one is the montana freeway freeway project this is going to help 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 that some of that congestion on 375 so you know nobody likes to 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 one side of the franklin mountains to the other this has been under construction since i moved here and so um uh it's gonna 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 a video which is probably not the safest thing to do but what they're trying to do here is just increase the longest 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 this season and there were 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 you know clean 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 you know the capacity and hopefully the kind of the effectiveness that our roads and our systems for transportation function so all right 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 this will just have at it so now i am not a snob i am not um 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 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 um functioning in the capacity of you know waiters um you know all sorts of different service industry you know 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 uh 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 it took a while and there were some challenges and some bumps and some frustration along the way dare i say it was a very poor service that we received from from from this company we've also gone to restaurants and bars and different places like that and you know have had to sit around and wait a pretty long time before uh you know anybody came around it's funny my wife can't my wife can't uh have limes and so whenever she orders a drink she she always says you know please no lime and and now it's a running joke we're like all right do you think we're gonna get a lime or not and for the majority of the time we get a lime you know what i mean and so like i said i'm not trying to sound like a snob or a jerk but i can honestly say that the 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 it to be a little bit more laid back in this kind of stress-filled life uh in society that we live in right now so you know i 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 um pro 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 uh 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 uh property taxes as a real estate agent this is the this is the objection that i get the most right because property taxes are about three percent of the appraised value of your home if your home is appraised for two hundred thousand dollars you could pay up to about six thousand dollars 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 so at the same time though i understand nobody wants to to to give their money away so property taxes there's there's nothing i can really say about them um other than you know we don't have any state income tax so if you're still drawing a salary you know you're gonna you're gonna save money there so that's gonna 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 uh but finally another thing another agent actually was was talking about this the thing about a three percent 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 going to really balk at the idea of paying 30 000 in taxes right i mean even for a millionaire thirty thousand dollars a year in just property taxes is is pretty insane so in one way you know our average home price here in el paso is still around two hundred thousand dollars 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 it 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 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 uh educational or at least insightful i would be super curious especially if you're if you live here in el paso uh of what some of the worst things that you are uh 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 uh 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 you

Channel: Living In El Paso Texas

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Id: r2Ct9pb2uzo

Length: 18min 31sec (1111 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021