It was that fear that helped kick off El Paso’s first attempt at urban renewal a decade ago. A young, idealistic city council was looking for a way to improve the city, which was one of the poorest in the country. To stop young talent from leaving in droves, they needed to revitalize their downtown, the elected officials decided. They started an effort to bring more people to the city’s downtown, and to try to stop—or at least control—sprawl on the city’s outer edges, where hundreds of miles of desert lay waiting for development.

El Paso’s civic leaders wanted to make their city healthier and happier. Making the city more walkable could help reduce obesity and heart disease, and encourage social interaction, they said. “The maladies associated with social alienation have become a normal response to a built-environment that does not allow walking or facilitate human interaction,” they wrote in the plan. They wanted to reduce carbon emissions by limiting sprawl and creating a city where people don’t have to drive for half an hour to get around. They also wanted to save money. Sprawl is expensive for cities, since they must pay to extend water and sewer to faraway subdivisions.

But what’s good for a city or region or the environment isn’t necessarily what individuals want. And the relatively slow place of El Paso’s move towards sustainability raises the question: Does El Paso, or indeed, the Southwest, really want to make a shift to more walkable neighborhoods and apartment-style buildings? Most residents live in single-family homes with front yards and backyards and detached garages, and drive to get just about everywhere. Developers are continuing to build more of these homes, further and further from the city center because, they say, El Pasoans want a driveway, space, and maybe even a pool.

Planners like Gallinar say that change is coming, albeit slowly. But El Paso may be the starkest example that it can be hard to convince people to live more sustainably if they don’t have to.

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In 2005, El Paso had one of the lowest median household incomes of big cities in the nation, at $32,205. Poverty rates were rising and city leaders were questioning how to reverse the fortunes of a city that couldn’t seem to halt its downward slide.

Then elections in 2005 brought in three city-council members under the age of 30, and two more, Beto O’Rourke (now a U.S. Congressman) and Susie Byrd, who were 32 and 34, respectively. Many of these young council members had lived in other cities and seen how downtowns across the country had been revitalized, bolstering the economy of entire regions. They started considering it as an option to change the city’s fate.

“For many of us, it’s about quality of life, and having a downtown that is a source and a draw for energy was critical to that,” O’Rourke told me.