Don’t obscure the root cause of the decline: the government enforcing the segregation line.

Interesting video, but I disagree with its conclusion that the downtown’s decline is due to NAFTA, nor that its revitalization is “impossible”.

NAFTA did a lot of things, and few people understand it, so it often makes a convenient punching bag. However, even in the context of the video the criticism makes little sense to me - NAFTA liberalized trade between the US and Mexico so that factories moved from hiring undocumented migrants in the US to hiring Mexicans in Mexico… that seems like a totally reasonable change to make.

Instead, downtowns tend to be in decline because of specific government policies and local conditions. In particular, government subsidies for single family homes, auto infrastructure, and corporate big box stores, which draw people out of city centers with lower prices and greater convenience. El Paso, in particular, has probably seen its downtown remain in decline (compared to cities like Dallas and Austin) due to crime driven by US drug policy.

However, in an efficient market, downtown areas like El Paso should never be hallowed out unless the area as a whole is bleeding population. The natural progression of a city in decline is to see its population abandon outlying areas, continually re-occupying depopulated land close to the city center. Beyond auto-oriented government subsidies, this hallowing-out of city centers is driven by speculative land holding. The owners of those big, old, beautiful buildings have little incentive to perform upkeep, rent out apartments, or fill their ground-floor retail spaces because the expense of simply owning the building and land and waiting for the value to go up is less than the expense of investing in and running the building to serve the community. The solution to this problem is a Georgist land value tax, which incentivizes land owners to shit or get off the pot - either fill your retail space with shops and your apartments with tenants, or sell the land and building to someone who will.

Sidebar: while economic analysis of international trade agreements is always fraught, the general consensus is that NAFTA was good for the average person in both the US and Mexico. Gains for the average person were not as large as were projected, but did exist and were significant. The largest gains for the average person came not in the form of wage growth, but instead in the lower cost of consumer goods, including necessities such as food, transportation, and clothing. While a significant minority of the poor and middle class in both the US and Mexico did experience losses due to the agreement, on the whole, the agreement did not create a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich, but rather created a regressive gain across the economic spectrum - ie, the rich benefitted more, but the poor still benefitted. One particularly interesting point to consider is that Mexico’s rate of extreme poverty has decreased significantly since NAFTA - this can be directly attributed to progressive policy implementations in the Mexican government. But the funding for these progressive policies benefitted greatly from the expansion of the Mexican economy which was enabled via NAFTA. Modern economists, who have developed a more nuanced view of international trade policy since NAFTA was ratified (in part, driven by the observed effects of NAFTA), certainly have their critiques - but these critiques should be viewed as lessons learned to be applied to future trade deals. Contemporary critiques of the deal, however, were significant, and failures to modify the deal to address them contributed to the regressive nature of the economic gains. In particular, strong protections for labor rights and the environment would have shunted more of the economic gains to workers and communities rather than to corporate profits. And agreeing to the creation of funds to ease the transition for vulnerable individuals and communities (like El Paso) would have helped preserve many of the most impacted local economies better - though domestic policy likely played a bigger role here, and the critique should lay not just on the implementation of the trade deal but also in the US government’s response to its impacts and general social support of its citizens. On the whole, NAFTA was a net positive, and trade liberalization was likely necessary not just for national economic gains, but to avoid economic contraction in an increasingly globalized economy. The exact implementation deserves critique, but this critique should not be taken as a condemnation of international trade or as evidence in favor of protectionist policies. Instead, the critiques should be taken as areas for improvement to create more equitable distributions of the wealth generated by liberalized trade, and as areas for the attention of domestic welfare policy when international agreements fall short. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

As climate change continues the mass migration west and south will reverse or otherwise shift north. Cities south short of those on the west coast will most likely continue to shrink. If you’re looking to buy land or homes that will increase in value over the next 50 years look north to underpopulated areas with large fresh water resources.

The area may be good for someone wanting to live out a mad max / tank girl / slab city style life where you buy up a whole ghost town for you and some wild west entourage.