Where to live in El Paso

Where the neighborhoods come from. El Paso draws its own neighborhoods. The City's Neighborhood Boundaries layer has 224 named areas, from 8 to 998 acres, that never overlap, and on our count of the 2020 census blocks they hold 580,573 of the city's 678,745 residents, 85.5%. Where that layer carries a guide's name, its line is the guide's boundary, and where it splits one name into parts, North and South, East and West, or Cielo Vista's three, the parts are taken together. Three guides need another line, and each says so. Downtown has no feature on the layer, so its guide is the Downtown Management District, less the blocks it shares with the Segundo Barrio. Tierra del Este is not a City neighborhood either: its guide is the 116 recorded subdivision plats whose names begin Tierra del Este, filed from 2001 to 2025, less the part in Sun Ridge, a line the City keeps for its land records rather than one it draws for a neighborhood. And Ysleta is the City's South Loop neighborhood, which holds the Ysleta Mission, without the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo's reservation, which is sovereign land and no guide's. A City historic district is named inside the guide that holds it rather than used as the line. Each guide's population is the 2020 census count of the blocks inside it. Only the City of El Paso is covered. Socorro, Horizon City, San Elizario, Anthony, Vinton and Clint are separate cities with their own councils and tax rates; Canutillo, Westway and Fabens are unincorporated; Sunland Park, Santa Teresa and Chaparral are across the state line in New Mexico, and Ciudad Juárez across the river; none of them is here. Neither is Fort Bliss, which is federal land outside the City's limits, nor the Paseo del Este subdivisions past Loop 375, which are municipal utility districts in the City's extraterritorial jurisdiction. And an El Paso mailing address is not proof of a City of El Paso address: the El Paso Central Appraisal District's record for the property, which lists the units that tax it, is the one to read.

The five areas are ours. The City does publish divisions, and none of them is a way to choose where to live. Its eight City Council districts are electoral and are redrawn after each census. Plan El Paso's five planning areas, Central, Northwest, Northeast, Mission Valley and East, come closest, and the names here echo them, but they are drawn for land-use policy: the East planning area alone held 244,797 residents in 2020, more than a third of the city, from Cielo Vista beside the airport to Tierra del Este past Loop 375, and Central takes in Kern Place and most of Mission Hills on the far side of the mountain. The City's 224 neighborhoods are the right size for a guide and far too many to group by. And the neighborhood associations registered with the City overlap one another and, on our count, take in only about half of the city's residents. The grouping here uses the names residents use instead, including Lower Valley for what the City's plan now calls Mission Valley, and which neighborhood lands in which area is our judgment.

What is not here. Inside the limits this selection still leaves real places out. Austin Terrace, a City neighborhood of 2,990 residents with a City historic district over most of them, is the first to add in Central, then Magoffin and Rim-University. Upper Mesa Hills and the Cimarron plats in the far northwest are the next on the Westside, Pecan Grove in the Lower Valley and Vista Hills on the Eastside; they were left out to keep the first set to a size that could be finished, and they come as the guides do. North Hills, Government Hill and Highland Park are waiting because other guides on this site already carry those names. Some names people use have no line of their own. Chihuahuita is a City neighborhood and historic district beside the Segundo Barrio, but it held 196 residents in 2020, too few for a guide. Coronado has no single line: the Coronado Hills place on the map, the Coronado Hills association and Coronado High School each fall in different City neighborhoods, so no guide carries the name. UTEP's campus is in no City neighborhood and no guide, though Sunset Heights and Kern Place come within 20 meters of it. And Pebble Hills High School is not in Pebble Hills: it is 10 kilometers east, in the Tierra del Este guide.