Live in Segundo Barrio

The Segundo Barrio, the second ward, filled in between the business district and the river after the railroad reached El Paso in 1881, and its institutions are nearly as old. Olives Villanueva Aoy opened a school at his own expense in 1887, teaching in Spanish and English; Sacred Heart Church was dedicated in 1893; the Rose Gregory Houchen Settlement opened in 1912, and Francisco Madero lived in houses here while he planned the campaign against Porfirio Díaz. By the 1950s surveys counted more than 12,000 substandard dwellings, with an average of seven families to a toilet, and in 1967 a tenement fire with no fire escapes killed three children. That year women of the neighborhood started, inside a tenement called Los Seis Infiernos, the clinic that became Centro de Salud Familiar La Fe, whose Central Clinic is still on Ochoa Street.

This guide takes the City's Segundo Barrio neighborhood, 290 acres from Paisano Drive south to the Cesar Chavez Memorial Highway along the Rio Grande, and from Santa Fe Street east to Cotton Street. The 2020 census counted 5,581 residents there, 575 fewer than on about the same ground in 2010, and 26% of them were under 18, against 6% in the downtown blocks across Paisano. Of the 2,305 homes occupied on census day, 2,041 were rented and 264, 11%, were lived in by their owners.

The historic district is a listing, not a review board. The National Park Service put the Segundo Barrio Historic District, 686 buildings, on the National Register in November 2021, five years after Preservation Texas named the barrio one of the most endangered places in the state. It covers about 73% of the neighborhood and 4,650 of its residents. A National Register listing opens tax credits for a qualifying rehabilitation, and the conditions attach only to an owner who takes them. It is not one of the City's nine local historic districts, so the certificate of appropriateness that Chihuahuita, across Santa Fe Street, and parts of downtown require does not apply here, except at the one individually designated site inside the line. The City does not review a new facade or a demolition here for its history.

The typical value here is below the school exemption. Zillow put the typical home in ZIP code 79901, which holds the whole barrio and downtown besides, at $135,191 in August 2026, up 4.1% on the year. That is under the state's $140,000 school homestead exemption, so a homestead at that value owes El Paso ISD nothing, and the five units on the bill, 2.643693 per $100 before exemptions, come to about $2,052 a year. A landlord on the same value owes about $3,574. The 374 residents at the western end, inside the Downtown Management District, pay its 12 cents too, about $162 on that value, and Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone 5 over the northwest corner adds no rate. The arithmetic is on the El Paso page.

The river is behind a levee and in a concrete channel. FEMA's digital flood layer leaves the barrio out, so the effective zone has to be read on the scanned 2006 panel. The preliminary countywide map of August 2025, not yet in force, shows none of it in the 1% or 0.2% zones but 29%, the reference point included, as reduced risk behind a levee along the Rio Grande. Rain is the other risk: the storms of 2006 damaged the Casitas del Norte apartments here, and El Paso Water says flooding happens where runoff outruns a channel. A homeowners policy does not cover rising water.