A lot of weird stuff in politics these days but the Club for Growth and Ted Cruz championing Segundo Barrio is definitely up there: motherjones.com/politics/2018/…
I tried to unpack the backstory behind the eminent domain attacks on O'Rourke. It's sort of the formative episode of his political career: motherjones.com/politics/2018/… 
A quick study on building buzz, O'Rourke brought an El Paso Times reporter along with him when he went door-to-door to make the case for the plan:
The downtown plan was explosive. Beto and his allies saw the city as "mediocre" and floundering, post-NAFTA. This would change that. But they weren't going to be the people really affected by the plan. motherjones.com/politics/2018/…
O'Rourke was "white savior," per one critic. The fact that we was an Anglo pushing redevelopment for the Barrio, wasn't helped by stuff like this, a focus-group study approved by the city:
O'Rourke tended to dismiss the opposition as a vocal minority, and it was. As he notes, he won the neighborhood when he ran for re-election in a race that was considered a referendum on the redevelopment plan.
The actual eminent domain stuff is complicated. It was never used in the project. In fact, O'Rourke voted for a moratorium on its use. (Then the council extended the moratorium.) He did resist efforts that would have restricted the kinds of properties you could use it on.
But Cruz doesn't really care about gentrification in El Paso. He's been there four times in six years, and one of the last times he was there, it was for a meeting with some of the same people who were the driving force behind the downtown project.
It's sort of telling that the people who were actually fighting O'Rourke on eminent domain don't want any part of Cruz and the Club's attacks motherjones.com/politics/2018/…
Says David Romo, the historian who co-founded a main opposition group to the plan, "In no way do I want Cruz to exploit our own work for his utterly nefarious politics"
in a weird way, this sort of captures where O'Rourke was coming from on the downtown project pretty well
