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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | February 2005 
Cheap Housing Boom a Triumph for Mexico
 John Rice - Associated Press
 Tecamac, Mexico - Outside Melesio Rivero's city hall office, workmen shouldering bags of cement squeeze past suit-wearing developers waiting for building permits. Dust and the rap of hammers filter through a building under sudden expansion.
The planning maps spread over Rivero's desk show why. Over the past two decades, Tecamac has grown from a scattering of farm towns into a Pittsburgh-sized city of 350,000.
Tecamac is also a showplace for the explosion in organized housing construction since President Vicente Fox took office in December 2000 - a result of loan programs that take advantage of interest rates lowered by years of fiscal austerity.
Most people in Mexico City, 20 miles to the south, couldn't find Tecamac on a map. But by 2020, Rivero says, the capital's urban sprawl will turn Tecamac into an inflated suburb of 1 million people.
"This is the natural point for growth. That's the tendency. It's irreversible," says Rivero, a Tecamac native who is deputy director for planning.
On the southern edge of Tecamac, the development company Sadasi is building Los Heroes, a middle-class neighborhood whose broad streets are lined with 30,000 eerily identical two-story attached houses of 670 square feet each.
Within a few years, Rivero said, the area will have 100,000 homes.
Many Mexicans are disappointed with Fox's achievements since he came to office in 2000 as an outsider promising a virtual revolution after 71 years of single-party rule.
But the housing boom stands out as a clear accomplishment. Fox boasts that the main federal housing lender, Infonavit, will have given out 2 million loans during his administration, surpassing the total in its previous 28-year history.
His government has granted 1.6 million housing credits through its first four years and hopes to reach 750,000 credits per year by the end of his term in 2006.
That would accommodate population growth and start to erode a 4-million-unit backlog of substandard or overcrowded housing, said Carlos Gutierrez, head of the government's National Commission for Promotion of Housing.
The loans, grants and subsidies come in a growing array of programs, some of which allow people who have earned points for years of work to avoid down payments altogether.
By loaning would-be homeowners the money to buy their own homes, rather than doing the building itself, the government has spawned "a very strong, very solid private market," Gutierrez said.
The industry has been growing by up to 20 percent a year, and Fox says overall housing investment in 2004 was 130 billion pesos ($11.5 billion).
Mexico's private banks also are starting to creep back into the housing market they abandoned after a credit crisis sent some interest rates past 100 percent a year in 1995.
Immediately south of Tecamac is a vast example of the problems with Mexico's current housing: Ecatepec, a chaotic city of 1 million people. Mexico State housing officials say half of them live in housing that is technically illegal.
People there have flooded onto just about any available land - sometimes buying it in legally questionable deals, sometimes just taking it.
Starved of credit, families have built their own houses helter-skelter and step by step, adding a second story, then a third, and perhaps a back room to accommodate new children or offspring who marry.
With guidance, planning and services, that can work well, said Jose Maria Gutierrez, president of the Mexican Academy of Architects.
But 70 percent of homes in the Mexico City area "are self-produced by people without any intervention by any professional. Those are not good houses. More than half have lighting and ventilation problems or aren't structurally sound," he said.
Haphazard eruptions of self-built concrete-block houses climb Ecatepec's hills. Tarpaper shacks almost hug the guard rail of the expressway. Streets built for a small town are strangled by the traffic of a metropolis.
While Ecatepec struggles to bring services to makeshift neighborhoods and to find ways of legalizing their existence, Rivero said Tecamac hopes to push development into areas where it's easier to provide power, water and other services.
Developments such as Los Heroes come with their own services, as well as parks, school buildings and systems that replenish strained groundwater supplies.
Gutierrez said about 380,000 new legal houses were self-built across Mexico last year. Nobody is sure how many more were built illegally.
And the organized housing boom so far has missed most of Mexico's population.
Roughly half of Mexico's workers make less than 3,000 pesos - about $270 - a month, making even Los Heroes houses expensive at $23,900 each.
Sales manager Graciela Ortega said most buyers make more than twice that median wage. The lowest monthly payments at Los Heroes are about $70, but most pay closer to double that, leaving the average Mexican worker with less than $5 a day for the family's food, transportation, medical and other expenses.
There's also little help for the millions of Mexicans who are self-employed or who work at informal jobs and have no paycheck to show lenders. The government is weighing plans to give the poor more help, while self-employed workers can qualify for a government credit by establishing a pattern of savings over a six-month period, Gutierrez said.
As elsewhere, many at Los Heroes are trying to turn their houses into sources of income, ignoring rules banning home businesses. Hundreds of beauty salons, miniature grocery stores, Internet cafes and taco stands have blossomed. One thing missing, though, is bars.
"It's more peaceful here. There aren't any drunks. There aren't any gangs," said Jose Guadalupe Villordo, 72, who was helping his son paint a front-yard cage to protect his car against theft.
Along a dust-choked dirt street about a mile away, Eli Posada spoke with vague longing about the concrete-block house where he is a self-employed metalworker.
"How would I pay for one of those houses?" he asked. "For that, you have to work in a factory." |
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