Squatters, scaremongers, and the challenge of Mexico’s ghost homes

Government-financed housing in Colonia San Miguel in Escobedo, Nuevo Leon, Mexico circa 2011. Image credit: Keith Dannemiller / Alamy

by Madeleine Wattenbarger.

A new housing program sparked indignation across Mexico’s mainstream media this week. With the initiative, the Institute for the National Housing Fund for Workers (Infonavit) will offer refinancing plans to people who have stopped paying off their Infonavit housing loans. It will also offer a rent-to-buy plan to squatters of abandoned Infonavit homes.

Establishment media figures in Mexico decried the program’s implications for private property in Mexico. El Heraldo radio host Luis Cárdenas insisted that the judicial reform would allow Morena to seize private dwellings. Speaking in a video posted to social, Cárdenas claimed, “The head of the Infonavit will turn over your house and mine to the criminals who squatted it.” The Infonavit has said that the measure only applies to homes that are not in dispute.

Speaking on Monday, Infonavit director Octavio Romero Oropeza explained that the program is an attempt for the government to recover social housing units without resorting to mass evictions. An ongoing Infonavit census has found 25,000 abandoned houses across the country. Local governments, concerned about them becoming a locus of crime, have long requested that the Mexican state do something about the empty developments.

According to Silvia Emanuelli, the Latin America regional director of the Habitat International Coalition, an independent global network of housing NGOs and specialists founded at a United Nations conference in 1976, Mexico’s abandoned homes are a result of pro-market policies reproduced across the continent in the 1990s, with the logic first applied in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship. Those policies mandated a reduction in the state’s role in the housing market. Private companies were put in charge of building housing, and homes became merchandise.

In Mexico, under the administrations of PAN presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón during the early 2000s, the Infonavit shifted from building public housing to a more market oriented stance. The new model saw it functioning essentially as a bank, offering loans for workers to purchase houses built by third-party builders.

With the aim of maximizing profits and minimizing costs, construction companies paid as little as possible for land. They built shoddy complexes far from urban centers, often without access to basic services. One of the most high profile cases is that of Homex, the construction firm that attracted billions in Wall Street financing in the mid-2000s before declaring bankruptcy and leaving hundreds of thousands of subpar homes around Mexico, as the LA Times reported in 2017.

“These houses were abandoned for a reason, because of an inability to pay or the poor location. Many of them are totally empty and vandalized,” says Emanuelli. “It’s really hard to imagine what the Infonavit should do even after evicting people. What will they do with [the homes]? Who will they give them to?”

But details of the new program remain unclear, and the government’s announcement comes amidst a series of upheavals in the Infonavit. On Monday, Oropeza also presented the advances of the institute’s new housing construction campaign. Through a public construction company established in February, Constructora Infonavit, the state will once again build social housing, instead of contracting private companies.

One of the policy’s most visible detractors is Ricardo Salinas Pliego, the outspoken right-libertarian billionaire who owns both TV Azteca and the Grupo Elektra finance and retail group. Posting on X, he called the policy, “Legalized robbery of private property.” Many of the properties in question are publicly owned, however, and the plan requires squatters to pay in order to become homeowners.

After Monday’s backlash, Interior Secretary Rosa Icela Rodriguez took to the President’s mañanera podium to clarify that the regularization program will not include any properties that are in the midst of legal processes for dispossession.

Reflecting on the backlash to the program from Mexico’s right-wing opposition, Emanuelli describes the threat of, “Tomorrow they’re coming for your home,” as an old scare tactic. “Private property is a right, but so is the right to adequate housing,” she says. “[Their] concern isn’t that more people access homes, it’s to continue defending the need for the market to move freely so that the state doesn’t take housing construction back into its hands.”