Thread: Baja's/Tijuana's mortgage crisis Hundreds of thousands of abandoned homes

• Unable to make payments, owners have abandoned homes like these across Baja.
• Photo: El Sol de Tijuana

Baja's/Tijuana's mortgage crisis

Hundreds of thousands of abandoned homes called a "social tragedy"

By Bob McPhail, Sept. 3, 2015


An estimated 362,000 homes in Baja California have been abandoned by their owners and another 60,000 are at risk of abandonment, according to the national director of El Barzón, a Mexico nonprofit founded to assist consumers in economic trouble.

Speaking at a recent press conference in Tijuana, Alfonso Ramírez Cuellar called the mortgage crisis and its aftermath a “social tragedy.”

The abandoned homes are the leftovers of a nationwide housing boom in the early 2000s during which, according to Americas Quarterly, more than 7 million homes were constructed with government financing, making Infonavit “the largest mortgage lender in Latin America.”

By 2008, however, many Mexican workers had been slammed by economic hard times, either losing their jobs or agreeing to lower wages and fewer hours. As a consequence they were no longer able to afford their mortgage payments. Many of them took their families and moved elsewhere, leaving an estimated 2 million abandoned homes across Mexico.

Infonavit-Baja California currently has about 14,000 past-due mortgages on its books, the agency's regional delegate, Alejandro Arregui Ibarra, said in an interview published August 29 in El Sol de Tijuana.

Since 2014, he told the newspaper, about 7,000 homes have been repossessed by Infonavit. Of those, he said, some 3,000 have been renovated through a new program that fixes up the repossessed dwellings and puts them back on the market on a rent-to-own basis.

Baja California's state legislature last year also enacted measures to help owners refinance their mortgages at much lower interest rates. Repossession, said Arregui, is a last resort for his agency.

Still, thousands of abandoned homes dot sprawling, high-density developments in the eastern reaches of Tijuana and elsewhere in Baja, creating insecurity among the homeowners who have managed to hold on to their property.

“A home that once put a roof over the heads of a family today provides shelter to kidnappers, drug dealers, and robbers,” noted Martha Rueda, state coordinator for El Barzón in Baja California, in an El Sol interview also published on August 29.

http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2...andoned-homes/

I don't buy this stuff about Mexican or Central American poverty. Just like this government mortgage program, there are both government and private self help programs all over Latin America. Moreover when they do build homes, they are usually using cement and brick products in a drier climate that should last a long time. This is the Meditteranean style of building----compared to lots of wood, as used by north Europeans and Americans. We have plenty of examples of poorly constructed, declining housing in the US----mobile homes, houses built on poor foundations, houses built of wood in wet and damp locations or where burrowing pests are a problem. I know that in the Pacific NW there were lots of homes built out of wood over a century ago that are no longer here. Go to the Rocky Mountains or out on the central prairies----there are abandoned and desolate structures all over. Many of them were abandoned by their owners. There are North American ghost towns that sprang up for some economic opportunity that soon vanished.

Here is a FB page that I do have some fun with, where people take photos of abandoned properties and also machinery around the state:https://www.facebook.com/groups/7713...44618/?fref=nf

What do Latin Americans have? They have farms. In the cities many of them live in high rises---there are hundreds and hundreds of them in S. America. They have government programs and N. American religious missionaries helping them out. They also have CEMEX corporation which has helped 500,000 parties so far build their own homes with CEMEX products under professional guidance. http://www.cemexmexico.com/Desarroll...imonioHoy.aspx

1. 
   Mexico Raises Minimum Wage for 2015 by 4.2%, In Line ...
2. MEXICO CITY—The Mexican minimum-wage commission on Friday determined to raise the country's daily minimum wage by 4.2%—in line with current inflation—to about 70 pesos a day, less than $5 at current exchange rates.Dec 19, 2014
   Mexico Raises Minimum Wage for 2015 by 4.2%, In Line ...
   www.wsj.com/.../mexico-raises-minimum-wage-for-...The Wall Street Journal

Many of them took their families and moved elsewhere, leaving an estimated

2 million abandoned homes across Mexico.

It doesn't take an Amazing Kreskin to figure out where many of them went.