Thread: Yanquis go home!

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Mike Davis: Yanquis go home!

Urban theorist warns that all the retiring baby boomers streaming into low-cost Mexico will exacerbate social divisions and put serious stress on the environment


10:12 AM CDT on Sunday, October 1, 2006


To listen to some conservative demagogues on the immigration issue, one would assume that the Twin Towers had been blown up by followers of the Virgin of Guadalupe or that Spanish had recently been decreed the official language of Connecticut.

Having failed to scourge the world of evil by invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Republicans, supported by some Democrats, now propose that we invade ourselves: sending the Marines and Green Berets, along with the National Guard, into the hostile deserts of California and New Mexico where national sovereignty is supposedly under siege.

What few people – at least, outside of Mexico – have bothered to notice is that while all the nannies, cooks and maids have been heading north to tend the luxury lifestyles of irate Republicans, the gringo hordes have been rushing south to enjoy glorious budget retirements and affordable second homes under the Mexican sun.

Yes, in former California Gov. Pete Wilson's immortal words, "They just keep coming."

Over the last decade, the U.S. State Department estimates that the number of Americans living in Mexico has soared from 200,000 to 1 million (or one-quarter of all U.S. expatriates). Remittances from the United States to Mexico have risen dramatically, from $9 billion to $14.5 billion in just two years. Though initially interpreted as representing a huge spike in illegal workers (who send parts of their salaries across the border to family), it turns out to be mainly money sent by Americans to themselves in order to finance Mexican homes and retirements.

Although some of them are certainly naturalized U.S. citizens returning to towns and villages of their birth after lifetimes of toil al otro lado, the director-general of Fonatur, the official agency for tourism development in Mexico, recently characterized the typical investors in that country's real estate as American "baby boomers who have paid off in good part their initial mortgage and are coming into inheritance money."

Indeed, according to The Wall Street Journal, "The land rush is occurring at the beginning of a demographic tidal wave. With more than 70 million American baby boomers expected to retire in the next two decades... some experts predict a vast migration to warmer – and cheaper – climates. Often such buyers purchase a property 10 to 15 years before retirement, use it as a vacation home and then eventually move there for most of the year. Developers increasingly are taking advantage of the trend, building gated communities, condominiums and golf courses."

The extraordinary rise in U.S. Sunbelt property values gives gringos immense economic leverage. Shrewd baby boomers are not simply feathering nests for eventual retirement, but also increasingly speculating in Mexican resort property, sending up property values to the detriment of locals whose children are consequently driven into slums or forced to emigrate north, only increasing the "invasion" charges. As in Galway, Corsica or, for that matter, Montana, the global second-home boom is making life in beautiful, natural settings unaffordable for their traditional residents.

Some expatriates are experimenting with exotic places such as the Riviera Maya or Tulum in Quintana Roo, but more prefer such well-established havens as San Miguel de Allende and Puerto Vallarta. Here the norteamericanos make themselves at home in more ways than one.

An English-language paper in Puerto Vallarta, for instance, recently applauded the imminent arrival of a new shopping mall that will include Hooters, Burger King, Subway, Chili's and Starbucks. Only Dunkin' Donuts (con salsa?), the paper complained, was still missing.


Baja invasion

The gringo footprint is largest – and brings the most significant geopolitical consequences – in Baja California, the 1,000-mile-long desert appendage to the gridlocked state-nation governed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Indeed, Baja real-estate Web sites ooze almost as much hyperbole as those devoted to stalking the phantom menace of illegal immigrants – just in a far more upbeat tone when it comes to the question of immigrant invasions.

In essence, Alta (Upper) California is beginning to overflow into Baja, an epochal process that, if unchecked, will produce intolerable social marginalization and ecological devastation in Mexico's last true frontier region. All the contradictions of postindustrial California – runaway land inflation in the coastal zone, sprawling suburban development in interior valleys and deserts, freeway congestion and lack of mass transit, and the astronomical growth of motorized recreation – dictate the invasion of the gorgeous "empty" peninsula to the south. To use a term from a bad but not irrelevant past, Baja is Anglo California's Lebensraum.

Indeed, the first two stages of informal annexation already have occurred. Under the banner of NAFTA, Southern California has exported hundreds of its sweatshops and toxic industries to the maquiladora zones of Tijuana and Mexicali. The Pacific Maritime Association, representing the West Coast's major shipping companies, has joined forces with Korean and Japanese corporations to explore the construction of a vast new container port at Punta Colonel, 150 miles south of Tijuana, which would undercut the power of longshore unionism in San Pedro and San Francisco.

Second, tens of thousands of gringo retirees and winter residents are now clustered at both ends of the peninsula. Along the northwest coast from Tijuana to Ensenada, a recent advertisement for a real-estate conference at UCLA boasts that "there are presently over 57 real-estate developments... with over 11,000 homes/condos with an inventory value of over $3 billion... all of them geared for the U.S. market."

Meanwhile, at the tropical end of Baja, a gilded gringo enclave has emerged in the 20-mile strip between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose de Cabo. Los Cabos is part of that global archipelago of real-estate hot spots where continuous double-digit increases in property values suck in speculative capital from all over the world. Ordinary gringos can participate in this glamorous Los Cabos real-estate casino through the purchase and resale of fractional time-shares in condominiums and beach homes.

Although Western Canadian and Arizona speculators have taken large bites out of Baja's southern cape, Los Cabos – at least judging from the registration of private planes at the local airport – has essentially become a resort suburb of Orange County, which is the home of the most vehement Minutemen chapters. (Many wealthy Southern Californians evidently see no contradiction between fuming over the "alien invasion" with one's conservative friends at the Newport Marina one day and flying down to Cabos the next for sea-kayaking or celebrity golf.)

The next step in the late colonization of Baja is the "Escalera Nautica," a $3 billion "ladder" of marinas and coastal resorts being developed by Fonatur that will open pristine sections of both Mexican coasts to the yacht club set.

Meanwhile, The Truman Show has arrived in the picturesque little city of Loreto on the Gulf side of the peninsula. There, Fonatur has joined forces with an Arizona company and "New Urbanist" architects from Florida to develop the Villages of Loreto Bay: 6,000 homes for expatriates in a colonial-Mexico motif on the Sea of Cortez.

The $3 billion Loreto project boasts that it will be the last word in green design, exploiting solar power and restricting automobile usage. Yet, at the same time, it will balloon Loreto's population from its current 15,000 to more than 100,000 in a decade, with the social and environmental consequences of a sort that already can be seen in the slum peripheries of Cancun and other mega-resorts.


Lost wilderness

One of the irresistible attractions of Baja is that it has preserved a primordial wildness that has disappeared elsewhere in the West. Local residents, including a very eloquent indigenous environmental movement, cherish this incomparable landscape as they do the survival of an egalitarian ethos in the peninsula's small towns and fishing villages.

Thanks to the silent invasion of baby boomers from the north, however, much of the natural history and frontier culture of Baja could be swept away in the next generation. One of the world's most magnificent wild coastlines could be turned into generic tourist sprawl, waiting for Dunkin' Donuts to open.

Locals, accordingly, have every reason to fear that today's mega-resorts and mock-colonial suburbs, like Fonatur's entire tourism-centered strategy of regional development, are merely the latest Trojan horses of Manifest Destiny.

Mike Davis is the author, most recently, of "Planet of Slums." He lives in San Diego. A longer version of this essay appears at Tomdispatch.com.

[quote="Brian503a"]http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-mikedavis_01edi.ART.State.Edition1.3e703a0.html

Mike Davis: Yanquis go home!





What few people – at least, outside of Mexico – have bothered to notice is that while all the nannies, cooks and maids have been heading north to tend the luxury lifestyles of irate Republicans, the gringo hordes have been rushing south to enjoy glorious budget retirements and affordable second homes under the Mexican sun.

quote]

I consider gringo to be an insulting racist word. Its only ok to publicly insult white ppl?

What few people – at least, outside of Mexico – have bothered to notice is that while all the nannies, cooks and maids have been heading north to tend the luxury lifestyles of irate Republicans, the gringo hordes have been rushing south to enjoy glorious budget retirements and affordable second homes under the Mexican sun.

Just about every line written by this clown is an insult and a cliche.

Right, Mike, they all work for rich Republicans.

And while, in Mike's world, it's just fine for millions of Mexicans to invade the US illegally, there's something wrong when some gringos move to Mexico legally. I guess their gringo presence somehow contaminates the pristine Mexican culture.

Why do you think they "just keep moving?"

You think people in California want to hang around in their Golden Years to pay thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars supporting governments and illegal aliens destroy their neighborhoods?

If you want your people to stay in California, then you have a legal obligation and a civic, moral and patriotic duty to protect their "space"...MORON.

Having failed to scourge the world of evil by invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Republicans, supported by some Democrats, now propose that we invade ourselves: sending the Marines and Green Berets, along with the National Guard, into the hostile deserts of California and New Mexico where national sovereignty is supposedly under siege.

Has this guy ever been to a border state? How ignorant.

I don't understand what he is complaining about. With the "gringos" developing land down there, does it not create jobs for the local economy? What do they want? To sit there and be poor or have someone step in and do something? Most articles I have read state that illegals miss their culture and families and come here only for jobs. If Americans develop an area in Mexico, they can stay with their families, cultural preferences and get a local job! I don't understand the problem here.

I think they should all leave Mexico to, get out of there things are going to get ugly before this is all over you can bet on that!

http://www.sdbj.com/industry_article.as ... ID2=105491

Posted date: 10/2/2006

Real Estate Craze Leads to Binational Marketing Blitz

Wheeler-Dealers Make Lucrative Sales in Uncharted Territory
By KATIE WEEKS

San Diego Business Journal Staff


Steven Aparis, loan consultant at Del Mar-based Finance North America’s call center, helps manage hundreds of inquiries every week about buying property in Mexico.
BY KATIE WEEKS

Watching the sunset from his estate in Mexico, Dave La Barre couldn’t contain his enthusiasm for his lifestyle.

“You’re talking to me right now, and I’m standing here overlooking the Sea of Cortez from a house I bought for less than $500,000,” said La Barre, who is president and founder of Mi Casa del Mar, one of the largest of about 40 development companies making Baja California, Mexico’s San Felipe, “American ready.” In 2002, there were just four developers in that city.

The house, he said, would have cost him $2 million to $3 million in San Diego, where La Barre was born and raised.

While La Barre, 63, limits advertising to billboards and restaurant placemats in San Felipe, others have plans to spend millions to promote their ventures.

Armando Ramos, 60, president of San Felipe Marina Resort, a $900 million oceanfront project, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote his gigantic project — and plans to spend a lot more.

La Barre, an American, and Ramos, a Mexican citizen, battle decades of horror stories — real and imagined — about the Mexican government seizing property, crooked cops and insufficient infrastructure.

But the two businessmen take different approaches. While La Barre said his aim isn’t to convert consumers who have already made up their minds, Ramos’ company has held educational seminars on how to buy his Mexican properties. La Barre would rather target people who have already visited Mexico.

Targeting Western Markets

Markets with a higher likelihood of buying a second home or vacation home in Mexico are Northern California, the Pacific Northwest, Texas and Arizona, said Georgi Bohrod, who has spent 10 years marketing time shares and homes in Mexico. Colorado, Minnesota and Chicago are secondary markets, said Bohrod, whose San Diego-based public relations firm, Georgi Bohrod Associates, services clients in Baja California and Puerto Vallarta, which is on the west coast of the mainland Mexican state of Jalisco.

“You can have a gorgeous place on the beach that you could not afford to have in Del Mar or La Jolla,” Bohrod said. “There are situations on both sides of the border where you need to be cautious, but Mexico is one of the safest places to travel abroad, and the Mexican government is working to make it safer.”

During the last 13-14 years, changes in laws have made it easier and more secure for Americans to buy land in Mexico, including the ability to buy beachfront property or land close to the border by putting it in a Mexican bank trust, or fideicomiso, said Pepe Larroque, an attorney with global law firm Baker & McKenzie. Larroque has been working in Mexican real estate law for 20 years, and works 60 percent of the time in Tijuana, and partly in the firm’s San Diego office.

Developers, on the other hand, typically hold the title of Mexican land through a Mexican company they establish, instead of a fideicomiso, Larroque said.

About six years ago, legal changes on both sides of the border made mortgages a feasible way to buy property in Mexico, said Russ Schreier, founder and chief executive officer of Del Mar-based Finance North America, which offers mortgages to Americans, Mexicans and Canadians buying property in Mexico. Most properties, though, are still bought in cash, say developers and Mexican real estate law experts.
“More and more people are comfortable with the system,” Schreier said, adding that financing for Mexican property is about 2 percent higher, and closing on a home can take up to 90 days versus about two weeks in the United States.

Schreier said mortgage firms like his, along with title insurance companies and developers, have begun advertising their services together to simplify the purchase for customers — a combo meal of sorts for vacation-home buying.

Quick To Sell

Finance North America, whose Del Mar call center receives about 300 inquiries each week, became profitable this summer after having been open only a year. Schreier said the rapid growth of his company, for which he declined to disclose revenues, is indicative of the increasing number of people looking to Baja to purchase beachfront property.

The U.S. Census Bureau doesn’t track the number of Americans living in Mexico, but it might start during the 2010 census, according to the bureau. According to the 2000 Mexican census, there are at least 340,000 Americans living in Mexico.

About 25,000 Americans buy property in Baja each year, said Ramos, whose San Felipe Marina Resort project includes a completed 80-room hotel and plans for 3,300 homes to border a golf course, 100 ocean-view villas and 40 condos priced at $600,000 each.

“Baby boomers are the richest generation in American history,” Ramos said. “They’re choosing Mexico because there are less regulations and it’s cheaper.”

Ramos said his company has spent around $350,000 on advertising annually for the last several years and will spend an additional $1.5 million on it during the next year.

His development firm has billboards in Baja aimed at keeping Americans in Mexico. One reads, “George W. Who? You don’t need to know,” Ramos said.

San Felipe Marina Resort also advertises in the San Diego Union-Tribune, San Francisco’s daily newspapers, online and in in-flight magazines. Ramos and his associates have held seminars in conjunction with brokers about purchasing properties at his resort.

“We are doing business like America wants to do business,” Ramos said. “They trust more in Mexican developers now.”

Construction on San Felipe Marina Resort began 12 years ago, and it is now entering the second phase. Ramos expects $100 million in sales for 2007, and $1.5 billion in the next 15 years.

Serving International Travelers
Last month, Carlsbad-based Grey Eagle Aviation Inc. began offering flight service three days a week from Carlsbad to San Felipe in Baja, Mexico, allowing residents and vacationers to bypass delays at the U.S.-Mexico border. The four- to six-hour drive from Southern California to San Felipe is reduced to an hour-and-a-half flight.

The economic development community in San Felipe is also working to get U.S. Airways to fly to Mexico regularly, said La Barre, who has been a leader in the effort. He believes U.S. Airways may come around in the next four months.

La Barre has about 30 homes under construction in San Felipe with around a dozen completed. Almost 100 percent of his contractors are Mexico-based.

A certain amount of the business still depends on trial and error.

“We’re watching to see who’s good and who’s not,” La Barre said.

But that’s to be expected considering the pioneering spirit that led La Barre and his fellow co-founders from the dot-com boom to Mexican real estate.

“It’s not just homes, it’s communities we’re building,” La Barre said, adding that the 38-member San Felipe Rotary Club he’s involved with recently donated 500 pairs of tailor-made eyeglasses to schoolchildren there. His company also donated $20,000 this year to a local hospital.

A 2001 article in Time magazine featured Americans who moved to San Felipe when few of the settlements there had electricity.

“San Felipe is no luxury resort,” stated the article, titled, “No Bad Days (Who Needs Electricity?).”

“Refrigerators run on propane and computers on solar panels … and the town doesn’t pick up garbage for days.”

All that is changing, say those familiar with Baja.

“It has changed dramatically,” said Larroque, the real estate law attorney, referring to living standards in Baja.

Abundance Of Real Estate
For one, home values are rising dramatically.

Larroque predicts the real estate boom that blessed the corridor from Tijuana to Ensenada in the last three to four years is about to repeat itself in San Felipe and other touristy coastal towns, such as Punta Mita, in the Mexican state of Nayarit.

The price range four years ago for a high-end, 8,000-square-foot beachfront home in the corridor from Tijuana to Ensenada would have been $50,000 to $200,000, said Larroque, who has overseen hundreds of cross-border real estate transactions. Today, the same homes are priced at $100,000 to $1 million. In markets such as Cabo San Lucas in Southern Baja, the same home would cost $6 million to $10 million, he said.

“I remember having conversations with developers who said they had a hard time selling a house for $150,000,” Larroque said. “Slowly, that has changed, and now you have high-rises and all sorts of developments.”

San Felipe, which started as a small fishing village of 15,000 Mexicans, has grown into a city with a population of more than 30,000.

“There’s so much mythology, it’s ridiculous,” said La Barre, who said San Felipe is safer than walking down a street in Los Angeles. “The water is cleaner than the water I grew up on in Mission Valley. It’s right out of our own well.”

La Barre said there’s even a Costco in Mexicali that delivers to San Felipe.

“The only thing we go north for are certain ice creams,” he said. “You want a junior bacon burger? You go across the border. We have everything here.”

Personally, I think we should buy up the entire kitten kaboodle. LaRaza can then take their conniptions when the towns they've tried to take over in the USA go down the tubes without any American know how and culture, becoming that very slum which they left.........while Americans will then OWN & build a prosperous south of the border.

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Wonder what I could get for about 300 a month? Besides a blanket on the beach? Heck no before I go that route would beg the Aussies to take me in!

nitty says "beg the Aussies to take me in"



Good One, nitty.