“You just can’t get good help these days”

From El Financiero (18 Feb 2022).

For a few years now, rents in the Roma and Condesa neighborhoods in Mexico City have skyrocketed.

These areas have become ‘the cool place’ to live in the country’s capital and foreigners have been those to ‘make the most of it’. In other words, the rent for apartments and houses are through the roof for most Mexicans, but accessible to people from other countries living here. A dynamic seen here, as in other Latin American cities.

A few days ago, Becca Sherman stirred up a fair bit of controversy with a tweet to her more than 2,000 followers:

Do yourself in favor and remote work in Mexico City — it is truly magical ✨ pic.twitter.com/QRHRYp0qpv — Becca Sherman 🤝 (@becsherm) February 16, 2022

The problem is that the “netizens” from other countries actually come to live here, work remotely and don’t pay taxes.

Meanwhile, gentrification is not a new phenomenon. According to academic researchers Antoine Casgrain and Michael Janoschka, (Gentrification and Resistance in Latin American Cities) gentrification over the last fifty years has meant the reconquest of the central and consolidated areas of cities by economic power, in which spaces are appropriated by private real estate agents and capitalization of ground rent is sought. Casgrain and Janoschka assert that it reproduces class inequality.

“It can be considered an increasingly intense and central mechanism, typical of the contemporary era of late and globalized capitalism that focuses its efforts on cementing the domination of the wealthy classes over the processes of reproduction of social life,” they write.

In addition, according to the Polytechnic University of Madrid, gentrification seeks to replace the urban population with the ‘non-population’, that is, international tourism or foreigners who come to live in certain areas of the city. Here we remember Sherman again and her love for CDMX. This also implies that the urban population with fewer resources moves to the periphery, thus leaving foreigners in areas such as La Condesa or La Roma. The experts agree that a possible solution to this phenomenon is the real estate regulation of rents.