Airbnb Mexico

Twenty miles away, in the historic center of Oaxaca, real estate is ripe, and abandoned buildings are few and far between. Just like in Ciudad Yagul, however, people are being driven from their homes, though for an entirely different reason: the cannibalizing of housing stock for Airbnb and skyrocketing rents.

“I’d been in my place for ten years when the owner and her son decided to turn the apartments into Airbnbs,” Zoe tells us. “‘But we’re not kicking you out!’ she said. Sure.” In the case of Celina, they were the final holdouts in an eight-unit complex that had all gone Airbnb. After months of seeing a rolling stock of new faces and hearing suitcases rolling constantly outside their door, she and her husband were informed by their landlords that they needed to vacate their apartment temporarily, ostensibly for roof repair. Only once they had been safely removed were they notified of the change of rental method.

“Similar things have happened to like ten other friends of ours this past year,” she says.

A search for Oaxaca rentals on the Airbnb site revealed an average price of $749 pesos a night ($40 USD) — six times the daily minimum wage. Indeed, a monthly rental at that price would come in at more than $22,000 pesos ($1,200 USD), well over 500 percent of the monthly average salary in Oaxaca.

The gulf between the Airbnb rental bubble and the actual world where everyone else exists is staggering. And by reducing the availability of long-term housing while increasing owners’ expectations of what they are able to get, Airbnb has inflated prices throughout the city, aggravating what was already a stiff breach between the owner and tenant classes and pushing the latter farther and farther away from their jobs in the city center.

Elsewhere in Oaxaca, home of the first major social rebellion of the twenty-first century, tourism is booming. Hip groups of visitors quaff artisanal beer and boutique mezcal before ambling off to sample upscale versions of the area’s famed cuisine at exclusive restaurants. On the Day of the Dead in November, vans full of tourists flood local cemeteries to live out their Coco-inspired fantasies in real time. And while tourism brings money into a city where industry is virtually absent, the structure of the Oaxacan economy ensures that most of this income winds up in the hands of one class — the same one that benefits from Airbnb rentals.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

At other Infonavit-financed housing projects we visit, the stories are similar. At the Santo Domingo Barrio Bajo subdivision, residents Tavo and Esmeralda list a series of problems: no running water, no street lights, unpaved streets, and the all-too-familiar scenes of abandoned houses. Another resident, José Luis, explains the reasons for the subdivision’s abandonment: the construction company that built it, Premin, declared bankruptcy, while the municipality that ceded the lands in the first place has refused to incorporate them.

It is a familiar story: once the federal government began turning off the spigot of public money in 2011, the nation’s largest constructors of these developments, Homex, Casas GEO, and Urbi, all filed for bankruptcy within three years. With the whirlwind of revolving companies with different names, it becomes impossible to know who to complain to. “They just move on to other cities and do the same thing there,” José Luis says.

At another Premin construction job, the Reyes Mantecón subdivision, built in conjunction with the government workers’ housing authority FOVISSSTE, the situation went to the extreme: a feud between town and housing project that led to the latter proposing to build a wall between the two. In addition to the town being asked to shoulder the burden of the construction company’s abandonment, the clash also has to do with conflicting perceptions of rights: the communal ethos of Reyes Mantecón, a centuries-old Zapotec settlement based on a people’s assembly and community-service work known as tequios, and the imposed individualism of the subdivision, most of whose ranks come and go from the city in conditions similar to that of Ciudad Yagul’s.

“Clashes of identity can become very aggressive,” notes the former mayor Efraín Aragón Ibáñez, who for three years was forced to execute a delicate balancing act between the two sections.

The AMLO Solution Must Go Further

In its first year, the Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) government unveiled a package of reforms to help struggling renters in the Infonavit program, including an end to evictions, discounts for those over forty who have had a mortgage for at least fifteen years, and condonations of remaining debt for those who have paid 90 percent of it.

Crucially, their debts will now be calculated in straight pesos instead of minimum-wage multiples, a perverse mechanism that penalized debtors every time wages rose. While welcome, the restructuring program is not universal, and thus still leaves hundreds of thousands underwater. Moreover, the president is still left with another item on his long list of problems not of his own making: a mass of rapidly decaying housing stock in areas that never should have been built on in the first place.

In order to fulfill the Mexican constitution’s guarantee of dignified housing for all, he will have no choice but to grapple with this time bomb at some point.

In a larger sense, however, the president appears to be ignoring the overriding lesson of the Infonavit disaster: the pernicious nature of public-private partnerships. Indeed, he is roaring ahead with such partnerships for his national infrastructure program and a series of big-ticket items such as his Mayan Train in the Yucatán and the trans-isthmus corridor linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

And while AMLO insists that his anti-corruption credibility will prevent contracts falling into unscrupulous hands, just this past week, his government awarded a contract to the company La Peninsular to repair some thirty miles of trans-isthmus railway track. La Peninsular belongs to Grupo Hermes, headed by the notorious multimillionaire Carlos Hank Rhon, investigated on multiple occasions for money laundering and links with drug traffickers.

However, even in the “cleanest” of circumstances, public-private partnerships are about transferring public capital into private hands, privileging the financial interests of stockholders and speculators over the common good. Just as they were not the solution to Mexico’s housing crisis, they will not be the answer to its infrastructure needs.

In Oaxaca City, meanwhile, Airbnb-fueled gentrification proceeds apace. Celina and Zoe have moved out of the downtown and commute back and forth. Though they miss living in the centro, they can still count themselves among the relatively fortunate: they don’t have to get up quite as early as the residents of Ciudad Yagul.