Housing has become an investment asset in Mexico, a country where few people in the upper class can acquire or rent it.
“The house is being built not to live, but as an investment, and that fosters speculation, so a public policy that generates a balance is necessary,” says Mireya Pasillas Torres, ITESO researcher, Jesuit University of Guadalajara.
There is a huge price dispersion in the sale nationwide, according to the specialist.
“The cheapest property reported had a price of 169 thousand pesos, while the most expensive reached 76.3 million pesos,” the academic warns.
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“This difference of more than 450 times evidences the deep inequality of the Mexican real estate market,” he says.
Housing price ranges are wide in Mexico City, Querétaro, Jalisco, Yucatán and Quintana Roo, where vertical developments, premium areas and investment corridors are built
“This variability puts in tension the right to housing and underlines the need for differentiated policies that respond to the specific conditions of each local market,” says the researcher.
The question appears – and is documented in the investigation of ITESO, Jesuit University of Guadalajara -: Who can pay those prices?
“Only a very low percentage of the population can pay those housing prices in Mexico, while the rest has to search the periphery, in places without services and in situations that increase inequality,” he says.
To acquire a house with a value of one million pesos, a monthly income of around 30 thousand 699 pesos is necessary, according to the study of ITESO, Jesuit University of Guadalajara.
It details that the median price of housing in Mexico is 3.05 million pesos, which would imply a monthly income of 93 thousand 632 pesos, while the average price (4.29 million pesos) would require revenues of 131 thousand 780 per month.
When today, the monthly income per household, without considering transfers, is 21 thousand 355.
And the IX decile (which groups households with high income, but not at the highest level) has an income of 35 thousand 988 per month, which would barely reach for a house of around 1.2 million under the simulated conditions.
“This shows that not even most high -income households could access the homes that represent the median or the average obtained from the selected digital platforms,” says the researcher.
Only Decile X, which concentrates households with the highest income (on average 70 thousand 201 per month), is close to the levels required to access real estate of around 2.2 million pesos under the credit conditions raised, he says.
This income level is still well below what is necessary to acquire the median housing of 3.05 million pesos or the average housing of 4.29 million pesos without allocating more than 30 percent of the monthly income to the mortgage.
“You can’t buy a house, but you can’t rent it either,” adds Mireya Pasillas Torres.
The formal housing market pricing structure is disconnected from the reality reality of most households, asserts.
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The Political Constitution of the United Mexican States stipulates in its article 4 that “every person has the right to enjoy adequate housing. The law will establish the necessary instruments and support in order to achieve such objective.”
But what happens in everyday life is very different: in practice, making a home – whether bought or for rent – is increasingly complicated for the majority of the population, which leads people to look for options in the peripheries of the cities, in places without services and in conditions that increase inequality.
