Renting and Sharing: Housing Options for the Poor

The government of Mexico encouraged the construction industry and the financial sector through massive new housing projects, particularly from 2000 to 2012. Developers built houses and acquired land reserves where the price of the land was cheap: on the far away outskirts of the cities. An important impact of this policy on the poor is that cheap land where irregular settlements would in the past have developed, has now become scarcer and more expensive. Over half of the population do not qualify for the new houses, anyway. Thus the financialization of housing on the periphery of Mexican cities is likely to have pushed the poor back into existing low-income settlements, or forced them to remain there, thus encouraging the already ongoing process of consolidation of irregular settlements. Old low-income settlements, founded more than 20 or even 50 years ago, have earned themselves a privileged location in the cities by now, as they can offer their inhabitants proximity to employment and infrastructure. In these areas, renting or sharing accommodation has become an important option for those with low incomes, either because, as is often the case, it is the only choice they have, or else because it suits their family or economic situation to rent instead of buying. Also, shared arrangements play a fundamental role in the lives of the most vulnerable groups: single mothers, the sick, the handicapped, and people of an advanced age. However, we know very little about current conditions in these settlements, and the problems faced by owners, tenants and sharers. To shed light on these parts of the city, I use information obtained from questionnaires and in-depth interviews conducted in Mexico, as part of a major research project into 11 cities in 9 countries of Latin America (the Latin American Housing Network).