New houses a very tight fit for Mexican families

MEXICO CITY — The running joke in the Cortes family is that their new home is so big, family members get lost wandering through it. The reality is that the Corteses have to hang drapes in the living room to create a makeshift bedroom for the four children, ages 7 to 18.

Squeezing six family members into 450 square feet has been difficult, but patriarch Alejandro Cortes says he's happy to trade living space for the security of the "Pretty Mountain" subdivision about 25 traffic-choked miles north of Mexico City.

"When we lived in the city, it was too dangerous to let the kids outside," Cortes, a baker, said. "Here we feel more safe, and it's like we finally have something for ourselves."

As more and more Mexicans have become homeowners in recent years, it's quickly becoming a nation of suburban commuters.

The Cortes family is among the legions who have moved into housing subdivisions built by private developers in the last five years at the edges of every major Mexican city. Like suburbs on steroids, the homes stretch for miles, thousands of reproductions of a single style, ranging from army barrack-chic to Swiss chalet knockoffs.

The houses, aimed at low-to-medium-income Mexicans, are small by U.S. standards, averaging about 530 square feet, with some of the smallest clocking in at around 320 square feet. The Mexican government offers a variety of loans to help people buy the homes, which range in price from about $16,000 to more than $60,000.

In what it considers one of its crowning social achievements, the administration of President Vicente Fox says 2.7 million Mexicans have received loans to buy or remodel homes since 2000, two-thirds of them for purchases, and more than 1.5 million units have been built in the past five years. Many of the borrowers make the equivalent of $200 to $600 a month and end up with mortgage payments of $80 to $150.

But critics say the housing wreaks havoc on traditional family patterns, creates unhealthy overcrowding and drives low-income residents hours from their jobs in cities, causing them to spend too much of their income on transportation.

"We are copying the United States or Europe, and we don't live like that," said architect Gustavo Romero, president of a non-profit housing development organization in Mexico City. "The government and the builders don't understand the poor, and because of that they invent solutions from their point of view."

Some say that low-income residents — who traditionally have lived with extended families of uncles, grandparents and cousins — have been squeezed into the middle-class mold of the nuclear family.

A better solution is to provide more government loans to families building their own homes, Romero says.

"They can do it better, cheaper and bigger on their own," he said, adding that such a strategy would make more homes available to millions of Mexicans who still find them unaffordable, despite the low price.

"It seems that all (the government) is interested in is numbers and not the quality of life of the people," said Maria Teresa Esquivel, a sociology professor at the Metropolitan University of Azcapotzalco, who co-authored a May report on the housing phenomenon for an international housing symposium.

Problems cited in the report ranged from a lack of privacy due to reduced space to shoddy construction materials. Residents interviewed for the report said rooms are often too small for normal-size furniture. Many said they lean their dining room table against the wall during non-meal hours and create elaborate time-share schemes for use of bathrooms and common areas.

The report concluded that the developments create nightmarish commutes, forcing residents to spend up to a fifth of their income on transportation to and from work.

Unlike the United States, where suburbs tend to be refuges for the more affluent fleeing the city, the areas surrounding Mexican cities are often populated by lower-income residents, forced to the edges because land is cheaper there.

Maria de los Angeles Serrano, who shares a home with her husband and two children in a housing development in Ecatepec outside Mexico City, says her husband regularly leaves at 7 a.m. and returns home at 10 p.m. from his job at a hardware store on the other side of Mexico City. "From Monday to Friday it's like I'm a single mother or a widower," she laughed.

But Mexican home builders say they have found an ingenious way to fill the critical need for affordable housing in Mexico, bringing the dream of homeownership to people who could not have dreamed of a new house a decade ago, when mortgage loans were generally unavailable even to those with decent incomes.

Despite their diminutive size, most houses in subdivisions can be added onto with second or third stories by residents and building so many homes of the same prototype allows economies of scale, bringing down prices. For many residents, the new houses are dignified alternatives to the ramshackle, irregular slum housing they used to own, home builders say.

And while the homes may appear tiny, especially to U.S. eyes, officials say they represent a leap forward for affordable housing in a country of widespread poverty. Many homeowners also say they feel safer in their new neighborhoods, many of which have guard booths and open space where children can play.

Housing advocates say that one of the chief problems plaguing the subdivisions is a lack of planning and infrastructure. Esquivel said many subdivisions sprout up without proper roads, and they lack access to clinics and stores.

"The government has to realize that (companies) are not just building a bunch of houses, but they're building entire cities," she said.

Builders say the subdivisions are far more orderly than neighborhoods built by residents on hillsides. While roads are a problem, there have been few complaints about lack of electric, water or sewer service, which are frequently absent from self-built homes.

Officials acknowledge that the extreme sprawl generated by the subdivisions is straining transportation systems. "It's time to build vertical," Fox said recently. "It's the moment to value the convenience of densifying our cities."

Critics complain that Mexican government has given free reign to a handful of large home builders to determine the face of the nation's affordable housing, failing to adequately regulate or coordinate with builders.

The last five years have proven a boon to the handful of large builders that dominates the Mexican home building industry. The largest, Casas Geo, has sold more than 230,000 homes – home to over 1.1 million people — and operates in and around 33 cities. Last year, the publicly traded company generated $704 million in revenue.

For many families living in the new housing developments, the peace of mind that comes from owning a home outweighs the lack of space and long commutes. "I like this 1,000 times better," said Maribel Jimenez, who moved with her husband and two children from a Mexico City apartment. "Yes you lose some space, but you get security."