Tijuana housing squeeze play
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/mexico/20041114-9999-1n14...
As Tijuana grows at breakneck speed, it also struggles to provide adequate, affordable homes. The city faces huge trade-offs in its sprawling
developments.
By Sandra Dibble
November 14, 2004
TIJUANA ? At 300 square feet, home is no bigger than a motel room.
But within these concrete walls, Teresa Guzm?n and her family fit bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, dining room and living room. A tight squeeze, barely
space enough for four people, but it's a home of their own, a place to hang their dreams at long last.
The light-olive duplex at the city's eastern edge is one of tens of thousands of mass-produced homes rising across Baja California as the state
confronts a daunting housing crisis.
New developments surge over hillsides in pastel-colored swells. The city grows at a breakneck pace. About 26,000 homes were built this year, breaking
Tijuana's record.
With a population of 1.5 million that is growing by about 80,000 people every year, affordable housing is a huge challenge for everyone ? families,
government planners and private developers. The hurdles are many, from the irregular terrain to the high cost of bringing water, electricity and
sewers to the undeveloped parcels.
"There is no place as complicated as Tijuana, except perhaps Mexico City," said Ra?l Bejarano Borboa, head of the Baja California office of Infonavit,
the main Mexican federal housing lending agency for low-cost homes.
As tract housing transforms the city, the effects will be felt for generations. Proponents say these developments are giving rise to a
property-owning, tax-paying middle class that will strengthen Mexico's democracy.
But this approach to Tijuana's growth has created its own problems.
Poor planning and weak regulation have, in some places, led to overcrowding and traffic gridlock. Open space is scarce, privacy is difficult,
maintenance is spotty. The roads and public transportation are inadequate, and as tracts are added, morning commuters must rise earlier to get to work
and school.
House after house, row upon row, neighborhood after neighborhood attest to the fact: One of Mexico's most dynamic housing markets could become an
unmanageable force.
Few good options
Conditions might be crowded, but for Guzm?n and her husband, Miguel Angel Cabrera, a factory worker, it beats sharing a room in an uncle's house, as
they did when they arrived in Tijuana seven years ago from the state of Nayarit. Or squeezing themselves and their two boys into a two-bedroom
apartment with four other relatives, as they found themselves doing for more than a year. Or renting a bedroom, as they did for five years in a
relative's house.
"It was a necessity for us," said Guzm?n, who is 31.
They paid $15,000 for their house last year, the lowest priced and smallest on the market.
The spurt in low-cost housing is a trend in major cities across Mexico as President Vicente Fox calls for 750,000 houses to be built annually by the
time he leaves office in 2006. That's more than twice the number built in 2000, the year he took office.
Baja California, a state with about 3 million residents, expects to build 50,000 homes this year. By comparison, San Diego County, with roughly the
same population, is expected to add 15,000 to 16,000 units.
Some liken the housing boom to a social revolution, comparing the developments with Levittown, the Long Island, N.Y., bedroom community where 17,500
mass-produced houses, measuring 750 and 800 square feet, popped up almost overnight to meet the post-World War II housing demand.
Cuauht?moc P?rez Roman, president of Mexicali-based Urbi, Baja California's largest housing developer, speaks of the transformative power of housing.
Residents are not just purchasing a house from Urbi, he said, but also buying a stake in their communities, just as World War II veterans bought their
own stake in Levittown.
"The most important thing is that they have a space that's theirs, a surrounding that generates values, principles," P?rez said.
For years, the city grew through land invasions by impoverished residents who raised shacks and then demanded the government bring in services.
Tijuana is hardly unique: A study by Harvard University this year estimated that half of Mexico's housing is self-built, and much of that on land
without clear title or basic infrastructure.
By contrast, the new tract houses come with water, sewage systems, electricity and paved streets. And perhaps most important, they come with legal
guarantees. They typically measure less than 600 square feet and cost less than $32,000, putting them within reach of families with modest incomes.
"The need for housing exists, and if we don't satisfy it legally, with services, with property taxes, with payments for water and electricity, Tijuana
will go back to being what it was," said Alfredo Sefami Mizraje, director of Casas Beta, a Mexico City-based housing developer. "All you have to do is
fly over Tijuana and see the illegal settlements."
One of those is near a streambed a few miles from the Otay Mesa border crossing, where a dozen families live in wooden shacks of various shapes and
sizes. Enedina Morales, 30, lives in one with her husband, who is a maquiladora worker, and their son.
They paid $1,000 for the property, but they don't hold title and they could be evicted anytime. City officials have posted signs labeling the area
dangerous. The family has no running water, no sewage system. They have electricity; it comes from a wire illegally connected to a nearby power pole.
The $90 a week that Morales' husband earns at his factory job would probably qualify them for a government housing loan, but they're not interested.
"My husband says they take out money, once a week your entire life, and my brother-in-law bought one and says they're very small," Morales said,
seated in her kitchen on a recent afternoon.
The lessons of sprawl
Critics of Tijuana's mass-produced housing fail to consider a key aspect, Urbi's P?rez said: that the housing is an upgrade for many people.
"It's an improvement, just a step, but it's an improvement," he said. "Their ability to pay has limits, so what should we do?"
No one wants to see Tijuana revert to the chaotic development that once predominated. But critics say the alternative has its own problems. Massive
tract-housing developments entail long-term costs, they say. Many lay the blame with city and state governments for not taking a stronger hand in
planning and controlling growth.
In Tijuana and other Mexican cities, the sprawling tracts of small houses "create enormous extensions of the city and call for extremely expensive
infrastructure," said Sara Topelson, coordinator of the Mexico City-based Center for Research and Documentation on Housing.
Many of the issues surfacing in Tijuana have played out for years in the United States.
"They're making the same mistakes we made," said Lawrence Herzog, a professor of urban planning at San Diego State University, in reference to large
housing tracts built on the far edges of cities. "They're not energy-efficient. They're built far from urban activity centers."
Many of Tijuana's architects say the city is missing an opportunity to be creative in solving the housing crisis.
"They have this idea, tabula rasa, to come and cut, and build overnight, without understanding that a city is built by layers, through processes,
through a series of sociocultural conditions that evolve," said Ren? Peralta, a Tijuana architect.
Federal Sen. H?ctor Osuna Jaime, also an architect, grappled with Tijuana's housing problems and other growing pains when he was mayor of the city
from 1992 to 1995.
"There are lots of utopian proposals that seem very attractive. I myself could come up with 20 of them," Osuna said. "But the fact is that you hit up
against an economic reality, and that's what dictates what you can do."
Tight quarters
In other parts of Mexico, even other parts of Baja California, the peso stretches further, buying more land and a bigger house. But in Tijuana, the
market rarely offers houses within reach of the poorest residents, and thus they are often forced to rent or live in makeshift shacks on plots without
services.
Speculation, the high cost of infrastructure, and the hilly terrain have pushed up land costs in the city.
Across Mexico, potential buyers who earn less than $360 per month can qualify for a mortgage of up to 161,000 pesos ($14,120 at current exchange
rates) through the federal agency Infonavit. In most parts of the country, that is enough to buy a house. But in Tijuana, many private developers are
reluctant to build housing for that amount, saying they cannot make a profit.
Urbi did build such housing last year, raising 1,000 one-bedroom units measuring about 300 square feet apiece. That led to scathing criticism from the
local architects association.
"To me they're nothing more than motor homes," said David Navarro, the group's president. "Imagine a family living in 300 square feet of space,
eating, sleeping, washing, doing chores, watching television. It's impossible. There are strong psychological repercussions, not just physical ones."
Like their neighbors on Calle de los Abetos, Guzm?n and her family are making the best of their small space. The one-bedroom duplex is what they could
afford on her husband's $95 a week earnings at the factory, where he assembles wood furniture for export to the United States.
His age and weekly pay qualified him for a loan last year of 155,300 pesos, about $15,000 at the then-prevailing exchange rate, from Infonavit. About
$70 a month is deducted from his paycheck.
For now, the boys, Angel, 12, and Alberto, 10, sleep in a bunk bed in the bedroom and their parents share a single bed in the common area, partitioned
with a curtain for privacy.
On the other side of the curtain is a table, a used green refrigerator with a television on top, a two-burner cooking unit, two chairs. A family
photograph is the wall's only adornment.
Sure it's cramped, said Guzm?n, managing to laugh and grimace and shrug at the same time.
Many say the solution starts at City Hall, that it's up to the government to take a stronger hand in planning and setting standards. Architect Carlos
Zavala, who heads the Construction Department for Tijuana's municipal government, agrees.
"We have greatly outdated regulations," Zavala said in his second-floor office overlooking Avenida Padre Kino. "We need rules for how large a shower
should be, or a toilet, or a kitchen . . . or something as simple as saying how much space per resident, per house, per bedroom."
San Diego's building code stipulates that a living unit must have at least 220 square feet; the rules require 100 extra square feet for each
additional person.
Tijuana also has a rule: that a livable space measure at least 78 square feet, not including a kitchen, bathroom, washing area and parking space. But
nothing in the rules says how many people should share the space.
Building a middle class
Rapid growth, high land cost. No matter how you look at it, the solution is complex and involves many players: developers, state and municipal
governments, federal lending agencies and the buyers themselves.
Builders say they can't begin to address the need without some help from government agencies. Subsidies for land, help with permits and infrastructure
or concessions on the credit limit are crucial for keeping costs down. Today, each new house receives about $940 in government subsidies, according to
the Baja California state housing commission.
In spite of this, only 580 "affordable housing" units were built in Tijuana this year, all by Casas Beta. The houses in eastern Tijuana are being
financed through a pilot program by Infonavit offering larger than usual mortgages to people earning less than $480 a month. The one-bedroom houses,
which sold for $19,000, measure 355 square feet and, like other tract houses, include blueprints for a second floor.
One alternative being studied across Mexico is mixing densities, blending houses with small apartment buildings, triplexes and duplexes. But in
Tijuana, where many families come from rural areas, buyers are often loathe to move into apartment buildings, demanding their own plot of land, no
matter how small.
Another obstacle is that Mexican families tend to view a house as a once-in-a-lifetime purchase, a basic unit modified and expanded over the years.
Planners and developers are calling for change, with the creation of a secondary housing market, allowing families to move to larger houses as their
numbers and incomes grow.
Developers and government officials point out that the housing industry does more than create houses. It creates jobs and thus helps build a stronger
economy, which will allow for larger houses in the future.
This year, investment in housing reached about $237 million and surpassed investment in maquiladoras for the first time.
"We're hoping that the country grows, . . . that housing itself pushes economic growth, and that this economic growth brings a higher quality of
life," said Urbi president P?rez Roman.
Home sweet home
While others discuss the pros and cons, Guzm?n is immersed in the realities of daily life in her new home: cooking meals, washing clothes, shopping
for supplies, taking the boys to school and catechism classes.
It's a modest start, but she has dreams. Of one day being able to bake cakes at home, of adding two bedrooms on the second floor, of raising a wall
around the tiny property.
Guzm?n's large brown eyes brighten as she speaks of her plans to build a small basketball court where her boys can play alone.
"It may sound selfish," she said, "but I want it to be just for them, so they can stretch a little bit."
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