Unable to Make Payments, Owners Have Abandoned 2 Million Homes Across Mexcio Bob McPhail - San Diego Reader
go to original September 4, 2015

The country has the largest number of abandoned houses of all the 34 countries that make up the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. (Al Jazeera)

An estimated 362,000 homes in Baja California have been abandoned by their owners and another 60,000 are at risk of abandonment, according to the national director of El Barzón, a Mexico nonprofit founded to assist consumers in economic trouble.

Speaking at a recent press conference in Tijuana, Alfonso Ramírez Cuellar called the mortgage crisis and its aftermath a “social tragedy.”

The abandoned homes are the leftovers of a nationwide housing boom in the early 2000s during which, according to Americas Quarterly, more than 7 million homes were constructed with government financing, making Infonavit “the largest mortgage lender in Latin America.”

By 2008, however, many Mexican workers had been slammed by economic hard times, either losing their jobs or agreeing to lower wages and fewer hours. As a consequence they were no longer able to afford their mortgage payments. Many of them took their families and moved elsewhere, leaving an estimated 2 million abandoned homes across Mexico.

Infonavit-Baja California currently has about 14,000 past-due mortgages on its books, the agency's regional delegate, Alejandro Arregui Ibarra, said in an interview published August 29 in El Sol de Tijuana.

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