affordable second homes under the Mexican sun.
What few people -- at least, outside of Mexico -- have bothered to
notice is that while all the nannies, cooks and maids have been heading
north to tend the luxury lifestyles of irate Republicans, the gringo
hordes have been rushing south to enjoy glorious budget retirements and
affordable second homes under the Mexican sun.
Over the past decade, the State Department estimates that the number of
Americans living in Mexico has soared from 200,000 to 1 million (or
one-quarter of all U.S. expatriates). Remittances from the United
States to Mexico have risen dramatically, from $9 billion to $14.5
billion in just two years. Although initially interpreted as
representing a huge increase in illegal workers (who send parts of
their salaries across the border to family), it turns out to be mainly
money sent by Americans to themselves to finance Mexican homes and
retirements.
Although some of them are naturalized U.S. citizens returning to towns
and villages of their birth after lifetimes of toil on the other side,
the director-general of Fonatur, the official agency for tourism
development in Mexico, recently characterized the typical investors in
that country's real estate as American "Baby Boomers who have paid off
in good part their initial mortgage and are coming into inheritance
money."
The extraordinary rise in U.S. sunbelt property values gives gringos
immense economic leverage. Shrewd Baby Boomers are not simply
feathering nests for eventual retirement, but also increasingly
speculating in Mexican resort property, sending up property values to
the detriment of locals whose children are consequently driven into
slums or forced to emigrate north, increasing the "invasion" charges.
As in Galway, Corsica, or, for that matter, Montaña, the global
second-home boom is making life in beautiful, natural settings
unaffordable for their traditional residents.
The gringo presence is largest (and brings the most significant
geopolitical consequences) in Baja California. Indeed, Baja real estate
Web sites ooze almost as much hyperbole as those devoted to stalking
the phantom menace of illegal immigrants -- in a far more upbeat tone
when it comes to the question of immigrant invasions.
In essence, Alta (Upper) California is beginning to overflow into Baja,
an epochal process that, if unchecked, will produce intolerable social
marginalization and ecological devastation in Mexico's last true
frontier region. Indeed, the first two stages of informal annexation
have already occurred.
Secondly, tens of thousands of gringo retirees and winter residents are
clustered at both ends of the peninsula. Along the northwest coast from
Tijuana to Ensenada, an advertisement for a real estate conference at
UCLA boasts, "there are presently over 57 real estate developments ...
with over 11,000 homes/condos with an inventory value of over $3
billion ... all of them geared for the U.S. market."
Meanwhile, at the tropical end of Baja, a gilded gringo enclave has
emerged in the 20-mile strip between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose de
Cabo. Los Cabos is part of that global archipelago of real estate hot
spots where continuous double-digit increases in property values suck
in speculative capital from all over the world. Ordinary gringos can
participate in this glamorous Los Cabos real estate casino through the
purchase and resale of time-shares in condominiums and beach homes.
Although Canadian and Arizona speculators have taken large bites out of
Baja's southern cape, Los Cabos -- at least judging from the
registration of private planes at the local airport -- has essentially
become a resort suburb of Orange County, the home of the most vehement
Minutemen chapters.
Many wealthy Southern Californians evidently see no contradiction
between fuming over the "alien invasion" with one's conservative
friends at the Newport Marina one day and flying down to Cabo the next
for some sea-kayaking or celebrity golf.
The next step in the late-colonization of Baja is the Escalera Nautica,
a $3 billion "ladder" of marinas and coastal resorts being developed by
Fonatur that will open pristine sections of both Mexican coasts to the
yacht club set.
Meanwhile, the "Truman Show" has arrived in the picturesque little city
of Loreto on the Gulf side of the peninsula. There, Fonatur has joined
forces with an Arizona company and new urbanist architects from Florida
to develop the Villages of Loreto Bay: 6,000 homes for expatriates in
colonial-Mexico motif on the Sea of Cortez.
The $3 billion Loreto project boasts that it will be the last word in
green design, exploiting solar power and restricting automobile usage.
At the same time, it will balloon Loreto's population from its current
15,000 to more than 100,000 in a decade, with the social and
environmental consequences of a sort that can already be seen in the
slum peripheries of Cancun and other mega-resorts.