The Role of Housing Finance in Mexico’s Vacancy Crisis

In the wake of the housing market crash in the United States in the late 2000s, images of abandoned homes on the urban periphery of American cities dominated international media coverage. This narrative of peri-urban over-extension was used by media documenting the housing crisis in Mexico, despite the profound differences in context, namely the role of the government in housing finance. This paper disentangles the issue of Mexican housing vacancy from surface similarities with the US through an examination of vacancy rates within cities in Mexico, and tests of four hypotheses about their determinants using data from the 2010 Census of Population and Housing. Results confirm that violence related to the drug war, international migration, and housing finance are associated with vacancy. However, more housing finance is strongly related to higher vacancy in the central city but not in the urban periphery. In spite of the existence of vacancy in newly built houses, the expansion of credit for new housing in Mexico has been most significant for the role it has played in hollowing out the central city. The paper concludes with a review of policies to address the vacancy crisis in Mexico and a framework of best practices.