Research visit: (In)formalizing Property? Tracing the legal geographies of mass housing schemes

In the first decades of the 21st century, housing production at mass industrial scale quickly expanded the urban fringes of Mexican Cities, predominantly without urban planning concepts and accompanying infrastructure development.

As part of a public policy of government mortgage lending that aimed to foster homeownership for low- and lower-middle-income tenants, Mexico’s National Workers’ Housing Fund INFOANVIT offered mortgage loans for the purchase of these new-built homes.

Given the peripheral locations and the sub-standard quality of the housing produced, the emerging subdivisions today stand partly vacant and many of them in decay.

The mass abandonment of these units and the accompanying bankruptcy of the development firms before the completion and handover of the projects has fostered two changes in property development that are at the core of this application: on the one hand, families, individuals and organized gangs have squatted housing units