Mexican travel destinations: doomed to failure?

The real estate development is one of the most profitable businesses in the cities, both for private enterprise in the subdivision, development, construction and sale, and the public sector through the recollection of taxes and duties. Countries like the United States, Canada, Brazil and Argentina have captured much of its municipal revenues from activities related to the real estate industry - mainly housing projects - allowing them to reduce their taxes and even subsidize percentage terms or complete amounts of some basic services like water, electricity and public transport. Portland, Oregon has become a pioneer of intelligent development and implementation of the principles of New Urbanism – which we have constantly talked on this blog – extending themselves throughout the Pacific Northwest in cities like Seattle, Vancouver and Victoria.

There are many factors that influence profitability; the most frequent are the repopulation of the central cities reducing the strength of the peripheral areas, the rights-transfer between private regulated by the public sector that guarantees equal opportunities for development, the regulation of taxes due to the proximity to services that encourages existing served areas contrary to the provision of services in new developments, and possibly the most important one, the long-term vision of cities development based on sustainability, vitality and raising the quality of life by reducing the polarization between different social classes.

Unfortunately in our country, radically different things work. Urban areas with all the infrastructure and services generate more expensive taxes and fees which are intended to sprawl areas for development and networks; these makes developable the external land breaking the inertia of the ideal city development and increase land prices – no appreciation as we may think - in favor of private sector developers whose interest lies not in ​​construction but on the changes in land use in their favor by speculation and corruption and allow the overvaluation of agricultural lands and ejidos to their sale to the public.

And in this scenario, the city is no stranger to neoliberalism, the economic - and political - system that prevails in the world today. The polarization of social classes is increasingly evident among luxury condominium located on the beach strip over 40 km of Los Cabos and peripheral subdivisions of social interest to workers, mainly from tourism developments, or the misery belts and slums around the city for people who have no access to credit or national housing programs.

"What is now far away, tomorrow will be part of the city" is the slogan that is heard on the local radio station to promote a peripheral fractionation, maintaining the sprawling growth model that has caused many problems to the tourist destinations in the country. While higher-income sectors - and overseas - take over the littoral, local income groups are entitled to the land near airports, but both reflect the same outdated ideology to see the land surface as an unlimited resource. In the case of Acapulco, the first tourist destination in the country, the real estate proliferation marked distinguishable developmental areas that have been gentrified and abandoned in order to continue the development and layering it to increasingly segmented markets; from Traditional Acapulco to the South Coast draft are about 100 km away with more than 4,000 new hotel rooms authorized for the coming years, that beyond solve the social, economic and abandonment problem, will become an even larger problem that seems to have no end or solution to the so skewed view of the relevant governments and private investors, whose only interest is to get earnings of the land use and operating staff.

But Acapulco is not an alternate reality to us, nor are Veracruz and Mazatlan developments or "planned" FONATUR ones as Huatulco or the corridor Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo. Cities have been at the mercy of investors who decide when to develop and when to leave country's destinations according to purely neo-liberal interests, both for tourism and housing, luxury or popular, without distinction. The lack of reinvestment in consolidated areas has become a major problem for the maintenance of touristic destinations and contrary to the general conception, government is not the main culprit.

We are currently in electoral period and would be worth asking our candidates what will be their urban policy for the next 3 and 6 years. It is important to know if Los Cabos will become the north Acapulco in hands of developers or if we can hope to build together, the 3 main stakeholders: public sector, private investors and citizens, a successful destination not only desirable for foreigners inside the gated communities but to all people in the real city.

JPV