This article first appeared in the May 5, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier leftist daily newspaper.
The federal government is preparing a strategy to recover 600,000 homes abandoned by their owners across the country, President Claudia Sheimbaum Pardo announced.
During her morning press conference this Monday, the head of the Executive maintained that in the case of home evictions, “which is a different matter,” it is the responsibility of the prosecutors’ offices in the states where these crimes are reported.
“It’s estimated there are more than 600,000 abandoned or illegally occupied homes in the country. Imagine! What kind of homes are we talking about? The ones built, mainly during the (Vicente) Fox and (Felipe) Calderón administrations, where Infonavit housing (government housing agency – ed) was actually private businesses, didn’t meet the needs of workers, were very far from urban centers, some measuring 35 square meters, some have been found measuring 10 square meters, with no services, nowhere near population centers.”
Faced with this, he said, several agencies, such as Infonavit and the Secretariat of Agrarian, Territorial, and Urban Development, are now conducting a census to determine how many homes are in this state of abandonment.
“We have the addresses of all these homes, so we can see their condition, whether they are occupied by the person who paid off their loan or by someone else, whether they are abandoned, and in what condition.”
Based on this, he added, a regularization program will be implemented to determine what will be done with these homes.
“Once we know what condition they’re in, we’ll present the program,” he said.
The other issue, he noted, is what pertains to dispossession by criminal groups or potential criminals who take over a home occupied by a family, “who is renting it, is alone, or some other condition.”
He noted that this should be investigated by state prosecutors.