Financialization of Housing in Mexico

For more than 30 years, housing in Mexico has been undergoing a transformation that is best studied using INFONAVIT and FOVISSSTE as starting points. Both funds were established in 1972 to implement the constitutional right to decent housing for workers and state employees in Mexico. In their first few years, both funds were responsible for, among other things, granting loans and investigating ways to achieve low-cost but high-quality housing. However, in the aftermath of the debt crisis of 1981, a comprehensive reconfiguration of housing provision was pushed forward. The aim of this contribution is to characterize changes in housing policy and ask whether and in what way they can be described as financialization. We argue that financialization is a political-economic project that has developed in a particular, stepwise form. Building on the stylized distinction between destructive (roll-back) and creative (roll out) moments of financialization, we try to understand how financialization took hold. Two projects—Cuautitlan Izcalli from the 1970s and Huehuetoca from the 2000s—symbolize this change.