Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This article is based on my fieldwork in Tlajomulco de Zúñiga (Jalisco), a municipality characterized by a dramatic boom of social-interest housing in the 2000s. I will address two gaps in the existing literature on social-interest housing in Mexico. First, while it has been widely examined the national-level factors that have triggered the housing boom (such as the reform of INFONAVIT), little has been discussed on local-level factors. Second, while much has been said about the failures of the current paradigm of housing policy, little has been discussed on how to improve the condition in the existing social-interest housing projects. In the first part of this article, I argue that local authorities play a major role in promoting social-interest housing, in particular due to its incapacity in regulating urban development and its fiscal dependency on revenues from issuing construction authorizations. The boom of social-interest housing has caused enormous challenges to the urban governance, due to problems such as the substandard quality of construction, hazardous locations, concentration of poverty, etc. In the second part of the article, I list several structural and institutional factors that should be addressed to improve the condition of the existing social-interest housing projects, including more efficient coordination among governments of different levels and at metropolitan level, diversifying the sources of municipal fiscal revenues, reinforcing citizen participation, unfolding the potential of informality, etc.