Mexico promised affordable housing for all. Instead it created many rapidly decaying slums
VERACRUZ, Mexico - Sixteen years ago, Mexico embarked on a monumental campaign to elevate living standards for its working-class masses.
The government teamed with private developers to launch the largest residential construction boom in Latin American history. Global investors - the World Bank, big foundations, Wall Street firms - poured billions of dollars into the effort.
Vast housing tracts sprang up across cow pastures, farms and old haciendas. From 2001 to 2012, an estimated 20 million people - one-sixth of Mexico's population - left cities, shantytowns and rural ranchos for the promise of a better life.
It was a Levittown moment for Mexico - a test of the increasingly prosperous nation's first-world ambitions. But Mexico fell disastrously short of creating that orderly suburbia.
The program has devolved into a slow-motion social and financial catastrophe, inflicting daily hardships and hazards on millions in troubled developments across the country, a Los Angeles Times investigation has found.
Homeowners toting buckets scrounge for water delivered by trucks. Gutters run with raw sewage from burst pipes. Streets sink, sidewalks crumble, and broken-down water treatment plants rust. In some developments, blackouts hit for days at a time.
Inside many homes, roofs leak, walls crack and electrical systems short circuit, blowing out appliances and in some cases sparking fires that send families fleeing.
The program cost more than $100 billion, and some investors and construction executives reaped enormous profits, hailing themselves as "nation builders" as they joined the ranks of Mexico's richest citizens.
Meanwhile, the factory workers, small-business owners, retirees and civil servants who bought the homes got stuck with complex loans featuring mortgage payments that rose even as their neighborhoods deteriorated into slums.
The Times visited 50 of the affordable-housing developments from Tijuana to the Gulf of Mexico. It also reviewed thousands of pages of government and industry documents, and interviewed hundreds of homeowners, municipal leaders, housing experts, civil engineers, construction workers and government officials.
The program, plagued by poor planning, corruption and a lack of oversight from the start, has reached crisis levels amid government indifference and impunity. Authorities have rarely investigated widespread allegations of fraud. And developers in some cases have tried to obstruct homeowners' efforts to get problems fixed.
The American housing crisis and recession a decade ago also were marked by regulatory failures, and the U.S. economy eventually recovered. But the crisis in Mexico has been deepening.
Conditions at the developments vary widely. While some
