All the effects of gentrification in one corner of Mexico’s Colonia Roma

Two American girls are sitting on a bench outside the establishment, sipping Nepalese green tea. The inside is a spacious and austere area reminiscent of an industrial warehouse with a visible bread oven, and English is spoken more often than Spanish. A man in his sixties, wearing a jacket and tasseled shoes, tells the young man behind the counter that he drove almost an hour from the wealthy residential area of Polanco just to buy a loaf of malted cereal: 165 pesos (about $9). Nepalese teas cost $6. Across the street, a young man takes a video call in English on his silver Mac from the patio of another new café. When he finishes, he orders a second matcha tea and a slice of lavender cake for $7.50.

Sitting in the doorway of the building next to the bakery, a woman makes herself instant coffee. She’s heating the water in an electric coffee maker plugged into the tangle of wires in the street. On a folding table there are plastic cups and sugar. Behind her is a pile of blankets brought by neighbors to help her through a particularly cold November night in Mexico City. María (who prefers not to give her last name) was evicted from her home at the end of summer, along with 20 other families, for a crime called despojo that is similar to squatting. They were forcibly removed in the early morning. Their belongings are still inside, and since then, they’ve taken turns standing guard at the door. The entire building is sealed off by the city prosecutor’s office, including the ground floor: a soup kitchen. María remembers that until it was closed, long lines of people would gather every day to eat a full meal for 10 pesos (about 50 cents).

This is Colonia Roma, simply known as La Roma, where new bakeries and upscale cafes stand side-by-side with entire buildings dedicated to short-term rentals for tourists; where dozens of residents are being evicted and a public soup kitchen that had fed the community for decades has disappeared. All this within just 100 meters of Tonalá Street. This corner of the Mexican capital bears the brunt of gentrification, a steamroller that is turning many neighborhoods in large cities into identical photocopies by driving up prices and replacing residents with tourists, local shops with trendy cafes and restaurants, eroding the social fabric and unique identity of each place.

The building that houses the bakery is a modern, understated, five-story structure of concrete and glass, managed by a company that offers “flexible stays, unique spaces with local touches that inspire a connection with the city.” They call themselves a “neo-hospitality” company, renting their spaces through Airbnb. Three nights in one of their two-bedroom apartments cost about 8,000 pesos. These three nights, at about $450, roughly correspond to the minimum wage in Mexico. These three nights also coincide with the monthly rent that María’s family paid for the past few years. She, her husband and two children had lived here for over two decades, since they arrived from Hidalgo for her husband’s job; lately, he had been selling tacos.

Regarding the accusation that they were evicted for, María maintains that they have been paying the rent and have had no problems all these years. “We don’t know what’s going to happen, we’re anxious about the uncertainty, no one is explaining to us properly what we have to do,” she says as the afternoon sun sets and she places the third blanket over her legs.

Mexico City authorities have just unveiled a specific plan to combat despojo, which includes increased penalties, seizures and evictions. Daniela Sánchez, coordinator of the Housing Rights Legal Clinic at the Ibero-American University, points out that “it’s a crime that is very high on the list of concerns. That’s why it’s relatively easy to initiate legal proceedings, often without much legal basis. In areas like Roma, it’s not as common, but especially in these neighborhoods, there are huge incentives to seize these buildings. The network formed by prosecutors, notaries, local politicians, and large real estate companies sometimes makes it unclear who is behind the evictions.”

The rising cost of living and the replacement of residents with trendy shops and Airbnb tourists has been a constant in this area for years. Roma was chosen in 2018 as one of the 50 coolest neighborhoods in the world by the editors of Time Out. The travel magazine highlighted its architecture, culinary offerings, nightlife, high-quality bars and restaurants, as well as its long cultural tradition. Roma and Condesa, its sister neighborhood that forms the city’s coolest hub, together have more cafes than the entire Historic Center, according to official statistics data.

After the Covid pandemic, to revive the hospitality industry, local authorities launched a campaign in 2022 that eased permitting requirements. Nearly 10,000 establishments — event venues, restaurants, and private clubs — obtained the necessary authorizations. A couple of years later, the Michelin Guide, the gourmet bible, showed up in the city. The Roma and Condesa neighborhoods are home to 108 restaurants recognized by the Michelin Guide.

According to the National Chamber of the Restaurant and Seasoned Food Industry (Canirac), commercial rents in these neighborhoods have risen by up to 40%, resulting in nearly half of the restaurants that open in this area failing to survive more than two years. In the last three years, residential rents have skyrocketed by more than 120%, according to estimates from real estate websites. Last year, The Economist ranked Mexico City as the sixteenth most expensive city in the world, ahead of cities like Washington, D.C. and Milan.

Embrace the meanwhile

The “neo-hospitality” company attached to the closed building has plastered its motto in fluorescent letters on the glass entrance: Embrace the meanwhile. It’s an ode to an uncertainty very different from that of María and the other evicted families. The target audience for that motto is obviously not María, but rather the so-called digital nomads, skilled workers with high salaries — often in dollars — and the ability to work remotely. Since the pandemic, their presence, especially from the United States, has tripled, according to data from a technology consulting firm. Three nights in Mexico City, two in San Francisco, a couple of weeks in Europe. Embrace the meanwhile.

For Maria, the “meanwhile” is more about the patience and generosity of friends who are letting her and her family sleep in a room while the trial gets underway. When her shift ends at 8 a.m., Maria will take the subway, then a bus, and then walk another stretch to reach the home of those who are sheltering her.

The restaurant next door to the matcha café didn’t enjoy much time in the meantime either. It was called “Flautas, el antojito de todos” and was part of a very popular Mexican food chain. “They’d been there for at least 20 years, but their rent went up a lot, and they had to sell the place a couple of months ago,” says Mariluz, 52, owner of the store next door. “Abarrotes Lucerito,” with its water jugs tied to the door and daily specials of ham croissants and beer for $1.50, is the business that’s been on this stretch of street the longest. It’s been a grocery store for over two decades, and before that, it was a dairy.

“The neighborhood has changed a lot. Before, it was very quiet, just families and small businesses. Now there are a lot of restaurants and a lot of chaos,” adds Mariluz, who also mentions that her rent has tripled in three years. She says that if they keep raising it like this, she won’t be able to keep going; she’ll have to close and find someplace else. Mariluz lived here for 45 years, in the Roma neighborhood, in the building across the street from her grocery store, next to the now-closed building that used to house the soup kitchen. Two years ago, the owner sold the entire property to turn it into a giant Airbnb.

The apartment above the grocery store, which extends around the corner, is an early 20th-century building with six stately stone balconies and relief moldings. Mariluz says that “the Englishman’s son” lives upstairs. The neighborhood was one of the hardest hit by the 1985 earthquake. “People were terrified; many returned to the provinces and sold their homes. That’s when the father of the young man who lives upstairs bought his place.” The urban planning lawyer points out that the earthquake “brought about a significant change in the neighborhood. It had always been an upper-middle-class area, but after the earthquake, property values dropped considerably, and real estate companies began investing, thinking they could profit once the market recovered.”

Roma is the brainchild of Porfirio Díaz, the dictator overthrown by the 1910 revolution. A self-confessed Francophile, Díaz promoted an urban plan featuring boulevards and wide medians lined with double rows of trees and broad avenues modeled after those of Paris. Its relative proximity to the city center encouraged upper-class families to settle in single-family homes in neoclassical and modernist styles. This area, both majestic and decadent, has been a magnet for artists and adventurers for decades.

In the early 1950s, it was a regular haunt for the Beatniks, the generation of Americans who invented the counterculture. One night, fueled by gin and suicidal games, William Burroughs shot his wife in the head in an apartment in the Roma neighborhood. A few years later, Jack Kerouac rented an adobe room, without electricity or running water, secured with a padlock threaded through two rings haphazardly screwed into the door. In the throes of a Buddhist fervor, he recited a different sutra each day upon waking in that hovel. There, illuminated by a candle, he wrote Tristessa, a short, semi-autobiographical novel about an indigenous prostitute addicted to morphine.

The Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco also dedicated a short novel to the neighborhood where he spent his childhood and adolescence. Battles in the Desert, set in the late 1940s, is a coming-of-age story where the main character, an eight-year-old boy who is a stand-in for the author, recounts how his mother “hated the Roma neighborhood because the good families were starting to leave, and in those years it was inhabited by Arabs and Jews and people from the south: Campeche, Chiapas, Tabasco, Yucatán.” At the end of the novel, when the protagonist returns as an adult to the setting of his youth, he says, looking back with a mixture of resignation and nostalgia: “They demolished the school, they demolished Mariana’s building, they demolished my house, they demolished the Roma neighborhood. That city is finished. That country is finished. There is no memory of the Mexico of those years. And nobody cares.”

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