That is a very complicated question, because typically in the villas miserias the people who build houses do not have any officially recognized title to the land. They may or may not have paid protection money to a local gang for a title, but these are not officially recognized. They may end up paying for the land several times over the years, or not at all, and they may end up being evicted from the land — sometimes with bulldozers — despite having paid someone for it.

On one occasion a few years back, some crackheads who had started building a villa near Ecovillage Velatropa stabbed one of the Velatropans, shortly after allegedly setting fire to one of their outhouses. The Velatropans called the police, who evicted the crackheads and the mentally ill man who had invited them to move in. The next couple of weeks, the Velatropans stood 24-hour guard to ensure that the crackheads did not return. One night I calmed down an extremely excited Cuban who was running to get the village machete — he thought he had spotted one of the crackheads hiding in a tree. By the time we returned in a group to chase the crackhead off, he could not be found.

Velatropa itself is built on a site that previously housed the "villa gay", where a group of some 300 people, initially transgender prostitutes, had lived before being ejected en masse with a judicial order in 1998. The city paid to house them in a hotel thereafter — but only for a week. I don't think the "villa gay" was bulldozed until shortly afterwards, but none of its buildings remained when I started going to Velatropa around 2008.

So the answer to your question is not as simple as a range of numbers of dollars or pesos per square meter. I think it's better understood as an ongoing social process of negotiation of land tenure, among whose elements may or may not be quitclaim deeds, warranty deeds, and fee-simple title.