Californians are fleeing to Mexico to escape outrageous housing prices | Hacker News Reader

Californians are fleeing to Mexico to escape outrageous housing prices

fortune.com

27 pointsSQL221912 comments

I was actually in Baja Mexico a few weeks ago and the house prices there are growing too. I was seeing plots of land for 50-70k USD. You know the prices are going to be high when the signs are in English and phone numbers are American.

Also, I'm about 90% sure you have to be a Mexican citizen to own land in Mexico otherwise you can only lease the land. This might be hearsay though.

> I'm about 90% sure you have to be a Mexican citizen to own land in Mexico

It's a little more nuanced. My understanding is that if you're near the water (where you probably want to own in Mexico) you can't directly buy but can set up a trust ("fideicomiso") that owns the land. Not sure how big of a deal that is.. never done it personally.

Within 31 miles of the coastline or 62 miles of an international border. Costs about $1000USD to setup a bank managed trust as part of a real estate transaction and $500USD/year in ongoing costs.

Living in Mexico can be a good deal. If it worries you, setting up a trust is not that big an issue. It's routine and your agent usually handles it. I do pay about $500 a year for my trust, but my property tax is only about $85 a year.

Not even going to click the link, as I'm sure it's a germ of an interesting data point wrapped in self-conflagratory turd.

For every "exodus" article, is statistics that show fairly typical ebbs and flows (and I say this as someone who is happy when more folks move out of this state) and I'd argue the sudden extra interest in foreign property is loosely coupled to crypto-fever and everyone wanting to buy up "cheap" whatever physical assets they can before the inevitable bubble pop.

I knew an artist who saved his money and bought a small house on a plot in rural Central America.. he was kind and alone, and he was attacked with a machete one day and told never to return.. he obliged .. true

And many people know Americans who were attacked with a knife or gun one day and never return home.

At the end of the day you never know what's going to happen. Even in Cleveland OH, my bike got a flat in a neighborhood full of people of a different ethnicity as me, and as soon as the locals saw I would have a harder time getting away, the predators came out to try to rob me. On the flipside living in rural phillipines, a guy approached me menacingly with 2 machetes and when I just smiled like I was happy to see him, he invited me to eat the dog he was cooking over an open fire. Life is full of surprises, and these kind of things happen everywhere.

Anecdotally I also know a rural villager who was attacked by machete by a fellow villager in this fashion, and when he fought back it never happened again. I'm sure being an outsider was part of the attack, but that may have just been prison rules for the area to see if you'll stand your ground.

Hough?

"Californians are fleeing" = trying to get dummies to click

Is there a reason more people don't live in the many american territories and compact of free association nations? Some of the territories and compact nations have cheap urban (and rural) land (or leases) and there is no need for a visa to remain indefinitely.

Too far away, for one. Too different for most people, too, I imagine. Even to move to Guadalajara, Mexico, you are only a couple hours flight from Houston but you still need to have a remote job and have some interest in being in a different culture and learning Spanish which is kind of a luxury.

I only ended up here by accident. I don’t think I would have had the balls to just move to another country without a serious push. In my case I was burned out, took a low paying software job in Guadalajara, and ended up meeting a girlfriend who helped me situate with friends and a community. I was terrified of getting another software job in Austin that I hated as much as my previous one.

It was a chain of luck and circumstance.

Dey took er jerbs, we gunna take eir homes!

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