Digital nomads take over Mexico City: “You're a fucking plague, locals hate you” | Hacker News Reader

Digital nomads take over Mexico City: “You're a fucking plague, locals hate you”

elmundo.es

31 pointsspaniard8927732 comments

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I’ve lived in Mexico City since 2017 and this article is pure sensationalist bullshit. Condesa for instance has been gentrified for decades… smh. It’s hard to overstate how large this city really is and how tiny the gentrified neighborhoods are in comparison. And those neighborhoods like Comdesa and Roma, while attractive to foreigners, are a far cry from the neighborhoods where the truly wealthy people live.

Translation too long, dumped here: https://pastebin.com/raw/0fCkU2zG

Did you write this? If so, thank you! This is a fantastic and eloquent translation.

DeepL my friend

Plz don't be xenophobic guys they are just trying to better their lives

If foreigners come to your town and make rents go 2x everyone is likely to become pretty xenophobic.

if it was in my power I'd ban vacation rentals. Hotels and aparthotels are nice enough.

Hating people because they are foreign seems a lot less principled than because they are wealthy.

Maybe it’s most principled not to hate anybody at all?

nah that would be pretty good signal to not come here

People simply hate foreigners.

The rich gentrify and make everything expensive.

The poor live of welfare or steal your jobs.

Your local wealthy people isn't going to price you out your low-income neighbourhod because he fancys going downstairs and watching people working and speaking in spanish.

Anyway, 99% of them are just wealthier workers.

Plenty of awareness of that:

> "I refuse to talk about the invasion of foreigners, it is not a matter of nationality, of labeling them guilty," explains Mayela Delgadillo, a citizen rights activist

But if labeling them xenophobic makes you feel better about the situation, and allows you to ignore their legitimate complaint because it was made in terms you find objectionable, go ahead

If foreigners come to your town and make your wages go 1/2 everyone is likely to become pretty xenophobic. Hmmmm

It might happen without foreigners too, but it's so easy to blame them. Besides every country has foreigners from other countries. Don't they realize U.S. is full of Mexicans, for instance?

It might happen without foreigners but it's happening with foreigners.

I went to Mexico 20 years ago. I thought I'd try to find work for a few months. Even though I found a job other people prevented me from working. They were orders of magnitude more aggressive against me than I remembered Americans were in California against illegal aliens from Mexico at that time.

Imagine that! Impoverished citizens of a third-world nation are more aggressive against wealthy foreigners, than are wealthy first-worlders against the pittance-wage illegal immigrants that they hire to harvest their crops! Inconceivable!

Rents going 2x is a landlord gouging problem. Don't blame the renters infusing money into the economy.

Blaming both seems good enough

A small number of foreigners couldn't organically make rents go 2x "everywhere". Having small gentrified areas aren't so bad. If the impact was instead quite large, it's a failure by the local government and developers to manage scarce land resources.

The same gentrification debates that have been going on in tech hubs for the last few decades, nothing new really.

Build the wall! Stop the Americans from stealing our jobs and apartments!

Mexico City metropolitan area with a population of 21 million is not being taken over by digital nomads

I don't think locals in Mexico are saying "sois una plaga", which is a very Spain verb form befitting the Spanish source. The original quote says "eres" which is singular.

Anytime I read about why someone likes some new low-cost locale better than SF, NY, or pick-your-US-city, I just can’t help but read it as “I like being rich.”

Or maybe they just don't like being poor and miserable. Most US cities are crazy expensive, have no real public transportation, extreme wealth divides, rampant homelessness, no economic mobility, limited green space, cultures that are materialistic, shallow, and antisocial, a dominant car culture... they just lack so much of the vibrance of many foreign cities.

I think there are a few exceptions to this, like Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans... and maybe not coincidentally, they are also some of the poorer cities.

Rich people make shitty cultures.

anybody should have a right to go and live anywhere. But no one is entitled to be able to afford to live anywhere they want.

I think the problem for more and more people is that there's not many places left to live, anywhere, if you want even a lower middle class life.

this can’t be true by definition. E.g. 80% of places can’t be in top 10% by cost of living.

It can if most of the wealth is concentrated in a tiny percentage of the population and everyone else has to share rooms...

Here are over 200 listings in Warren MI (a middle class suburb of Detroit) with houses for sale under $200k - https://www.zillow.com/homes/Warren,-MI_rb/. That's just one suburb, there are many others in this Metro Detroit are of 4.5 million people.

Check the same thing in Metro areas surrounding Cleveland, Cincy, Indy, St Louis, Atlanta, Charlotte, Knoxville, Dallas etc etc..

People in the handful of highest priced cities are so divorced from reality it's concerning. This is a huge country with a ton of multi-million population metro areas.

...only if it means moving to poorer place (this needs rent/buying property regulation).

The other way you would end up with rich countries (read EU for instance) collapsing under flood of economic migrants unless they would completely scratch any welfare. We see where it goes with "refugees". There is reason why economic migration should be regulated, I have no problem welcoming economic migrants who upon arrival declares he won't use and won't be eligible to any welfare in next five years, but it would still cause problems anyway with people living in ghettoes willing to lube worth much lower living standard undercutting locals from low paid jobs.

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