It makes social housing more expensive than residential housing.

Andrés Gallegos

The constant increase in housing costs in Mexico is especially affecting economic-social housing, that is, those properties located in popular urban areas intended for low and middle income families.

In the last year, prices for this segment of houses rose 11 percent, according to the most recent data from the Federal Mortgage Society (SHF), which is analyzed in issue 34 of the Economic Analysis Bulletin of the ITESO Business School (ENI).

Conversely, middle-income residential housing, that is, housing built for demographic sectors with greater purchasing power, showed an annual increase of 7.5 percent (in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same period last year).

“Access to housing is being further restricted, especially for families with lower incomes,” says Elvira Mireya Pasillas Torres, an academic at ITESO and editorial manager of the newsletter.

“The housing market continues to move further away from the ability to pay of large sectors of the population, reinforcing the need for public policies aimed at expanding the supply of affordable housing,” states page 7 of the document.

Over the past decade, social housing in the country has experienced a greater cumulative price increase than the rest of the housing market. From the first quarter of 2017 to the present, house prices have risen 209.9 points, or 109.9 percent. Meanwhile, residential housing prices have risen 203.2 points (103.2 percent).

This means that if in 2017 a social housing unit was worth 500,000 pesos, today it costs more than double, that is, 1,049,500 pesos.

In Jalisco and the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area (ZMG), prices are soaring above the national average. According to the SHF Price Index for the first quarter of 2026, Jalisco saw a 12.6 percent increase in home values. In contrast, the national average increase was 8.7 percent.

Furthermore, the state has seen a cumulative price increase of 132 percent in its homes since 2017. Nationally, the percentage is 103.2 percent.

The ZMG is the metropolitan area with the highest increases in housing costs in the country, above Monterrey (9.3 percent), Querétaro (6.6 percent) and the Valley of Mexico (5.1 percent).

“The pressures on the Jalisco real estate market continue to intensify (...) in a context of weakening of the state labor market, characterized by loss of formal employment, increase in informality and deterioration in economic participation,” the ENI bulletin states on page 12.

Quitting work is not an option, even under bad conditions.

In the Mexican and Jalisco labor market, the trend towards greater informality continues, along with the ongoing erosion of formal jobs or jobs with social security and increasingly lower incomes, which especially affect women.

Although the official narrative highlights the low unemployment rate in the country (2.46 percent) and Jalisco (1.74 percent), this is because Mexicans cannot stop working to feed their families, even if it is in bad working conditions (without social security, without a signed contract, self-employment, etc.) and in an economic context of lower productivity and dynamism.

“Mexico is not creating the economic or social conditions to generate quality employment. Claiming a low unemployment rate is irrelevant, given that it is occurring under conditions of greater job insecurity,” explains Pasillas.

In the last year (data as of April 2026), the informality rate in the country rose from 54.7 percent to 55.2 percent. And although the employed population grew by 0.9 percent, this productive force strengthened the informal market—almost 600,000 Mexicans—at the expense of the formal market—which lost 31,502 jobs.

The deterioration of employment is greater in Jalisco. The rate of informal employment rose 1.67 percent annually, meaning that today 48.6 percent of Jalisco residents work without social security, signed contracts, and other advantages of the formal labor market.

In contrast, more than 105,000 people in Jalisco lost their formal employment, which translates to a 5 percent annual drop.

Women in Jalisco are suffering the most from the decline in general working conditions. One of several statistics that reveal this shows that the number of female salaried workers fell by 7.3 percent in the last year, while the drop for men was only two percent.

“The labor adjustment is disproportionately affecting women, both through the loss of formal employment and through leaving the labor market and the growth of more precarious occupations,” is analyzed on page 9 of the Economic Analysis Bulletin.

According to other data, three out of every 10 Mexicans live in working poverty, meaning they do not have enough income to afford the basic food basket. In Jalisco, the percentage is 22.5 percent, or one in four people.

One positive piece of news was the growth of total Mexican exports, which showed an annual increase of 32.6 percent (data as of April 2026), although industries such as the automotive industry did not grow at the same rate (8.2 percent).

The Economic Analysis Bulletin can be consulted at this https://ite.so/boleconomi34 .