The Newcomers
On digital nomads, gentrification, and what it means to belong to a city that keeps changing
I call myself chilanga, which is the term for someone who has come to Mexico City from somewhere else. It applies regardless of where you are from — from Guadalajara, from Veracruz, from California. To be chilanga is to have arrived and decided, however tacitly, that you are staying. The city absorbs you and gives you a new designation in return. What it does not make you is from here.
I have been chilanga since 2009, when I moved to the city for work and spent my first years crossing it every morning from Ixtapalapa to Santa Fe — one end of the social spectrum to the other, as I wrote in an earlier post. I arrived alone, without a community waiting for me, and built one from the people I met at work: Mexican lawyers and accountants and economists who became my colleagues, then my friends, eventually my family. When my husband and I had dinner parties, we spoke Spanish. When I was tired and homesick, I called my parents and spoke English for an hour and then went back to speaking Spanish. The language I live in is Spanish.
I tell you this because I am about to write about people whose experience of Mexico City is very different from mine, and I want to be honest about where I am standing when I look at them. I also want to be careful, because the conversation about digital nomads and gentrification is one where easy narratives form quickly and the reality is considerably more complicated.
The wave
Since the pandemic, Mexico City has absorbed a significant influx of remote workers from the United States, Canada, and Europe — people who discovered, when their employers stopped requiring their physical presence, that they could live somewhere more interesting and considerably less expensive than wherever they had been. The city is everything the lifestyle promises: cosmopolitan, culturally rich, excellent food, warm climate, direct flights, same time zone as the midwestern United States. It makes sense that they came.
But Mexico City has also simply become one of the most visited cities in the world, and it is worth separating the nomad story from the tourism story, because they involve different pressures and different mechanisms. International arrivals have recovered strongly since the pandemic, and domestic tourism — Mexicans from Guadalajara, Monterrey, Mérida, and everywhere else coming to the capital for long weekends and holidays — has grown substantially too. The city is attracting people for reasons that have nothing to do with remote work. These are not the same phenomenon, even if they show up in the same Airbnb data.
The data on what has followed is real. Airbnb listings in the Condesa, Roma Norte, Roma Sur, and Hipódromo quadrant grew 74 percent between 2019 and 2023. Rents for one-bedroom apartments rose 30 percent in the same period. The share of businesses in those neighborhoods with foreign-sounding names roughly doubled. Anti-gentrification protests broke out in July 2025. Graffiti appeared on walls — No Gringo, in the most direct possible register.
A woman who has lived in the Condesa for more than twenty years told a journalist recently that when she goes to a local restaurant, the servers greet her in English. She has to tell them she is local. I do not live in the Condesa, but I understand what that particular erasure feels like. When the assumption is that everyone in a space is a foreigner, the people who were there first become invisible inside their own neighborhood.
And yet, my gut reaction, when I hear someone describe the Condesa as having been transformed by digital nomads, is: which Condesa? The Condesa I arrived in, in 2009, was already one of the most expensive and fashionable neighborhoods in the city. The tree-lined streets and the art deco buildings and the excellent restaurants — those were already there, already expensive, already populated by the city’s upper-middle class and its international visitors. The displacement of lower-income residents from the Condesa did not begin with a remote worker from Brooklyn following the pandemic. It was underway long before.
The Airbnb question — and who is actually making the decision
There is a specific mechanism worth examining carefully, because it is real and it is happening: the conversion of residential apartments into short-term tourist rentals. Between December 2024 and June 2025, roughly three residential units exited the long-term rental market every two days in Mexico City to become Airbnb listings — bringing the total to over 27,000 active listings citywide. The conversions are concentrated in exactly the neighborhoods we have been discussing: Juárez, Roma, Condesa, Centro Histórico. Mexico City reformed its Tourism Law in 2023 to cap short-term rentals at 180 nights per year specifically to slow this process. As of 2026, around 28 percent of all listings are projected to exceed that cap anyway.
This is a genuine problem for housing availability in central neighborhoods. When a landlord converts a two-bedroom apartment from a long-term lease to an Airbnb, that unit disappears from the pool available to residents — permanently, as long as the short-term economics hold. The economics hold because Mexico City is genuinely, increasingly popular as a tourist destination. Deloitte estimates 44,000 visitors will use short-term rentals in Mexico City for the 2026 FIFA World Cup alone, generating $87 million in direct economic impact. Hotel rates for World Cup dates have risen an average of 961 percent at some properties, which pushes visitors toward Airbnb, which pulls more residential units off the market. The pressure is self-reinforcing.
Just this weekend, a neighbor was telling me that he plans to convert all three of his rental properties to short term rentals over the next six months as his current leases expire. His motivation? He expects the short term rentals to be two or three times more profitable than continuing to rent them under long-term leases.
This is where the argument requires precision. The actor converting that apartment is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, a Mexican property owner making an economic calculation. The platform creates the incentive. The landlord makes the choice. This is not Airbnb imposing itself on an unwilling city — it is a rational economic response by property owners to a market that pays significantly more for short-term tourist accommodation than for long-term residential leases. Blaming the platform, or the tourist, or the nomad for this particular dynamic obscures the fact that the decision is being made by Mexicans, about Mexican-owned property, in response to Mexican and international market demand. The city is grappling with a property rights question as much as a gentrification question.
There is also a counterargument worth taking seriously. Advocates for small-scale hosts note that while active whole-unit short-term rentals number around 9,000, Mexico City has more than 207,000 residences that are vacant or abandoned. That gap suggests the housing shortage is not primarily a function of Airbnb conversions but of structural supply failure — a finding consistent with everything else the data shows. A 2025 study found that the amount of social and affordable housing built in Mexico City has dropped dramatically over the last twenty-five years. The platforms accelerate a problem whose roots are deeper. Other cities that have tried aggressive short-term rental restrictions — Amsterdam, New York — have not seen rents fall meaningfully as a result. The supply is simply not there.
This is not a new story — and it is not only a foreign one
It is worth being precise about what is new and what is not, because the data is more clarifying than the debate tends to be.
Rising housing costs in Mexico City are not a story about digital nomads. They are a story about a city that has been getting more expensive for everyone for more than two decades, driven primarily by supply constraints, domestic capital, and government policy. A peer-reviewed study published in 2024 found that average housing prices in Mexico City quadrupled over the twenty-year period from 2000 to 2022 — while per capita labor income declined in real terms. The average family had four times greater difficulty accessing housing in 2015 than in 2005. By 2015, well before this nomad wave arrived, the crisis was already acute. The same study found that even non-gentrified zones like Iztapalapa — on the far east of the city — saw prices triple over that same period. This is a city-wide structural problem, not a neighborhood story.
The study is also explicit about the nomad effect specifically: as of 2022, only around 11,000 foreigners were living in Mexico City. In the same year, between 15,000 and 80,000 people were displaced from their homes by domestic forces. The foreign influx accelerated existing pressures. It did not create them, and by the numbers, it is not the primary driver. Part of the supply problem is straightforward: between 2010 and 2020, Mexico City had the lowest housing construction rate per 1,000 residents of any major Mexican city, while demand continued concentrating in the central neighborhoods with the best infrastructure and services. More apartments were not being built. More people wanted the ones that existed. This dynamic preceded and will outlast the nomad wave.
And the Condesa specifically: yes, particular neighborhoods saw their largest single price spikes at particular moments — Condesa around 2013, Polanco from 2010 onward reaching an eight-fold increase by 2018, all before significant foreign arrivals. But these spikes were not isolated events. They were the leading edge of a wave that has been moving outward across the city for two decades, rippling from expensive central neighborhoods into adjacent ones, and from there further still. My gut instinct when someone describes the Condesa as having been transformed by digital nomads is: that neighborhood was already expensive, already fashionable, already out of reach for most of the city’s population when I arrived in 2009. Something real has changed since the pandemic, but the foundation for that change was laid long before.
Mexico City is also the capital — the seat of national government and the concentration point of national wealth — which means it is home to Mexico’s elite in a way that no other city in the country is. Some of the wealthiest families in one of the most unequal countries in the world have always lived in Polanco, in the Condesa, in the Pedregal. They travel, their children go to university abroad. They are Mexican by every definition and they have as much or more purchasing power as the digital nomad from San Francisco. The rising cost of an apartment in the Roma is not separable from this domestic reality. The conversation that blames foreign newcomers exclusively is a conversation that willfully ignores the domestic reality.
Mexico City has also been receiving waves of foreign settlement for a long time — Lebanese families, Spanish Republican exiles, the Japanese community, the Korean community in the Zona Rosa, the Jewish community whose roots here go back to the early twentieth century, a substantial French presence, and right now a rapidly growing Chinese community concentrated in what is being called Nuevo Polanco, visible in the proliferation of Chinese restaurants across the city. Each wave is different. What distinguishes the current digital nomad influx from most of these earlier arrivals is impermanence — the nomad may be here for three months or two years, long enough to drive up Airbnb prices, not necessarily long enough to learn Spanish. The city is, for many of them, a stop. This is not a moral failing. It is just a different relationship to a place.
The infrastructure
The digital nomad ecosystem in Mexico City has its own geography and its own institutions. HAAB Project on Ámsterdam in the Condesa is perhaps the clearest expression of what the creative end of this infrastructure looks like: a coworking space and social club combined, with a rooftop terrace, a café, workshops on tech and wellness and art, DJ nights, yoga classes, networking mixers. Soho House opened its first Latin American location in the Juárez in 2023 — tequila bar, vinyl listening room, pool, evening events — and occupies a more exclusive register. Both places attract international remote workers and creatives, but their clientele is not entirely foreign.
A significant part of both memberships is the internationally-mobile Mexican upper class — people who went to university in the States or Spain, who travel constantly, who are as comfortable in New York as in Polanco, who have one foot in this city and the other somewhere else. They are Mexican, and also fully at home in the global nomad ecosystem. The line between local and newcomer, it turns out, has always been more porous than the gentrification debate tends to acknowledge. The forces reshaping these neighborhoods are not arriving purely from outside. Some of them have always been here.
The sauna
I have encountered the digital nomad community almost exclusively at one place: Koti, the contrast therapy studio in Roma Norte where I go occasionally for the infrared sauna and cold plunge. I book the social shared sessions sometimes, which means an hour in the heat and cold with a small group of strangers, talking.
The conversations I have had there are illuminating. People talk about building their Instagram presence, about strategies that have worked and strategies that haven’t, about whether Mexico City is still the right base or whether they should try Lisbon or Chiang Mai. One person mentioned taking salsa classes specifically to interact with the local community — which is a perfectly genuine impulse and also a reality so different from my own; interacting with the local community as an organized activity, planned in advance, booked online.
I want to be fair here, because the people I meet at Koti are not a monolith. They are thoughtful, engaged, genuinely interested in the city. They talk about the restaurants they have found, the neighborhoods they prefer, the Mexico City they are experiencing. They share many of my values and interests. What is different is the community they are embedded in — other people like them, in the same neighborhoods, in the same spaces. My community is Mexican lawyers and accountants and economists who live across the city, whose reference points are entirely different. We are in the same city but rarely in the same room, except sometimes at the sauna.
The view from Cuauhtémoc
I live in the Cuauhtémoc — not the Roma, not the Condesa, not the Juárez that gets written about. My neighborhood has the St. Regis, the Four Seasons, and the Ritz within a radius of a few blocks, and the big corporate towers on Reforma, which means we have always seen a lot of English speakers on the street. That has increased as the city has become a more popular destination. But the digital nomad phenomenon as such — the Airbnb proliferation, the coworking density, the specific social world that has grown up around remote work — is concentrated elsewhere. I see it, but I do not live inside it.
My grocery shopping is at City Market in Polanco or Costco. I work from home. I make my coffee at home. When I go to yoga, there are one or two foreigners in a class of ten. I do a lot of my shopping online, partly for convenience and partly because I do not have time for boutiques. The city I live in day-to-day does not look much like the city that gets written about in digital nomad guides, and the digital nomad conversation does not reflect much of my experience of living here.
What this means, practically, is that the phenomenon does not affect my daily life very much. I am not being priced out of anything by an economy focused on digital nomads. I am not being served in English at my regular haunts. I have the distance from it that comes from living slightly off the map of where the transformation is concentrated, and from moving primarily in social circles that have nothing to do with the nomad world.
What they are bringing
I want to add something else here: I think the presence of this community has produced things I value, and I would be dishonest not to acknowledge it.
Koti and places like it exist partly because there is demand for it that an international clientele helps sustain. The density of good restaurants, cafés, and wellness spaces in Roma and the Juárez is partly a function of a clientele — both foreign and from Mexico’s own upper class — that can pay for them. The restaurants that opened in the Juárez because the neighborhood was becoming interesting: the meadery on General Prim, the Caribbean restaurant on Versalles, the natural wine bars, the beautiful boutiques on Havre — those I go to and enjoy. These are places that might not have survived without the density of customers willing to spend on them.
The same process that produces displacement and rising rents also produces things I like, and I am not exempt from it. The city I love has always been expensive and unequal — the Four Seasons has been in my neighborhood much longer than I have, and the inequality that makes Mexico City navigable on a foreign salary is the same inequality that makes it hard for a Mexican on a median income to rent an apartment in the fashionable neighborhoods. I benefit from access to the amenities that have arrived, and at the same time acknowledge that most Mexicans don’t enjoy the same access.
Living somewhere for a long time does not make you from there. But it changes your relationship to it — makes you a stakeholder in what it becomes, gives you a history with specific streets and restaurants and views that are yours in a way that a short-term lease does not convey.
The gentrification conversation in Mexico City is real and the stakes are real, but it is a conversation that becomes less useful the more it is reduced to a simple story of foreign villains and displaced locals, because that story does not account for the domestic capital and the domestic elite that have been reshaping these neighborhoods for decades, nor for the Mexican upper class that participates in and benefits from the same ecosystem as the nomads. The foreigner is a convenient antagonist in a story that is considerably more complicated.
What I notice, when I think carefully about this, is that the people who seem most at home here — the ones I am most likely to mistake for locals — are the ones who have learned Spanish, who have friends who are Mexican, who have been here long enough that they have become acculturated. They are a minority within the nomad community. They are the ones for whom the stop has become a stay.
Chilanga is still available to them, if they want it. The city keeps offering it. The question is whether they take it up.
Note on sources: The gentrification statistics in this essay draw on a January 2025 peer-reviewed study published in the journal EURE and reporting from CBC Radio (February 2026) and Tec de Monterrey’s research publication TecScience (September 2025).
Is this your city too, in some form? I’d like to hear how you relate to it — newcomer, long-timer, or somewhere in between.
