LATIN AMERICA NEWS
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July 27, 2012, 6:24 p.m. ET
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Affluent Mexicans Flee to Texas
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Violence Across the Border Buoys Housing in Impoverished Cities; Relocated Goalie Stars for School
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By ROBBIE WHELAN
In 2010, Ms. Gonzalez said, eight parents of children at the private school where she works were kidnapped and held for ransom by drug-cartel thugs. Frightened they would be next, she and her husband, Juan, an architect with offices in the industrial city of Monterrey, drove across the border and bought a three-bedroom house for $180,000.
For the past two years, she and her husband have been living here on tourist visas and working remotely, traveling back to Mexico only once every few months to tend to their businesses and to fulfill the requirements of their visas. Six months ago, she applied for an investor visa so she can gain U.S. residency. Eventually, Ms. Gonzalez said, she hopes to open a restaurant in the McAllen area.
"We left our family, our beautiful home in Mexico," she said over dinner recently at a local Macaroni Grill restaurant. "It's very sad to have to choose between your life and your lifestyle," she said.
As violence in Mexico has escalated, some affluent Mexicans have fled to border cities in Texas, turning impoverished places such as McAllen and Mission into unlikely beneficiaries of Mexico's gruesome drug war. Others, including some criminals targeted by rival cartels, are heading farther north to the wealthy suburbs of Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, where one transplant is awaiting trial for allegedly laundering money for a cartel.
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In Mission, Realtors are doing brisk business and builders are rushing to put up hacienda-style homes with stucco walls and red-tiled roofs. Mexican nationals are opening restaurants and other businesses, applying for permanent residency visas and establishing tightknit communities of expats who socialize together, send their kids to local schools and form business and networking associations.
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"In the French Revolution you had the reign of terror, and everyone in France went to London, they went abroad," says David Guerra, president of International Bank of Commerce's McAllen division. "Mexican nationals coming here has definitely supported property values. Without their presence, the downturn would be more severe."
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Beto Salinas, Mission's mayor, said in a recent interview at City Hall that the fallout from the violence has provided an unexpected boost to his town. "There are a lot of guys who come here from Mexico, build a million-dollar home, live here and let other people run their businesses," he said.
To be sure, the influx of wealthy Mexicans hasn't had a major impact on the lives of low-income residents. The part of Texas that includes McAllen and Mission is still the nation's poorest large metropolitan area, with more than a third of its residents living below the poverty line, according to a November report from the Commerce Department.
But that could slowly change if the number of wealthy residents continues to grow. Already, the newcomers have helped buoy the local housing market. While home sales and prices crashed in most other U.S. cities after the 2008 financial crisis, home sales in the McAllen-Mission metro area have stayed consistent at about 2,400 sales a year since 2008, and the median sale price has risen 3% to $102,000 over that period, according to the local multiple-listing service.
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"Half of my business last year was Mexican nationals leaving Mexico because of violence," said Rene Galvan, a Realtor based in McAllen. Last year, he said, one of his clients who had contracted to buy a house pulled out at the last minute because he needed money to pay a family member's ransom. "We've always had capital going back and forth between here and Mexico. The violence last year really sparked a lot of people to look for a safer place."
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Builders are responding to the increased demand as well. The value of Mission's taxable residential property has swelled to $3.2 billion today from $2.6 billion in 2007, as builders have put up hundreds of new homes. Miguel Brito, sales manager for Brito Construction, a small builder here, said he has consistently sold 45 to 55 new homes a year since 2009, and that 80% of his customers are Mexican.
"I get calls every day from people who say, 'The violence has been too much,' " Mr. Brito said. The most popular development for Mexican buyers, according to Mr. Brito, is Sharyland Plantation, a 6,000-acre master-planned community in Mission.
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The community, which has homes ranging in price from about $180,000 to more than $2 million, is next to a popular country club and has a amenities like a community pool with water slides. The project was developed in the late 1990s by Hunt Consolidated Inc., a Dallas-based oil conglomerate. Now, it has three new subdivisions under construction. Last year, the federal government built a border crossing inside the community, on land donated by Hunt, that connects the project directly to Reynosa.
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In April, Sharyland High School's boys soccer team won its first state championship. Rev Hernandez, the team's coach, said that one of the team's to the victory biggest stars was Jorge Medina, a senior goaltender who relocated to Sharyland last year from Monterrey, and who stopped four penalty shots in a hotly contested playoff game.
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"We have had a few very good goalies, but this guy, he just started school on this side, and all of the sudden, one of the reasons we won was because of him," Mr. Hernandez said. "It's like he fell from the sky."
In the last two years, glossy social magazines in Spanish have sprung up, filled with pictures of local families celebrating weddings and birthdays at Cimarron, the golf club adjacent to Sharyland Plantation.
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Last year, in response to increasing cartel violence in Reynosa, the manufacturing city immediately across the border from Mission, customers stopped going to La Fogata, a restaurant specializing in northern Mexican roast-meat dishes that was popular among Sunday churchgoers from Reynosa and McAllen alike. It's owner moved to Mission, and opened a new restaurant on the same road as Sharyland Plantation's main entrance, which was jam-packed on a recent Friday night.
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Local government officials have welcomed the foreigners with open arms. Last year, McAllen established a regional EB-5 Center, a corporation owned by the city that administers green cards to foreign nationals in return for investments of $1 million or sometimes less that create at least 10 full-time jobs. Federal immigration officials are currently reviewing investors in the region's first EB-5 investment, a $15 million hotel-construction project funded by 16 Mexicans, 14 of whom seeking residency.
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Mexicans have been visiting and immigrating to this part of the Rio Grande Valley, once a little-known agricultural hub, for decades, lured by shopping at busy malls and service-industry jobs. But until recently, most Mexican immigrants to the McAllen area were low-wage service industry workers. Many of today's buyers are more affluent Mexicans, who have moved to the area as the violence of the drug war has spilled over from places like Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana to Mexico's northeastern states, including Tamaulipas and Nuevo León.
In the early 1990s, McAllen saw a small economic boom after the North American Free Trade Agreement made it easier for American corporations like Emerson Electric Co., EMR +2.87% Whirlpool Corp., WHR +2.56% and Johnson Controls, JCI +3.81% Inc., to set up maquiladoras, or "twin factories", on either side of the border, allowing the companies to export components to plants in Mexico, where low-wage workers assemble them into products, then ship them back to the U.S. Last August, armed cartel men set fire to a casino in Monterrey, killing 45 people, while in April of last year, police in Tamaulipas, the state across the border from McAllen, found 183 corpses in a mass grave, which government officials blamed on cartel violence.
Jesus Gomez owns a Monterrey factory with 250 workers that makes tempered glass for shower doors and curtain walls for buildings. Six months ago, he bought a house in a quiet neighborhood in North McAllen after receiving five threatening phone calls from people he described as "vigilantes" looking for money.
Now, he relies on his managers to take care of day-to-day business at the factory, and communicates with them mostly by phone and email. He and his wife have joined a local church congregation, and he has become a Dallas Cowboys football fan. On weekends, his three children come to visit and bring his young grandchildren to play in their pool.
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"It's hard to explain what it's like to live in Monterrey these days. Everything has changed. You can't work freely there, if you have a business," he said. Now, in his new home, "it's really nice to be able to walk the streets and just relax."
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