Ignacio Morales Lechuga
Under the seductive cloak of social justice and the right to housing, the Mexico City Congress has set in motion a legislative machine that, far from solving the housing deficit, threatens to demolish the foundations of legal certainty in our capital. The bill, embellished with sweet adjectives such as “fair, reasonable, and affordable rents,” is, in reality, an interventionist regulatory framework that will strip property owners of their decision-making power, turning them into hostages of the state bureaucracy.
This is not a technical reform aimed at correcting specific distortions in the real estate market, but rather a reengineering of the property regime. What is being proposed is a mutation of private ownership toward a system of limits, forced extensions, and sanctions that dilute property rights. In plain terms, it is the replacement of a free contract with administrative dictate.
One of the most insidious aspects of this proposal is the introduction of indeterminate legal concepts, such as “neighborhood roots,” “speculation,” and “real estate tension zones.” In the world of law and economics, speculation is an intrinsic element of any investment; those who acquire real estate do so with expectations of value, demand, and profitability. By turning these expectations into a normative criterion without a technical definition, the legislator opens the door to moral judgment on the exercise of property rights. The law ceases to regulate behavior and begins to control the market’s rationality. Who will decide when a profit is “fair” and when it is speculative? A public official with political criteria.
The most acute risk of the bill is that it allows for the imposition of price controls and establishes a form of forced extension that undermines the very essence of property: the power to exclude and dispose of the asset. Under this scheme, a tenant could maintain an indefinite contractual relationship by consigning the payment, thereby nullifying the owner’s right to recover their property or to change its conditions of use. In addition, the law seeks to prohibit the charging of fees associated with brokerage or legal services and to restrict credit checks. In a country where judicial recovery of a property can take years, depriving the landlord of preventive tools will leave him at the mercy of non-compliance.
Another questionable point is the penalty for owners of uninhabited units. The decision to keep a property empty is usually based on entirely legitimate reasons: structural repairs, estate planning, change of use, or asset reserve for future sale. Penalizing vacancy will transform the right to property into an administrative duty of exploitation. Citizens are being penalized not for causing tangible harm to society, but for failing to align their private assets with the prevailing political ideology.
While the official discourse invokes “balance between the parties,” the legislative reality promotes unprecedented asymmetry. Obligations and prohibitions besiege landlords, while tenants are granted greater rights. Contractual balance is not achieved by arbitrarily declaring a “social interest”; it is built by respecting acquired rights and guaranteeing legal certainty.
Private property does not need to be formally abolished to disappear; it is enough to undermine its mechanisms of ownership. There will be no need for expropriation if the state already controls prices, penalizes vacancies, and extends occupancy at will. If property rights become conditional, not only is the lease agreement eroded, but the principle of legal certainty that underpins the entire civil order is fractured. In short, today it is the rental market in Mexico City; tomorrow, any other sphere of individual freedom may appear on the list of directed “justice.”
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