Living in Mexico City as an American owner
Living in Mexico City is usually described from a café terrace. What reaches a house is less visible: the city counts 9,209,944 residents at the 2020 census, much of it stands on the bed of a former lake, and its historic observatory sits at 2,308.6 metres above sea level. Ground, altitude and paperwork decide what a house there needs, more than the neighbourhood's reputation.
This guide answers the questions people ask before they settle on a house — what the city is like part of the year, where owners look, what the ground and the sky do — only as far as it takes to reach the one they ask afterwards: what that house needs while they are somewhere else. How looking after one is organised is on the page for the areas we serve.
What is Mexico City like to live in, part of the year?
It is a capital of more than nine million people where a house is one of nearly three million, and where tens of thousands of homes are used only part of the time. What is it like living in Mexico City, then, for an owner: a city with every service in place, and a house that is left with all of them running while nobody is there.
The census gives the scale. Mexico City had 2,756,319 inhabited private homes in 2020, and of the 3,035,125 private homes counted, 71,780 were reported as being in temporary use, 2.4 percent. That is the category a house belongs to when its owner lives between Mexico City and somewhere else. Services are not the problem: 98.9 percent of inhabited homes had piped water, and more than 99.9 percent in Benito Juárez, Coyoacán, Cuauhtémoc and Miguel Hidalgo.
The census does not count residents by passport, so there is no official number of Americans living in Mexico City. What it does record is that 48,591 residents of the city had been living abroad five years earlier, against 25,552 in 2000. Expats living in Mexico City are a growing group by that measure, but the figure includes Mexicans returning home, and it is not a count of foreigners. For an owner, the legal fact is simpler than on the coast. The foreign investment law defines the restricted zone as la faja del territorio nacional de cien kilómetros a lo largo de las fronteras y de cincuenta a lo largo de las playas, and the capital lies outside it, so the bank trust that a coastal house requires does not apply here; how buying works is explained in the guide to buying a house in Mexico as an American.
Which neighborhoods do owners usually mean by Mexico City?
Owners usually mean a handful of districts in the west and south of the city: Polanco and Lomas de Chapultepec, Condesa and Roma, San Ángel and Coyoacán. They are different kinds of house, standing on different ground and under different rules.
In Polanco and the Condesa many homes are apartments in buildings with an administration of their own, where any work starts with the building's rules. Lomas de Chapultepec is a district of houses on their own plots, on the higher ground to the west. San Ángel and Coyoacán are older houses, some of them inside protected perimeters: the federal decree of 1986 for the then delegación of Villa Álvaro Obregón, which takes in San Ángel, declares a historic monuments zone of 1.7 square kilometres and 130 blocks, where work on a building deberá realizarse previa solicitud del particular ante el Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. In those streets, the permit comes before the quote.
What does the ground under the house change?
Almost everything structural: the valley is divided into firm hill ground, a transition zone and the old lake bed, and the lake bed both shakes harder and sinks. Which of the three a house stands on is the first fact worth knowing about it.
The lake zone lies where the lakes of Texcoco and Xochimilco once were, and its soil is made of depósitos lacustres muy blandos y compresibles con altos contenidos de agua, which favours the amplification of seismic waves; the hill zone, higher up the basin, has soils of high strength that compress little. The same lake clays lose volume as groundwater is pumped out: a 2026 note by UNAM's Instituto de Geofísica reports that in parts of the metropolitan area the ground sinks up to 42 centimetres a year, mainly because of intensive groundwater extraction, affecting homes, roads and urban infrastructure.
| What the city is made of | What the record says | What it means for a house |
|---|---|---|
| The old lake bed | Very soft, compressible lake deposits with a high water content, which amplify seismic waves | Stronger shaking in a quake, and slow settlement that shows up as cracks, sticking doors and stressed pipe joints |
| Groundwater extraction | Subsidence of up to 42 cm a year in some areas | Cracks are worth marking and dating on each visit, so that a new one can be told from an old one |
| The altitude | Station at 2,308.6 m, January nights averaging 8.3 °C | Cold rooms in a house with no heating, and condensation where warm and cold surfaces meet |
| The rains | 174.0 mm in July and 175.6 mm in August, 5.0 mm in December | Roof drains and gutters cleared before the first afternoon storm, after months of dust and leaves |
| The decrees | Historic monuments zone of 1.7 km² and 130 blocks | Work on a protected house starts with a request to INAH, not with a builder |
What does altitude change in a house?
It makes the days mild and the nights cold, and it splits the year into a long dry season and a short, very wet one. At the city's observatory January averages a high of 22.2 °C and a low of 8.3 °C, and almost all the year's rain falls between May and October.
The national weather service's normal for station 9048, Tacubaya Central, gives 846.9 mm of rain a year over 118.5 rainy days, with 21.8 rainy days in July and 1.2 in December. For a closed house that means two different risks in two halves of the year: dust settling on everything and blocking drains in the dry months, and water finding every weak joint in the wet ones. The year month by month is in the guide to Mexico City weather.
The cold is the part newcomers underestimate. A house without heating that stays closed through January keeps the night's temperature in its walls, so textiles, books and wood are better kept away from the coldest exterior walls, and checked on each visit.
What do earthquakes and the alert system mean for a building?
They mean that the house is in a seismic city with a public warning system, and that the warning does not always arrive first. The Mexican seismic alert, SASMEX, is a network of sensors that sends a radio signal to the cities it covers, with a lead time that varies from quake to quake.
According to the civil protection material of Mexico City's judiciary, the system is operated by the Centro de Instrumentación y Registro Sísmico (CIRES), and in the city the alert is broadcast through loudspeakers linked to the C5 command centre and through receivers in strategic buildings. The same material warns that for a quake whose epicentre is close to the city el aviso podría llegar al mismo tiempo que el sismo, and that a quake outside the coverage zone triggers no alert at all.
For an owner who is away, the quake itself is not the task; what follows is. Someone checks the house the same day: gas, water, the cracks already on record and any new ones, doors that no longer close, and the building's own inspection if it is an apartment.
What does a house or apartment need while its owner is away?
It needs a visit on a fixed schedule, a record of the cracks and the roof, and a named person who acts the day something happens. In Mexico City the trades are there; what is missing is somebody accountable for calling them.
Most of that is maintenance with a date on it, which is what preventive maintenance means in practice, set out over twelve months in an annual plan. The building administration and the bills that keep arriving belong to utilities and HOA, and every amount goes into the monthly owner statement.
Who looks after it the rest of the time?
Someone who works for the owner and answers for the whole house: keys, suppliers, the building, the maintenance calendar and the accounts, in one place and in writing. For living in Mexico City as an American with a house there, that is the difference between arriving to a house that is ready and arriving to a list.
That is the job described in the guide to what a property manager does, and in its full form as luxury property management. What changes in Mexico City is the list of things to watch rather than the role: the ground, the cold, the rains and the decrees. How it is organised city by city is on the page for the areas we serve.
What is it like living in Mexico City?
Mexico City had 9,209,944 residents at the 2020 census, in 2,756,319 inhabited homes. Its historic observatory, at 2,308.6 metres, records mild days and cold nights, with a January average of 22.2 °C by day and 8.3 °C by night, and 846.9 mm of rain a year, almost all of it between May and October.
How many Americans live in Mexico City?
The census does not publish a count by passport for the city. It records that 48,591 residents of Mexico City had been living abroad five years before the 2020 census, a figure that includes Mexicans returning home and is not a count of foreigners.
Can an American own a house in Mexico City?
Yes. Mexico City lies outside the restricted zone, the strip one hundred kilometres wide along the borders and fifty kilometres wide along the coasts where foreigners hold residential property through a bank trust. The terms of a purchase are matters for the notary handling it.
Why does Mexico City shake so much in an earthquake?
Much of the city stands on the bed of former lakes, whose very soft, compressible deposits with a high water content amplify seismic waves. Houses on the firm hill ground at the edges of the valley stand on soils that compress little.
Does the seismic alert always sound before a quake in Mexico City?
No. The Mexican seismic alert system, operated by CIRES, warns with a lead time that varies with the distance to the epicentre. For a quake close to the city the warning can arrive at the same time as the shaking, and a quake outside the coverage zone does not trigger the alert.