With housing prices in Southern California skyrocketing, many U.S. citizens and legal residents are heading south of the border in search of affordable housing options.
The contrast in the affordability factor between north and south of the border has become so great that more and more people today are willing to deal with the daily commute and long border waits just to be able to find affordable housing that doesn’t break their budget.
A two-bedroom, two-bath rental apartment in San Diego currently goes for about $2,400 a month and the median price for a house is listed at more than $800,000, according to Real Estate sources we contacted who shared with us that housing values in the area have more than doubled since 2000.
San Diego – as well as much of the state of California – is now experiencing an “affordable living crisis”, where people can’t afford to buy a home and the extremely expensive rental rates are forcing people to move farther away from where they work to be able to make ends meet.
The situation has created an opportunity for many to take advantage of the close proximity of Tijuana and even Tecate or Rosarito Beach, heading south of the border to find much more affordable housing where they can rent a large home for less than the cost of a small rental in San Diego.
In spite of the lack of any exact figures on the number of Americans moving to Mexico for purely economic reasons, industry experts point to high levels of homelessness in California as a possible contributing factor to the increasing influx of Americans heading to Mexico.
San Diego County has the fourth-highest rate of homelessness in the country, with at least 9,000 individuals living either on the street or in shelters, according to a 2020 report by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The federal agency acknowledges that homelessness rates may be higher than that, as the data did not include individuals who live in vehicles or other makeshift accommodations.
Even more troubling is the data showing a large increase in homeless numbers in people over the age of 55 and an overwhelming 85% of them became homeless while living in San Diego.
As long as this trend downwards in affordable housing continues in San Diego, Tijuana will continue to see an increasing impact with more and more people crossing the border looking for less expensive homes.
Former San Diegans, like Sergio Roseti, say they had no choice but to move south of the border.
“Necessity forced us to look to Tijuana,” said Roseti. “Housing in the United States is extremely expensive, sharing a room costs you $500, a studio is $1,000 minimum, for an apartment, it’s $1,500 to $3,000.”
Roseti moved to Tijuana right around the time the pandemic began.
“It’s the reason why many people now live here and the number grows every day, with people migrating to Tijuana looking for cheaper rent,” said Roseti.
But with more Americans and legal U.S. residents moving south of the border, the cost of housing in Tijuana is now going up as well with rents having doubled and even tripled in the most desirable areas near the border crossings.
The recent surge in rental prices in Tijuana -still much cheaper than San Diego – is now driving some to look a bit farther east to Tecate where the rental prices are still low and one new resident telling us that he prefers the daily commute across the Tecate border vs Otay Mesa or San Ysidro.
However with Tecate’s smaller size and fairly limited number of rental properties available, that option may not last much longer and many are already looking to the beach at Playas de Tijuana or further south around the Rosarito Beach area.
And they sign up for the SENTRI program to help ease their daily border commute problems.
Responses
[…] of that could be a factor of the recent wave of new expats moving to northern Baja to escape the high prices in San Diego where studio apartments are renting for as much as 1,500 […]
Hi,
Im in the market for affordable living Baja
In the Tijuana area?