Enticing homebuyers back to their home country
Yesterday's Washington Post contains an article about the aggressive efforts of Salvadoran home builders and the government to entice Salvadorans living in the US to purchase a home in El Salvador. This week, even Tony Saca got into the act:
Drawn by nostalgia and price tags of $12,000 to $200,000, Salvadoran immigrants are continuing a tradition of celebrating financial success in the United States by purchasing a vacation or retirement house in their home towns. Still, the steady stream of buyers might soon swell to a flood as El Salvador's government and developers mount increasingly aggressive efforts to attract even the lowest-income earners of the roughly 1 million Salvadoran-born immigrants in the United States -- including at least 130,000 in the Washington area, where they are the region's largest immigrant group.
In September, the government expanded the low-interest mortgages of up to $50,000 that it offers low-income home buyers to include for the first time Salvadorans living overseas who have citizenship or legal permanent residency in the United States. This month, the program was extended to those with temporary legal status here.
And now similar help is being offered to Salvadorans living in the United States illegally, qualifying them for financing if they can prove they have been sending money home for six months or more.
"We are inaugurating a whole new era in the housing market, a whole new outreach to our compatriots overseas," said Salvadoran President Elias Antonio Saca, who traveled to Washington on Friday to open the fair, sponsored by El Salvador's main association of home builders.
His administration has good reason to make the effort. Although Salvadoran immigrants worldwide send roughly $3 billion home each year, the government estimates that until recently only 1 percent of that has been spent on housing. The Salvadoran government estimates that more than a fourth of its citizens live in the United States but only about 2 percent of the mortgages in their homeland are held by those immigrants.
If substantially larger numbers can be persuaded and empowered to invest in housing, the cascade effect on El Salvador's impoverished economy could be profound, Saca said. "A boom in construction and real estate investment creates a whole series of new jobs. . . . The remittances from overseas would be made so much more productive."(more).
Comments
Fact: El Salvador is one of the most deforested countries in the western hemisphere, only second to Haiti. Much of the remaining foreests that we have are/were coffee fincas, which as EL Espino show are victims of prejudist deforestation with the buildling of 3 commercial centers one next to the other, a hotel, housing projects and a road that has dissected the Espino in two.
Fact: 6 out of every 10 rivers in El Salvador are polluted, meaning that 60% of our water resources are contaminated. Let us not forget the large percentage of the population that doesn't even have "agua potable", concentration of the population in a specific area further stress the hydric resources.
And you come here to tell me that I see a cloud in every silver lining for merely pointing out that the lack of urban planning, the lack of family planning in this country has lead to overpopulation, concentration of population in major cities, unemployment, and caotic urbanization (housing projects abound in this country, driving to El Tunco you'll see malls and housing projects sprouting everywhere, in colinas, once forested areas, sometimes not even 10 meters away from each other).
Heck, if I'm bad for pointing out the problems I would rather stay like this. Because in my opinion,it would be about time that instead of building colonias ad nauseum in such a small country like this, the country's builders should finally start building UPWARDS. That would be a much better way to manage our population. Not only that, but organizing the public transport so more people would actually use it would reduce the huge amount of traffic we have in San Salvador, heck El Salvador is tiny we could easily have a metro stretch across all the country, but we lack it completely.
Here, if you don't want to take my word for it, here are some articles that touch on the subject of "urbanizacion caotica (another aspect of poor land management), and the impact its acceleration has on the populattion in the recent years labeling it as a "problem":
http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=3994&method=full
http://www.pnuma.org/foroalc/esp/reuniones/rjmna06i-DisastersandUrbanVulnerability.pdf
http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/1315
http://www.radixonline.org/sustainabledev.htm
http://www.who.int/entity/csr/resources/publications/surveillance/dengue.pdfº
http://www.unhabitat.org/content.asp?cid=4276&catid=14&typeid=8&subMenuId=0
Intrestingly enough my dad is thinking about buying a home in San Miguel now. I think El Salvador is going to experience a new trend in the coming years like Puerto Rico. More and more Salvadorans that are American citizens, like my father, who have worked here for so many yeras are going to buy homes and retire in El Salvador. I think the investors and realtors are licking their chops waiting for this to happen.
look at Taiwan, lots of up high rise makes more sense than spreading out
and true., all the wildlife i used to see in the 80's is now gone
same as here in USA too many people
now those families with 7 kids that had high infant mortality rates, well they now survive
the Catholic way
keep em dumb,drugged,drunk and uninformed
water quality. soon all the fishermen will know what gold mining does for water quality
again LEAVE NOW gold miners
as I/we will be working on fish farming in ES, NOW 6 months shrimp veda
offshore and estuarial fish farming will be developed to feed the people protein, vs cattle pork farming which takes TOO much land and way too much water read the facts on one pound protein from various sources what it takes to get the final 'pound of meat'
I can be reached at- darJams@aol.com
In my recent attempts to purchase a home 1) getting a bank account or a loan is like raiding fort Knox, 2) opening a checking account requires an "act of congress", 3) transferring sufficient money by wire has proven to be exasperating (it has taken 3 weeks to get through the beauracracy and the money is still not here).
Tony Saca has good reasons, which are very good for the economy of El Salvador, to promote the return of U.S./Salvadoran citizens/residents. But, until they find a way to promote a "user friendly" banking system, it will be akin to hiking to Mt. Everest.
I trust the banking industry will figure out the problems and find that there is good reason to work a little harder to get my business... and that of other potential investors from the U.S.
GAM
Patrick