Exodus after earthquake threatens hip communities
Stylish Mexico City neighborhoods hardest hit as death toll rises to 286
MEXICO CITY — When Fernando Bustos moved to Mexico City years ago, he had no doubt about where to live. The Roma and Condesa neighborhoods — sidewalk cafes, hip restaurants, thriving art and music, historic architecture — had captured his imagination.
He was not thinking about their vulnerability to earthquakes, like the one in 1985 that devastated both neighborhoods and plunged them into a long funk.
But the earthquake Tuesday revived that reality. Once again Roma and Condesa were among the hardest hit, and now Bustos, 34, is reluctantly planning to move from the area he adores.
“It’s terrible to realize that everything was destroyed where you live,” he said. “Despite how much we love this area, it’s not secure.”
Roma and Condesa, neighboring bastions of Mexican stylishness, are once again in an existential crisis, and residents are pondering whether living in them is worth the risk.
Some of the biggest boosters of Roma and Condesa worry that the Tuesday earthquake, which killed at least 286 people in Mexico, could slow if not reverse the ascendant popularity of the neighborhoods.
“Now and the next couple of years, it’s going to be a factor,” said Eduardo Aizenman, co-owner of El Péndulo bookstore and cafe, which became an engine of Condesa’s post-1985 renaissance. “I am sure many people will be putting their properties in the market.”
Roma and Condesa were largely developed in the early 20th century for the city’s elite, who luxuriated in grand villas built along tree-lined boulevards. By midcentury, the area’s popularity among the wealthy had begun to wane, with many residents moving to increasingly fashionable areas, like Polanco and Las Lomas, or to newly developed suburbs, like Ciudad Satélite. The 1985 earthquake accelerated this flight. Businesses closed, property values plunged, crime jumped.
Aizenman, 52, moved to Condesa in 1991, drawn to the cheap rents and atmosphere of possibility, even if it was an entertainment wasteland. “There was nothing here,” he recalled.
He opened El Péndulo two years later. Restaurants, bars, art galleries and boutiques followed. Historic properties were restored. Real estate values leapt. Condesa was back on top.
Roma was slower, rebounding within the past decade, and both neighborhoods entered the firmament of the world’s hippest urban precincts: “Mexico City’s reigning axis of cool,” declared GQ magazine in July.
Then came Tuesday’s 7.1 magnitude earthquake, which seriously damaged or destroyed a significant cluster of buildings in Roma and Condesa.
While Mexico City’s older central districts are particularly vulnerable to earthquakes because they sit on the soft ground of a residual lake bed, Roma and Condesa are no more at risk than other central neighborhoods, said Gerardo Suárez, a senior researcher in the Seismology Department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
And, indeed, other areas in the city were also badly hit. Still, the memories of 1985 combined with this week’s trauma have shaken the once-unbridled love of the two neighborhoods.
“Many residents feel a big distrust because it’s evident that it’s not a safe place to live,” said Bustos, a philosophy professor at Anáhuac University, whose apartment building was damaged enough to force the evacuation of all the residents.
Even Aizenman, who still lives in Condesa and has his offices there, is weighing the relative merits of different neighborhoods in light of the earthquake. The tremors Tuesday caused such damage to the building that houses his offices that he evacuated his staff and is now looking for new office space.
“It’s real,” he said of the earthquake. “When you’re here to experience the earth’s shaking,” he continued, pausing as he recalled the experience, “I don’t know.”