Our bus from Xalapa passed north of Puebla through Calpulalpan, and we could already see a haze of smog to the west.

We passed through small villages and drove along a massive empty nature preserve northeast of the city.

Reforma, or mainly the area along the Av. Paseo de la Reforma from Bosque de Chapultepec leading up to Centro around Hidalgo station, is where we slept for our month in Mexico.

It’s the most global, financial place I’ve been in mexico, where crowds of professionals walking into skyscrapers for work every morning. We were living a block from la bolsa, a stock exchange hosted in a round glass dome.

The road is probably considered the most iconic street in mexico, and it has a two-road system that works well for pedestrians. There are two main types of streets on Reforma: the auxillary streets like a “frontage road” that reaches local businesses, and the main road for thru-traffic which splits around the monuments.

This is El Paseo. It’s walkable for pedestrians. You can stroll on the sidewalk between the frontage and main road so you don’t need to dodge cars turning from side roads into the frontage roads. There are trees and benches and overall it’s a really pleasant and sheltered place to walk. They close the entire street for bikes and runners on Sundays.¹

Transport

In my opinion Mexico City has the best transport of any large city I’ve been to yet. This includes Shanghai, Beijing, Vancouver, Chicago, and NYC.

The major busses have raised platforms and dedicated lanes, making them almost as fast as the subways for getting around the city. There are dedicated “women’s cars” designated by pink seats. The subways, most busses, and shared bikes all used the same reusable transit card, and what isn’t covered by the busses or subways is covered by microbuses which have destinations listed on their windshield.

As I walked around the city, it was almost always easy to find a subway or metrobus that was going in the direction I wanted to go. A notable exception was the central part of Coyoacán which was poorly connected to the transit system at large. In this case, microbuses were reliable and got me to the north-south metrobus lines.

I liked this video of the historic city. The 2 line runs along some of the old historic roads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVZudWxXqPM

• If choosing where to live in the city, I’d recommend prioritizing access to metrobus lines over the subway. They are fast, will connect to subways, and allow you to get a better feel for the city as you look out the window.
• Like most transit-oriented cities, buy a reusable card and keep it charged.
• You can rent shared bikes using the ecobici app, and once you sign up you can link your metro card to it so you don’t need to worry about scanning a qr code with your phone. On the app, you can see a map that shows shared bike stations, but more importantly uses green on the map to designate roads that have decent biking infrastructure. You should only attempt the bike-unfriendly streets if you are a comfortable rider.

Coworking

In my case, working outside the home helps give me a focused and different environment, and gives my partner space. Something about getting to know the other people at the office makes me more punctual and less prone to sleeping in or leaving early. It’s a plus to go to the bathroom without worrying about my stuff left on a table, or always needing to buy some kind of cafe drink.

The overall strategy for finding a coworking space at a good price and location is to get in touch with as many spaces over whatsapp as possible. Don’t be afraid to haggle, because there really are minimal fixed costs to having another person sitting at an empty desk. Every price I was quoted was negotiable, besides wework. Let me know if you’ve found a way to game wework!

Here are the choices I found for one-month coworking arrangements, mostly by googling around. Prices here are in pesos (even though most quotes were in USD) and assume you are working 3-5 days a week. If you are looking for places for more than one month (say 3 months) you will find better rates and options.

Again, I want to stress the casualness of all of this. Besides wework which is managed by an automatic entry system, the IOS and Privat both didn’t ask for money right away. We chatted and they let me work there and trusted me to pay later.

wework

M$10,000/mo, assuming you are paying the M$500 daily rate rather than monthly. To my understanding monthly rates are by calendar month.

There’s a lot of weworks, especially around Reforma. I went to the one in Torre Reforma Latino for one day to take a look.

It was filled to the brim with power people, dressed well and ready for the office, talking extensively on the phone and chatting with others in the space.

People knew each other and discussed news at the afternoon mingly happy hour.

They opened the taps and had beer for whoever wanted it, and played ping pong tournaments.

The windows had some great views of the city and it’s probably worth the MXN$500 to check it out for a day. If you have the disposable income to do this for months at a time, I’m sure you’d have the opportunity to network with some driven businessy people.

Coffee shops

M$2000/mo, assuming you are paying M$100 on coffee or pastries for the day. You could definitely find cheaper than this, but I’m assuming you’d want to eat a lunch.

I saw a lot of laptop warriors in and outside of cafes in the Condesa and Roma Norte neighborhoods. Some proper full-time residents and digital nomad foreigners said good things about Blend Station which has a few locations around Roma-Condesa.

Some cafes are obviously not for working, but others have specific branding like “Work Café” or “Canela Café CoWorking”. There’s even the “Work Café Santander” (with the url workcafe.com.mx) which has a discount for account-holders.

IOS Offices

I was going to pay M$2700/mo, but flexible and open to negotiation. I contacted IOS Offices on whatsapp, and they got me in touch with manager for the office I as interested in. This guy initially quoted me at $300USD (~$5400MXN) with a nice pdf invoice sent to me over whatsapp, but I told him that was too expensive and asked if there were other IOS offices nearby that were cheaper. Since that was the only office under his control, he said there was a promotional rate of $150USD (~$2700MXN) which we tentatively agreed on.

The price was ok for what I wanted, and it was in a very nice office building directly next to our airbnb. I was usually the most underdressed person since I don’t have dress shoes, dress pants, or a nice button-down. But it was fun larping as a financial district office worker.

It’s a typical office: Everyone has nice shoes. Tucked-into-belt office shirts. Coffee machine, water, snacks. A bulletin board has people’s birthdays photos and cute little event fliers for cocktail hours.

A problem I soon ran into was the air. There was very little circulation, and no windows opened to the outdoors. The air ran stale quickly and I had trouble concentrating. The weather was beautiful outside! So I went looking for something else, and agreed to a (reduced) pro-rated rate with the office manager to pay for the days I spent there.

Privat.MX

This is where I ended up for the long haul. They quoted $160/d, $750/w, and $2450/mo.

It is on the western end of Roma, close to Doctores.

The coworking space had coffee, hot water, and possibly open 24/7 (?). The clientele was professional and seemed to be a combination of civil engineers using AutoCAD, or hardware designers switching between spreadsheets and circuit design software. Both parties were in their respective private offices, leaving me as one of only a few non-office, shared coworking space workers.

The space was great. I had a public coworking room all to my self against the window overlooking the street, and could open the window and listen to the passing conversations and fierro viejo calls. One day I overheard an hour-long breakup happening on the street below.

Gentrification and Anti-foreigner Sentiment, mainly in Roma Condesa

For a city as huge as mexico city (largest city in the hemisphere besides São Paulo!) it’s not like the displacement of families is 100% caused by foreigners moving here. Foreign immigration is definitely a problem that people are specifically protesting against, and it doesn’t help that the mayor is partnering with airbnb to attract digital nomads (check out its out-of-touch corporate memphis landing page!!). But there are larger domestic forces at play which you can read about in the appropriate wikipedia article about the Gentrification of Mexico City, and this plays out in places that aren’t as visibly popular with foreigners like Del Valle or Navarte or along Insurgentes Sur.

But this is my first time in the city, what would I know? So I asked residents.

Other People’s Opinions

When meeting people, I would sometimes ask about what they thought about the influx of foreigners to this area.

A 40+yo mexican man outside a bar told me it was a small part of the city, and that it led to some great food, in particular he raved about a new American BBQ place. He also hoped that a better relationship between americans and mexicans would help solve cartel violence near the border.

I met a remote worker from a midwestern state, tall stocky and blond, who lived here for 9+ months in monthlong airbnbs. He told me he loved it and worked in cafes like Blend Station. It was hard for him to date because he didn’t know spanish, and most of his practice came from these dates.

A mexican architect told me that because of this influx of foreigners, mexicans real estate investors weren’t buying in Condesa anymore – it’s too expensive now and not a good value.

At a language meetup I met a visiting foreigner who worked as a spiritual psychologist, teaching courses online, who said he liked the city so far and is thinking about moving here.

But putting a small selection of people’s opinions aside and just walking around, you can see an influx of foreigners in certain colonias. Particularly, people moving from the US and europe to certain neighborhoods and living here for a while. This is especially clear in Condesa and Roma (Norte), or “Roma Condesa” for short.

You’ll see pale fresh-from-the-north couples in complementary indie outfits or tastefully wrinkled linen white shirts walking the streets of Roma Norte, taking pictures with film cameras or perusing overpriced antiques. Trendy bakeries and cafes have people on laptops or loudly talking about NFTs in LA accents, all facing the street. On three separate occasions, I’ve seen tall foreigners walking with shorter nicely-dressed presumably local girls, holding their phones trying to converse with the aid of google translate. Probably tinder.

An ecosystem has grown up around this of language schools, language exchanges, airbnbs, coworking spaces, vintage stores, yoga studios, dog walkers, dance classes, and service staff that speak fluent english.

The word really got out to the tourists who wander near Av. Álvaro Obregón, hopping between hip places like an upscale asian street food restaurant, the tiktok trending retro-style Taquería Orinoco (which for the record is genuinely delicious), and the three-story Departamento club. If you look up the term “extranjeros” on the google reviews of these places, you’ll find people complaining about these foreigners getting better treatment, but also plenty of reviews in english about how it was great.

It’s hard for me to fully understand this, especially since I’m not talking to the displaced people and can’t just tell who is a foreigner or recent immigrant to these areas just looking at them. But I will say that in the colonias of Roma and Condesa, there were much much more people walking around speaking spanish than english, comparing this to somewhere like Flushing in Queens where many people walking around are speaking chinese.

I think in the future things will be more tense, specifically with foreigners earning wages in foreign currency and how that affects the price of housing, goods, and services. My guess is that the government eventually get more aggressive with taxing, or there will be more barriers put in place for foreigners to own land or work remote here on tourist visas.

It’s a matter of money. Nearly every major US city offers <$100 non-stop flights to CDMX, you can get a room with a shared space in Condesa for around USD$500 a month (and much cheaper in other areas!), and food is pretty cheap especially if you cook. So the average remote worker making even $50,000/y can live an urban life there that they wouldn’t come close to in somewhere like Manhattan where you can’t get a studio for under USD$2000! As the US foreigner community becomes more established there, it’s going to keep growing until the government takes action. These places will be the gringo equivalent of a chinatown.

420 Mexico City

According my googling, at 4/20 4:20pm there was a tradition to smoke at the Estela de Luz, a tall monument spire at the far west end of Reforma before the park.

A huge crowd was gathered smoking under the tree in a marijuana tolerance park. Walking through and around the smoky park were businesspeople getting off work, and it was surrounded by large towers like Torre BBVA and the Ritz-Carlton luxury hotel. Vendors were gathered selling elote, sliced mango, loose cigarettes, and paraphernalia like grinders or pipes. In the back there was a group of people playing chess next to a line into a tent to buy something to celebrate.

There was a procedure to buying: A man waved us from the front of the line into the tent. I approached the table and the lady asked me what I wanted to buy. I just showed a $20 bill, “dos porros?”, “claro”, and she insisted I set the money on the table instead of handing it to her. I grabbed the two joints and set down my ‘cash donation.’

It was $20 for two joints, and $50 (?) for a bag. I bought two joints and split them between me and a guy I met in line.

He was from Atlanta. He liked the chicago bulls, I had a milwaukee bucks shirt on, so we chatted. We talked about accents and he brought up how mexican accents are different everywhere: Mexico city, LA, spain, cholo – (“I’m hood, nigga!”) and then struggled to communicate effectively with a self-described defeño that joined our group.

The girls in the tent selling weed were quick like street food cooks. I would come here to smoke a few times and each time, they would teach me a different word for a joint: “toque”, “borro”, and others I since forgot.

If you speak some spanish and like smoking with others, it’s a great spot to chat and socialize.

Other Spots

That was Estela de Luz. But the others by the senate and hidalgo didn’t have central organization and were a lot more sketchy.

Another time I went to a different site in front of the senate building. It had a big, bare patch of dirt in the middle that formerly had marijuana planted in it. Compared to Estela de Luz this was a lot darker, and instead of the tent there were opportunistic individuals trying to sell.

Any time of day I walked through here, soon as I went over a threshold into the zone 3-4 guys would whistle and make smoke-drawing noises with their mouth and try to sell me a joints from altoid tins, first for $100, then $50, but never lower. Based on what Mexicans told me and I found in an article, these guys are probably part of the Unión Tepito street gang.

This patch is where a big bearded guy named Miguel came around for donations and told me he represented “La Comuna 420”, pointing at a banner between some trees. We chatted for a bit and he told me this covered all the locations, like Hidalgo and Estela de Luz. For him it was about marijuana legalization. I looked up the location earlier and from my understanding it has history as a marijuana legalization plantón, or “planted protest” in the past especially before the pandemic.

This activism mindset seemed at odds with the dealers. As I walked past one of the dealers in front of the senate building on Reforma tried to sell me a joint for $100, and as I declined and walked away, a more activist-looking individual came over and reprimanded him. I took the chance to sit down a bit further up. My spanish comprehension is pretty bad but from what I understood he was chastising the dealer about trying to sell to me for $100 and for trying to make money off this. It was one-sided and the dealer looked a little embarrassed but tried to ignore him for his five minute lecture.

I walked through the Hidalgo spot a few times and it was busy and filled with street dealers. There were some people jamming on guitars or playing cards, but my intuition told me to keep moving compared to the Estela location.

Overall impressions of CDMX

The entire sprawl is a world-class city surpassing NYC.

It’s a megacity with the best public transport in north america.

But one could feel lost in a sea of buildings and roads.

It’s a little grimy and some days can have some bad pollution.

In the future electric cars will help the city be so much more tolerable.

I think it’s going to be a better new york.