Posted on: Friday, November 19, 2004

Mexico City skyline on the rise

By Chris Hawley
Arizona Republic

MEXICO CITY — From the heliport atop the chisel-shaped Torre Mayor, a dizzying 738 feet above Mexico City, the change is clear. The Mexican capital is getting something it hasn't had since the Spaniards ripped down the pyramids: a monumental skyline.

High-rise buildings are sprouting by the dozens, from the western suburbs to bustling Paseo de la Reforma. Since 2000, 12 buildings higher than 300 feet, including the Torre Mayor, Latin America's tallest skyscraper, have appeared in the city. Twenty-nine others are under construction and more are on the way, according to Skyscraperpage.com.

That pace puts most other cities to shame. Phoenix, Ariz., for example, hasn't seen a new building of that size since 2000.

For a city of 18 million people, Mexico City has never had many skyscrapers, mainly because of the challenges the city poses for builders.

The center of the capital is built on a lake drained by the Spaniards. The lakebed is muddy and unstable; buildings (including the landmark Fine Arts Palace in the heart of downtown) sink, basements flood and earthquakes are amplified. That's why the 8.1-magnitude quake of 1985 smashed buildings all over the capital, killing at least 9,500 people, even though it was centered 140 miles from Mexico City.

But land is getting more expensive, anti-earthquake technology is getting better — the 55-story Torre Mayor, which opened last year, is built with 98 gigantic shock absorbers built into its girders and steel pylons that go 250 feet underground to connect to bedrock — and a wave of bank takeovers has flooded the country with foreign capital.

So builders are heading for the sky.

"You had a pent-up demand and the banks got healthy, so the time was right for this," said Gerald Ricker, who helped develop Tempe, Ariz.'s business district in the 1980s and is now director-general of Reichmann International, builder of the Torre Mayor.

The buildings are going up so fast that some observers wonder if things are getting out of control.

"All those buildings from the last two years are vacant, but the strange thing is they keep building them," said Sergio Flores Pena, director of the School of Urban Development at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. "There's a lot of real estate speculation going on."

As the Torre Mayor was going up, Mexico's banking system was undergoing a transformation. Banks that were nationalized in the 1980s, then sold to Mexican investors in the 1990s, have slowly recovered from their bad debts.

That has attracted international giants like HSBC of Britain, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya of Spain and Citigroup of the United States, who have snapped up the local banks and begun lending money again.

A string of big real estate purchases also has encouraged investors.