Nearly an hour outside the city of Oaxaca, a prime tourist destination in the southern Mexican state of the same name, lies the housing project of Ciudad Yagul.

Set off on a windswept plain from the nearest town of Tlacolula, it is a desolate place. The long lines of tiny, three-room row houses stretch down treeless streets under the hot sun. There are no parks, and the one stretch of concrete designated as a public space is run-down and unused. On closer inspection, it turns out that many of the houses are abandoned, the windows broken, collection-agency notices stuffed one after another into door cracks or turned into a pulpy pap by rains.

Ciudad Yagul is just one of dozens of housing projects dotting Oaxaca’s exurbs. Constructed during the Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón administrations (2000–2012) with the stated goal of providing housing for a working class that could not otherwise qualify for home ownership, this massive program soon became, in practice, a way to shovel money from the federal housing authority Infonavit into less-than-scrupulous private construction companies.