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The Shadow Side

I just got back to Medellín after maybe my longest time away in years, and sometimes a little distance gives you new eyes on a place.

I've lived here seven years, and my own rent has jumped a ton. Many of the local, family-owned bodegas are gone. And in Poblado, strangers are much more likely to open with English than they were when I first came to Medellín in 2011.

Someone in a comments section called it MEDAYORK. Half Medellín, half New York. No byline, no platform, just a local watching their city get eaten and finding the most efficient possible description for what was happening.

Prices in Medellín have risen 37% in four years, and rents now run nearly 14 percent above Bogotá's. The city Colombians call La Eterna Primavera, the City of Eternal Spring, now has the most expensive rental market in Colombia, according to Banco de la República. Paisas are leaving the city where they were born because they can no longer afford to stay.

It’s not only Medellín. It’s a common theme in worldwide travel, “pop” cities, and general migration patterns based on many factors, including inflation and people generally seeking a better life.

In Mexico City, rents have risen about 46% since 2020. Hundreds took to the streets of Condesa and Roma. The mayor announced a plan to regulate increases above inflation. The coffee shops that used to serve locals now post menus only in English. In Barcelona, protesters sprayed tourists with water pistols in June 2025. One sign read: "Your Airbnb was my home." The city is revoking all 10,000 of its short-term rental licenses by 2028.

Even Oaxaca, with some of the best food on the planet, is gentrifying fast.

An urban planning expert who studied Medellín specifically said this: nowhere has it happened "with the speed and impact that is occurring in Medellín."

These cities get discovered, usually organically, usually by someone who loved the place. Then they get marketed. The content appears: the listicles, the reels, the YouTube essays, the newsletters. The next wave arrives, then the next. Each wave finds a city slightly more expensive, slightly more optimized for foreign spending, slightly less itself.

People earning in stronger currencies can outbid locals in the housing market without trying. A three-month lease priced for a dollar income looks reasonable to the person paying it and catastrophic to the market it distorts. Landlords do the math. Apartments migrate from long-term local housing to short-term foreign-facing inventory. Supply shrinks. Prices rise. The original residents leave.

This is where the thesis of this newsletter runs into something it has to reckon with.

Don't Escape. Design. was always about individual choices: the idea that intentional relocation beats running away, that building something deliberate beats chasing cheap rent and good weather. It still is. But there's a shadow side to that premise.

When millions of people design the same escape (the same three cities, the same short-term terms, the same absence of commitment), the design becomes someone else's disaster. The intentionality of your individual choice doesn't neutralize the collective weight of everyone making the same one.

The foreigners straining these cities the most are usually the ones who pass through. They treat a city like a nice hotel, leave before anything roots, and post something on the way out that sends the next wave in. The three-month tenant. The short-term renter. The person who says they love a place and has no idea what's happening in its local politics.

Commitment changes the shape of your presence in a place. You take a long-term lease. You spend in locally-owned businesses. You learn enough of the language to be embarrassed by how little you know. You have a position on the city's future, because it's your future too.

Commitment does not cancel the math. A dollar income in a peso economy pushes rents up whether you stay three months or thirty years. What changes is what comes with the money. A long-term tenant fills a flat that would otherwise rotate through a platform, spends in the same neighborhood all year, and has a stake when the city decides something.

The structural fix is policy, and Barcelona and Mexico City are already attempting it. Economists argue about whether caps and license bans work, but they are at least the size of the problem, and one person's lease is not. What's left for the rest of us is smaller: if you pick a city, stay long enough to owe it something.

MEDAYORK is what happens to a city when everyone chooses it and nobody commits to it.

🇨🇴 Colombia - Holders of permanent resident (R) visas issued under the pre-2022 rules have until October 31 to complete the mandatory visa transfer, which is also the requirement for getting a cédula de extranjería. The process is fully online through the Cancillería, and the ministry has been telling people not to wait for the last week.

🇹🇭 Thailand - The Destination Thailand Visa got harder to file on August 31. Every new application now needs a police clearance certificate, and the old proof-of-current-location document has been replaced, with specifics that vary by embassy. Applications filed before that date follow the old rules, and current holders are unaffected.

🇪🇺 EU (ETIAS) - Still no confirmed launch date. The EU keeps saying the last quarter of 2026 and has promised at least six months' notice before it goes live, so watch for the announcement. When it arrives, Americans will pay about €7 for an online travel authorization rather than a visa.

🇪🇸 Spain - The digital nomad visa income floor rose to about €2,849 a month for a single applicant in 2026, up from €2,763, because it is pegged to the minimum wage. At least 80% of that income must come from outside Spain.

🇲🇽 Mexico - Residency card fees roughly doubled on January 1, and income thresholds are now calculated from the UMA instead of the minimum wage. Reported income requirements for a temporary resident visa sit around $4,300 to $4,400 a month, and consulates read them differently, so check yours before you file.

🇺🇸 U.S. (Inbound) - The new public charge rule took effect September 18, and 22 states promptly sued to block it. Separately, State Department social media screening expanded on October 1 to TN, TD, and foreign media (I) visa applicants.

Check your target country’s official immigration page for exact income thresholds and application windows. They move quickly.

If you've been following along, you know I've been on a fantasy kick. Turns out it's the most popular genre in publishing right now and the most requested by editors. So I went exploring.

Mark Lawrence keeps coming up.

The premise of Daughter of Crows: one hundred girls are sold each year to the Academy of Kindness. Ten years later, three walk out. The halls run with blood and the ones who survive have been made into something else entirely. Think Harry Potter crossed with the Hunger Games, except the school actually kills you and there are rules about which years can kill which years, which somehow makes it more terrifying than if there were no rules at all.

Darker. Way darker.

Lawrence is a great writer. Clean and controlled yet unhinged when the scene demands it. I am sure book two will have more of that.

If you're a serious fantasy reader who likes your prose sharp and deep world-building (dude’s got a PhD in mathematics), this is for you.

Though it might be a bit much for your average Hogwarts fan.

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See you next week. Don’t Escape. Design.