Middle Class in DR

[NY-DR Commuter]

Upper (rich) class does NOT live in places like Kokette my man! Nor will they share space with other tenants...

I'm maybe upper middle class by DR standards, but believe me! It's more the looks than the actual easy-go-by lifestyle of that sector. I work hard for my money and nothing came to my lap as heaven's gift to my person. I work very hard to maintain my living expenses!

The pictures are the reality many here try to sweep under BS talk! We have some DR1 members here (expats) that actually live in these hoods posted above and some can even tell you it's not an easy thing to keep with expenses, if you try to have too much relaxation under the budget...

All the above apartments are MIDDLE class in the DR! A few are upper middle class, the rest is a mix of mid to low middle class by finances.

Re-read my post #245, "my man".

I said that PARTICULAR APARTMENT (my bold added as in the original post also), does not represent "middle class" or "upper middle class" here in the Dominican Republic. It is an "upper-class" APARTMENT. A duplex penthouse apartment selling at $48 million pesos here in the DR is upper class, PERIOD. It doesn't matter what "hood" it's in. $48 million pesos cash for an apartment is not "upper middle class". If the duplex penthouse is "overkill' for that "hood", Kokette, that's the builder's problem.

I'm not going to argue neighborhood demographics, that wasn't my point. Santiago has all classes of people, poor, middle class, upper middle class, rich, whatever.

Your photos are nice and highlight some of the nicer buildings here in Santiago. ALL middle class? Obviously not. Spin it however you like, but this is one instance where your photos can speak for themselves.
And yes there certainly are "DR1 members" "that actually live in these 'hoods' posted above". You would be surprised.

I am curious about these posts though . . .

I'm not rich, nor I'm upper middle class (to my understanding) in the DR!!!

Just a regular folk from Villa Olga, with a paid (whilst it was shared) home, paid car, biz owned fully and bank account in the DR! Just like every other middle income class Dominican in the country!

And then . . .

I'm maybe upper middle class by DR standards, but believe me! It's more the looks than the actual easy-go-by lifestyle of that sector. I work hard for my money and nothing came to my lap as heaven's gift to my person. I work very hard to maintain my living expenses!

In one post you are not upper middle class, in the next one you are upper middle class, YOU don't even know what YOU are. How can you be defining classes?

And this nonsense . . .

Stop giving out lies to people that ask for help in moving to a country they know little about

You represented this apartment as "upper middle class" and NALs in his post regarding this SAME apartment states . . .

And that is, pretty much, how the upper middle class lives.

The most affluent sector in Santo Domingo, based on average household income, is La Esperilla and its shy of the US$40,000 mark.

NALs posts that in the MOST AFFLUENT sector in Santo Domingo the avg household income is shy of US$40,000. I'm assuming the MOST AFFLUENT sector would be considered upper-middle class, at the very least. Earning US$40,000 (RD$1,520,000) explain how can they afford to pay $48 million pesos CASH, and then maintain THAT APARTMENT. Forget it. UPPER CLASS -- ABSOLUTELY, UPPER MIDDLE CLASS -- NO!

Representing this apartment casually as "upper middle class" is a complete misrepresentation, "a lie".


And speaking of misrepresentation. . . .

I made my net worth in the DR, not the USA!

No you didn't. You "made" it in the DR AND the USA.

Shalena, people that "seek" los paises are those that are trying to leave the DR for economic means!

. . .last I checked nobody from the middle class I KNOW in the DR is seeking to leave the country for economic reasons...

In fact my first large investment in the USA was funded with revenues from our biz in the DR!! It took about 6 months to clear all the red tape to move the funds there, but we did it!

After that initial move of funds, we used the capital equity of the biz to open LOCs in the USA, and never again had to use DR revenues to back up any biz in the USA since.

I got a nice boat, which happened to come by within a package for our last biz in the USA, other than that I don't think I would had gotten such type of boat. This "son" of my friend's has another boat, compared to which, mine looks and feels like a canoe. He paid for his cash and has it registered under the DR flag. I paid for mine on credit, have it registered in the USA and when I tried to switch it to the DR, the expenses feel like buying another boat all over again (given how easy it's to get financing here in the states for anything, even stuff you can't really afford in the first place).

Obviously some of your "net worth" came from the USA. Apparently a decent amount according to your posts above.
You don't know anybody "from the middle class" "leaving the country for economic reasons"???
What are you doing there, missionary work?
Surely investing in the USA, opening businesses in the USA, acquiring a "nice boat" through business in the USA would qualify as "economic reasons" for leaving the country.

Don't take my post as an indictment of your success, especially in the USA.
I couldn't be happier for you. Good for you and keep going!!!
Few things make me happier than to hear that someone from the Dominican Republic is a successfull investor, businessman, or just gainfuly employed in the United States.
I love to see you participating in the liberty and prosperty afforded to you as a foreigner (Dominican) in the United States.

It's also great that you are taking full advantage of "the system".

I got a nice boat . . .I paid for mine on credit, have it registered in the USA . . . given how easy it's to get financing here in the states for anything, even stuff you can't really afford in the first place).

But you might be breaking the hearts of some of your Dominican "compadres"

Now you know why the majority of Dominicans own their homes, pay cash for cars, rarely use credit for big, pricey appliances, don't even think about a central a/c unless upper C and last but not least: Never show or tell what's you real economic status to anyone, especially family and the gov...
To carry on like one would do in the US in the DR is e-x-p-e-n-s-i-v-e!! Very!

Enjoy the MIDDLE CLASS!!

 

[mountainannie]

I am not exactly sure what all the huffing and puffing is about here... but I want to ask about the last postings, Picardo.. What do you mean by 50k and 70k? That those apartments rent for one quarter or one third of that a month? That 50k is the average salary of the folks who live there? What exactly? Just not making sense to me, your posting all these pics

 

[bachata]

Hahahahahahaha! What the DGII is going to do? Are they going to come to the U.S. and force me to tell them where my father has his business!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ezequiel, let's get together for the labor day Holy day weekend... I need to take a trip somewhere, too much work in the past four months.
Do you have a nice beach in Georgia??? I was thinking to go to morehead beach in NC.

JJ

 

[the gorgon]

mountainannie, it is not intended to make sense to you. it is supposed to leave you in such a state of confusion, you throw up your hands in despair, and think that he knows something profound.

 

[Criss Colon]

Chip,stop trying to confuse "P",Nals,and the other "DR Spin Doctors" with facts!
Anyone who actually lives in the DR,and is not deaf,dumb,and blind,knows what we actually see here;
Poverty is the norm,not the exception.Schools suck,hospitals suck,electric service sucks,water service sucks,fire and police services don't "SUCK",they just don't exist!
"Customer Service" doesn't exist!
What does exist is a populace who if they don't have their heads in the sand about these issues,it's "Up Their A$$'"!!!
But then we know,"It's all the Haitians fault"!


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I too would like to see an end to this thread,or,move it to the "Clown Bin" where it justly belongs.

 

[Chip]

I imagine I have some on this forum that are looking for a way to skew the calculations I have submitted and I'll help them in fact. One, the numbers may be different due to the value of the peso when the survey was done. Two, it is highly likely that people didn't report their complete income. Three, the number of Haitians may or may not have been included as I didn't read the whole report.

Nonetheless, given these influencing factors it would be still a long way to go to justify the middle class percentage and income as has been claimed - a very, very long way.

By the way, I still love the DR in spite of it's warts. Dominicans are still nicer in general than Westerners.

 

[RacerX]

Ha, Racer X has 3100 posts and not one of them has said anything positive about DR.

Do me a favor Frank. Put your camera where your mouth is. Go out and see if those residences actually have tenants or are we just playing a game of photography charades. If those buildings are occupied as Pichardo says they are. A million photographs and not ONE car on the street? Not one person walking around at street level? No curtains nor drapes? No street signs, feral dogs, motos nor litter anywhere? Are these real neighborhoods or advertising mock-ups? Can we have real street addresses and I will go there and front as I am a Jehovah's Witness and ring every doorbell in the building. Or I will go by at nighttime and see how many apartments are light up. Is this real prosperity or just renegade Photoshop?

Gorgon asked a simple question(which in 210 posts following that question Pichardo still hasnt answered): "Where do they shop?" The dude comes in with some obtuse stats about New York City which are irrelevant because NYC isnt representative of the entire United States. What he should do is pick a more generic large city like Kansas City, or Indianapolis or Denver.

Am I a Positive Pablo, hell the F no! I dont buy the statement that middle class people live in blatantly luxury housing and wealthy people prefer to live on the ground and in large estates. I also dont buy the validity in the business acumen of putting large sums of money into real estate development not expecting a return anytime in the near future. There is only one type of industry that welcomes that type of investment. I aint going to say no names but....

Go and tell Marriott or Disney to put up $15,000,000 to build a world class resort on the beach and have no idea of when it will turn a profit. Tell Holiday Inn to build "middle class" residential housing but have no any idea of when they will meet maximum occupancy. And then feed them some jive about waiting 10 years for the customer base to develop. They will laugh you out of the room, man. Those guys run a business to provide a need. These guys build a high rise no one needs but it is good to look because it symbolizes progress. But the people in general havent progressed, but like everything else they put on airs and pretend. Those buildings represent advancement(literally and figuratively), but true to form, it is all a facade(literally and figuratively). From the outside things look great. On the inside? Not so much.

So Frank if you can prove to us here that those buildings indeed to exist and are occupied, I might consider eating the poison applesauce and getting a window seat on the Absurd Express. I got my camera at the ready, do you?

 

[RacerX]

Look closely at the top, that's a tinaco on the roof at Villa Olimpica...

Now, lets go to the economics of it!

What would you accept Villa Olimpica as in the DR?

Low income?
Low middle income?
Middle income?
Upper middle income?

This is the interior of the average apartment in the villa:

About the construction safety, keep in mind that the villa was built under the supervision of an international body for the games, as they were built to house the international delegations that assisted to that event at the time. The codes used were the ones from MEXICO and the company that did the actual buildings was required to have international engineers in the team.

The Villa is very safe for seismic events, as any other type of building under the same codes. The reasons for the tinacos to be so few there, has to do with leaks and paying bribes to be allowed to place one. Nothing of problem with load capacity or the structure.

Villa Olimpica, middle class. Notice the LACK of spiral marble staircases and marble floors? No recessed lighting in the ceilings? No vaulted apices and mahoghany Corinthian pillars? What did we see? Tiled floors, stamped aluminum furniture in the bedroom. Caoba cabinets in the kitchen. You couldnt tell this from any generic housing development in the Little Havana section of Miami.

 

[cibaoo]

If most of you 1000+ Posts forum members have such a miserable Dominican existence, why do you have thousands of posts giving advice and opinions on a Dominican related website, go on and on about nonsensical topics like how much people make, or even worse, never lived full time in the Dominican Republic and interacted with all sorts of people on a business, social and personal level to gauge the real social status without relating to graphs and other Government information and then turn around and criticize said government about all the supposed social ills?

The only people who must use government data and nonsense for discussions are political talking heads on American news shows and Liberal intellectuals. Real People talk from experiences having lived and interacted amongst the masses in the country in question on a social, business and personal level, not studying or quoting data from moronic government officials.

God forbid the Dominican Republic has a few million Dominicans who on a daily basis engage in numerous acts of capitalism that enables them to live a comfortable lifestyle substantially better than the poor. GOD FORBID!!!

 

[RacerX]

The majority of the people in Santiago do not work for the government, so this question is moot. Now answer my first question.

It is because the majority dont work at all. Moot.

Once again the majority people do not work for the government. Answer my question!

Same mootitude

We are talking about Dominican middle class family, they have the cash in their bank accounts, unlike the Americans that need to use their credit cards or their houses equity as credit card. Big different!

Cash in what account? What bank? What remuneration? So if I had $100,000 in a Dominican bank in 1999 when the peso was 14:1 and I still have money in that account in 2011, did I win or lose?
The only difference in using home equity as a line of credit is that Dominican banks wouldnt give you a line of credit on your home because the same point I keep raising-No one knows what it is worth! You keep saying it is better because you paid for your house in cash, but there is no uniformity in anything regarding a home purchase or sale unlike the US. You get a house in Florida your house is built to a code. Everything is built to a code. There is no plastic bag tying 2 plumbing conduits together. There is no one using electrical tape and twine to hang your power lines on the outside of the house. There are no doors that dont fit the sill and therefore dont close. Look, you are taking it personal. I dont care. When I say your house has no value, I mean more than the aesthetic value of looking nice. In the US you have Truth in Lending and Disclosure laws, in the DR you get what you pay for. So the guy who thinks his house is worth 11M pesos has convinced you of this. You buy the house, the house isnt fit to live in. It looks good but it isnt safe. So what is your recourse? You cant go to the court system. Now you want to sell the house but you want the exact 11M you paid for it. The market wont support 11M pesos and it never did, but you know, cant tell you nothing. Guy like me comes and wants to negotiate the price of the home which you have been trying to sell for 6 years with no interest. I say I will give you 8.2M pesos for it you say no, you dont need to negotiate. Either I pay your price or get lost. I get lost. YOU, take this scant evidence of desire in your ragged house and increase your asking price to 13M pesos. But in reality you had no more people interested in buying your house now than did 10 years ago when it belonged to the previous owner. AND THAT illiquidity in the market tells us there is no substantial composition of middle class folks(44%) like you purport there is.

You are talking about poor people here and I'm talking about Middle and upper middle class family!

Don't answer my questions with other questions!

Well, I think my questions were better than your questions. Que sera, sera.

 

[Jumbo]

Villa Olimpica is to me lower middle class. The pictures shown is only a part of the hood. There is another section of 2 and 3 bedroom appartments that look like an upscale Los Reyes. Just another ant colony if you ask me.

 

[Jumbo]

And Racer X you are very negative.

 

[oldschool]

And Racer X you are very negative.

I don't think Racer X is negative I think he's a realist

 

[RacerX]

It depends what you consider middle class! I don't consider people on the middle class or upper middle class when they are in debt from birth to death. I don't consider people on the middle class when they lose everything they have when Wall Street decide that they need to lose everything!

Bro, everything you say is pejoratively subjective. It is weird, man. When Mejia wins this election and the peso goes from 40-100:1 what middle class will exist in the Dominican Republic? It happened to Argentina 10 years ago. It is happening in Greece and Portugal right now. When the currency gets devalued which it must because the economy has gotten no better, those who constitute the middle class are devastated.

I don't understand how one day you are in the upper middle class here in the States and the other day you are homeless or on welfare, food stamps, WIC or section 8.

I dont know if this is a pro or con in your argument? The reason these programs exist is because of what the society would look like if it didnt. If you worked in an industry in the DR and as all of them are dependent on outside corporate interests they decided to pull out for cheaper environment what would you do? Your constant response is "Oh we are middle class so we dont have to worry about that." There is no such thing as middle class. You exist in between the bottom and top. And it is much easier to hit the bottom than to grab the top.

My family has been in the DR middle class since before I was born and they are going to die living as middle class family, no matter how bad the economy is, that will never happen here in the U.S. because the middle class here live in a mirage where they think they are in the middle class but in reality they are not. They have to much debt to pay!

Apart from the debt, which I am only addressing the education debt. They also have something more transferable by comparison.

The hurdle was cleared by Pichardo in previous post! People in the DR don't report they true earnings because they don't want to pay taxes to the government. My father does not report all his profits from his business because he does not want to pay more taxes.

The same as drug dealers, arms merchants, numbers runners and bootleggers.

 

[Chip]

... criticize said government about all the supposed social ills?

I've lived here in the DR for more than 6 years and I can count one one hand the number of times a Dominican has defended a politician or the government and most of those were defending Pe?a Gomez. Furthermore, politicians are held in such high esteem here that calling somebody "diputado" is a blatant offense and the first thing they tell you at any bank if you try to get a loan is no politicians are allowed. Nonetheless, why is it that so many Dominicans on this forum defend politicians or the government when in real life by far the majority don't? Would it be they are on the gov't dole or have family that do?

What I ought to do is calculate the amount of wasted salary and gifts above and beyond the market rate for professionals that politicians here make and post it but if I do I will make a lot of people nauseous. Worse if I did it in Spanish and posted it on Facebook I might stir up a hornet's nest.

 

[Bronxboy]

This thread on running on thin ice!!!!

 

[RacerX]

I don't think Racer X is negative I think he's a realist

Thank you.

And all I can to JUMBO is that I think your notions could be considered pie in the sky. And from our history we know that the pie in the sky guys always are disillusioned when the pie falls in their face. And the realists say to that guy "Why did you think you could eat pie in the sky? Eat it on the table like the rest of us." What does that mean? Well, let me tell you something Jumbo, I asked Frank to investigate for himself IF those apartment buildings were actually occupied. And if they met his definition of where the "middle class" would live. That was a loaded question. I already took the photos, just like Pichardo, of the outside of the buildings. Of course using my trusty Santiago Map I can also give you street names(although not building numbers) so you can go and see for yourself. But this is a 3 card Monte game we are playing right now. Shuffle as much as you want. Where is the peanut?

 

[NALs]

Here are some facts from the survey done in 2007: Encuesta Nacional de Ingresos y Gastos de los Hogares

The average national monthly income is (a) RD11,425 for a population of (b) 4,670,000 persons. (table 8.16)

If we multiply the population (b) times the average national monthly income (b) this calculates to a total average national income of RD53,354,750,000 for the population.

If we assume as Pichardo and Nals would have us believe a middle class family would have an average salary of RD60,000 monthly and they represent 44% of the population their total monthly income would be: RD60,000 x 2,054,800 = RD123,288,000,000. Obviously we have a problem Houston as the total average monthly income of Nals et al prototypical middle class makes more than twice of the total income of the whole country, which is not possible to say the least. Please feel free to check my calculations.

I can understand where the problem lies as the study claims 44% of the participants surveyed received a monthly salary so to the layperson it might seem plausible that they are automatically middle class if it weren?t for the fact that this segment only receives a paltry RD11k a month average.

Finally, here is another telling statistic from the same study:

- 64% of all homes in the DR have a zinc roof.

My point in posting this is to get to the truth of the matter and not make observations based on emotion only (of which I?m guilty as well). Do I still love this country? Sure.

I would respectfully ask that we close this thread now that the facts are available.

Chip, you?re quite something!

Look what happens when a private AMERICAN firm does its own market research for a local investor thinking of developing a multimillion dollar mixed commercial-residential complex in Santo Domingo (2007 figures):

P?ngase a dise?ar puentecitos, edificiecitos, casuchas y chozas, que para eso es que usted da. Reconozca sus l?mites y no se salga de su lugar.

The complete market study: The Schout Company - Retail Consultant and Marketing Research Expert

 

[SKing]

Bronxboy........really?!? I mean, really?!? Where the hell is the trigger finger when you need it......

SHALENA

 

[Bronxboy]

Shelana:

I will let HB or WB handle this one. It is their forum but I am privy to it when needed.

In this case, I think I will let them handle this one. I do not think it the ice has broken BUT it is getting very thin.

With over 11K views, maybe there is still some life in it.