Every time I post a video about Colombia, the comments eventually fill up with the same word:

Gentrification.

Gringos are the problem.

Foreigners are driving up rents.

Go home.

Stop promoting Colombia.

You’re making life more expensive for locals.

And look — before we go any further — I want to say something clearly.

The frustration is real.

If you’re a young Colombian in Bogotá, Medellín, Pereira, Bucaramanga, or pretty much any major city right now, life does feel more expensive. Rents are up. Groceries cost more. A night out costs more. The building fees are higher. Your salary doesn’t stretch the way it did a few years ago. That part is not imaginary.

But here’s the problem:

A lot of people have correctly identified the pain and completely misidentified the cause.

And when that happens, the anger goes to the wrong target.

So let me give you two numbers that matter more than 90% of the “go home gringo” comments on the internet:

23.7%

and

92.6%

By the end of this article, those two numbers are going to explain your rising cost of living better than most people blaming foreigners ever could.

Because this is not a fluff piece.

This is not a “Colombia is perfect” piece.

And this is definitely not a “locals are wrong to be upset” piece.

This is an economics piece.

And the economics are a lot more interesting than the comments section.

Let’s start with the core claim.

The basic story goes like this:

Foreigners — especially Americans, Europeans, and digital nomads — are moving into Colombian cities, paying inflated rents, converting neighborhoods into expat zones, and pushing locals out.

Now, in one very specific place, this story has real truth to it.

We’ll get there.

But first, let’s ask the obvious question:

How many foreigners are actually in Colombia?

Because if foreigners are driving a national rent crisis, they should exist in national-crisis numbers.

They don’t.

Colombia has roughly 52 million people.

The total number of foreigners in the country is often cited at around 3 million, which sounds huge until you look closer at what that number actually includes.

The overwhelming majority of those foreigners are Venezuelan migrants and refugees — people who came to Colombia because of the humanitarian and economic collapse next door. Depending on the source and the month, that number is roughly 2.5 to 2.8 million.

That matters, because Venezuelan migration is a huge and complex topic — but it is not the same thing as affluent foreigners driving up rents in trendy neighborhoods.

If you remove Venezuelans from the number, you’re left with roughly 130,000 to 150,000 non-Venezuelan foreigners across the entire country.

That includes Americans.

Canadians.

Spaniards.

Italians.

French.

Germans.

Argentines.

Ecuadorians.

Everybody.

All of them.

Spread across a country of 52 million people.

That works out to roughly a quarter of one percent of the population.

In plain English: about one in every 400 people in Colombia is a non-Venezuelan foreigner.

That is not the kind of number that explains why rents are rising in every major city.

That is the kind of number that gets blamed because it’s visible, emotionally satisfying, and easier to yell at than macroeconomics.

Let’s make this even more concrete.

Bogotá is a city of around 8 million people — roughly 10 million if you include the metro area.

I live here. I walk here every day. I buy my groceries here. I eat in the restaurants here. I work here. I’m not doing geography from a spreadsheet.

And outside a handful of specific northern zones, I almost never see another foreigner.

My neighborhood is overwhelmingly Colombian.

The grocery stores are Colombian.

The cafés are Colombian.

The gyms are Colombian.

The restaurants are Colombian.

The building staff are Colombian.

The people walking dogs at night are Colombian.

And yet prices are still rising.

So if rents are going up in neighborhoods where there are almost no foreigners, then foreigners cannot be the main cause of those rent increases.

That’s just math.

And math is rude that way. It doesn’t care what feels emotionally convenient.

Now let’s be fair.

Because if I stopped here and said, “There’s no such thing as foreign-driven gentrification in Colombia,” I’d be doing the same lazy thing the comments section does — flattening a real issue into a comforting slogan.

There is one city where the complaint is much more legitimate:

Medellín.

And even more specifically, neighborhoods like El Poblado, Provenza, and parts of Laureles.

In those areas, there really is a visible and concentrated foreigner effect.

There are large numbers of digital nomads, short-term renters, and higher-spending foreigners layered on top of one of the strongest short-term rental ecosystems in Latin America. Airbnb conversions matter there. Foreign demand matters there. Landlord incentives absolutely matter there.

And on top of that, Medellín has a real and ugly sex-tourism problem that attracts some of the worst kinds of foreigners — men who come not because they love Colombia, but because they think they can exploit it.

That hurts locals.

That distorts neighborhoods.

That changes the city.

And people there are right to be angry about it.

So if someone in Medellín says, “Foreign demand is changing my neighborhood,” I’m not going to pretend that’s nonsense.

It’s not nonsense.

But here’s the key distinction:

Medellín is not all of Colombia.

And the comments section acts like the Medellín model explains Bogotá, Bucaramanga, Pereira, Manizales, and every other city in the country.

It doesn’t.

Outside a few very specific zones, something much larger is moving prices.

And this is where the economics lesson begins.

On December 29, 2025, President Gustavo Petro signed a decree raising Colombia’s minimum wage by 23.7% for 2026.

That is an enormous jump.

Not a normal annual adjustment.

Not a mild inflation correction.

An enormous jump.

The base minimum wage moved from about 1.42 million pesos to 1.75 million pesos, and with transportation subsidies included, the total package lands around 2 million pesos.

Now, if you’re a worker earning minimum wage, that feels like good news. And in the short term, for many people, it is.

Your paycheck just jumped much faster than inflation.

Your immediate purchasing power improved.

If you’ve been struggling for years, that feels like relief.

That’s the political appeal of the move.

But here’s what almost nobody explains properly:

In Colombia, the minimum wage is not just a wage.

It’s an index.

And once you understand that, you understand why your rent, your admin fees, and your monthly costs are rising — even if you never hired a single gringo in your life.

This is the part the average commenter almost never knows.

In a lot of countries, minimum wage affects the bottom of the labor market and that’s mostly it.

In Colombia, the minimum wage also acts as a benchmark for all kinds of other costs and obligations.

That means when the floor jumps, a lot more than wages jump with it.

For example:

If you live in an apartment building with a doorman, security guards, cleaning staff, or maintenance workers, those costs are tied directly or indirectly to minimum wage labor.

So when minimum wage jumps 23.7%, the administration bill for the building jumps too.

And landlords pass that along.

Owners feel it.

Renters feel it.

Everyone feels it.

That has nothing to do with expats.

A lot of government salaries and pension calculations are tied to minimum-wage multiples or minimum-wage-based formulas.

So when the minimum wage rises sharply, the state’s obligations rise sharply too.

And the estimates here are not small. This single policy shift adds a massive amount to public spending.

Again: not gringos.

Not Airbnb.

Not digital nomads.

Policy math.

Many administrative charges in Colombia are expressed in units tied to minimum wage.

So the floor rises, and suddenly the legal and bureaucratic ecosystem rises with it.

That means more cost pressure throughout daily life, even for people who never think about minimum wage beyond their paycheck.

Restaurants.

Cafés.

Barber shops.

Nail salons.

Stores.

Building staff.

Delivery support.

Neighborhood businesses.

If their wage floor jumps 23.7%, they have three options:

Raise prices.

Cut staff.

Automate where they can.

Usually they do some combination of all three.

That’s why your coffee costs more.

That’s why your restaurant service feels thinner.

That’s why the small business owner looks tired.

That’s why everyone feels squeezed at once.

And again: no foreigner needed.

I’ll make this personal for a second, because this isn’t abstract theory to me.

My building in Bogotá had real human security staff.

Doormen.

Guards.

People who knew the residents.

People who recognized the delivery guys.

People who were part of the life of the building.

Now the building is moving toward automation and reduced staffing.

Why?

Not because some evil landlord from Miami showed up.

Not because digital nomads invaded the lobby.

Not because the building suddenly got “gentrified.”

Because the labor math changed.

The administration costs were going to rise, residents were going to revolt at the new fees, and the building responded the way buildings all over the city are responding:

Cameras.

Remote systems.

Fewer humans.

That’s not a theory.

That’s not Twitter.

That’s not culture war language.

That’s what policy looks like when it lands on a monthly bill.

And it’s happening across the city.

Now let’s widen the lens.

Because the 23.7% number is dramatic.

But it didn’t happen in isolation.

Over the last five years, Colombia’s minimum wage has risen so aggressively that the combined increase is roughly 92.6%.

Nearly doubled.

Let that sink in.

Nearly doubled in five years.

And no, inflation did not double over that same period.

Which means the labor-cost structure of the country has been shifting much faster than many middle-class salaries and many business margins can comfortably absorb.

That’s why this feels bigger than just “one expensive year.”

Because it is bigger.

It has been compounding.

And when people say, “Everything feels more expensive than it used to,” they’re right.

But the explanation is not, “There are too many foreigners.”

The explanation is that a wage-indexed cost structure has been rising at a pace that now ripples through almost every part of urban life.

Here’s the part that really matters for Colombia’s urban middle class.

Let’s say you are not a minimum-wage worker.

Let’s say you’re a young professional.

You work in design.

Or accounting.

Or sales.

Or programming.

Or administration.

Or education.

You earn two or three times the minimum wage.

Did your salary rise 23.7% this year?

Probably not.

Maybe it rose 5%.

Maybe 8%.

Maybe 10% if you got lucky.

So while the minimum wage rose dramatically, your salary rose modestly.

That creates wage compression.

In other words, the gap between you and the bottom shrinks — not because you got poorer in absolute terms, but because your costs are rising in a system indexed to minimum wage while your income is not keeping up at the same pace.

That’s why so many middle-class Colombians feel like they’re being squeezed from both sides.

They’re not wrong.

They are being squeezed.

But they are not being squeezed primarily by foreigners.

They are being squeezed by a policy environment that lifted the wage floor aggressively while cascading those increases into housing, administration, staffing costs, services, and broader price structures.

This is where the conversation gets uncomfortable, because there is a real moral argument behind higher wage floors.

And Petro’s supporters are not stupid for making it.

Their argument is simple:

Colombia has been deeply unequal for a long time.

Minimum wage was too low.

Workers needed a meaningful raise.

More money in workers’ pockets boosts demand.

That helps the economy.

That improves dignity.

There is truth in that.

The problem is not the desire to raise incomes.

The problem is the scale, speed, and structure of the increase in a country where so many other costs are indexed to that same wage.

That’s where economists start getting nervous.

Because when increases outrun productivity and outrun inflation by too much, you start getting all the second-order effects we’re talking about now:

Higher business costs.

More layoffs.

More automation.

Higher admin fees.

More expensive services.

More wage compression.

Higher inflation pressure.

More pain for the exact middle class everyone keeps pretending doesn’t exist.

And then there’s another wrinkle:

Colombia is also reducing the legal workweek.

Which means the hourly cost of labor rises even more than the headline minimum-wage number suggests.

So the issue is not just “workers are making more.”

The issue is “the cost structure of employing people is rising fast enough to force changes everywhere.”

That’s a much bigger story than gentrification.

This is where the conversation needs to mature.

In 2026, people use the word gentrification as a catch-all for any local pain tied to housing, neighborhood change, or rising prices.

But those are not all the same thing.

Sometimes it really is foreign capital and short-term rental conversion.

Sometimes it’s urban redevelopment.

Sometimes it’s domestic upper-middle-class displacement pressure.

Sometimes it’s inflation.

Sometimes it’s wage-indexed cost escalation.

Sometimes it’s all of them at once.

If you call every price increase “gentrification,” you stop understanding the real mechanics.

And once that happens, you can’t solve the problem.

You can only yell at the nearest visible outsider.

That may feel satisfying.

But it’s not analysis.

And it’s definitely not policy.

If you are in Medellín and angry about what’s happening in very specific neighborhoods, your frustration may be justified.

If you are in Bogotá, Bucaramanga, Pereira, or another city with relatively small foreign populations, and you think gringos are the main reason your cost of living is rising, the math simply does not support that conclusion.

Not even close.

Your frustration is real.

Your diagnosis is wrong.

And that distinction matters.

Because yelling at foreigners won’t lower your building fees.

It won’t reverse wage compression.

It won’t bring back the security guard your building replaced with cameras.

It won’t reduce the restaurant owner’s labor cost.

It won’t lower indexed pension obligations.

It won’t change the structure of public spending.

Understanding the mechanism is the first step toward changing it.

And if you don’t understand the mechanism, you’re just shadowboxing with the wrong villain.

This is not a “foreigners are innocent” article.

Foreign demand can absolutely distort certain neighborhoods.

Bad expat behavior can absolutely make a city worse.

Short-term rentals can absolutely push locals out in concentrated zones.

But Colombia’s broad urban cost squeeze in 2026 is bigger than that.

Much bigger.

It’s about wage policy.

Indexed costs.

Labor economics.

Administrative pass-through.

Salary compression.

And a country trying to solve inequality with tools that create new pressure in the process.

So yes, be angry if your rent is rising.

Just be angry at the right thing.

Because if you’re going to fight for your future, it helps to know who’s actually moving the numbers.