Most purchased their homestead plots illegally from ejidatarios. The new settlement grew despite the lack of basic infrastructure, such as potable water, sewers, electricity, public transport, medical services and schools. It was only with the initiation of the Programa Nacional de Solidaridad, in 1988, that the federal government began to install basic services and, ultimately, regularize the tenancy of 77,000 homesteads.
Under the presidency of Porfirio Díaz, much of the drained lake bed formed part of a latifundia, the Hacienda de Xico. Following the Mexican Revolution, land ownership was reformed into the ejido system of communal ownership, and was utilized primarily for dairy farming by the communal owners, or ejidatarios. This began to change near the end of the 1970s, as hundreds of homesteaders, generally from Mexico City and adjacent urbanized areas, descended upon the region.