"the only local person"

My point exactly. More of a local issue that the rest of us could care less about and 99.9% of the time haven't a clue that it's even a local problem. So definitely "not" a reason why Zinuatanejo and Ixtapa don't get the action they once did.

No? Then why am I reading complaints about pollution, noise and crime? Why is there no money to fix the walkway between La Madera and Playa Principal? Why have so many things deteriorated or gone unattended?

Because the local politicians use the squatters and pander to them for their votes, spending what little money the city has on providing costly services to areas where it was determined decades ago it would be prohibitively costly to supply water and drainage. But their votes are apparently more important to the municipal government than the law or those of us who make up the commercial and tax-paying sector of the community.

And now more scarce resources are going to be spent to build a road directly from La Ropa to the police module on the outskirts of town so that our visitors don't have to see all the poor shanty homes on the hillsides.

Locals have no problem with providing affordable housing and helping poor families find a place to live, but we have been royally screwed by allowing the ecological zones that were our hillsides to be stolen by scammers allowed to break the law on a massive scale to serve the whims of unscrupulous politicians.

It's madness on a psychotic level, but it's our daily bread, as we say colloquially.