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… isn’t that the point?
Right?! Love how the article frames it as a bad thing because it doesn’t make sense from a capitalist standpoint.
It is a bad thing! How are investors holding on to dozens of empty units at ridiculous prices supposed to get a return on investment if the market’s oversaturated with living spaces?
Looks like we’re gonna have to start tearing them down to reduce supply.
That’s a good thing, right? It means there is no homelessness in the entire country, right?
Not so great if large aspects of your economic growth is tied to the real estate market. Theoretically the value of property is tied in some way to scarcity. If there is an abundance of housing, then there’s not a real reason for property value to mature.
If the rate of maturity is less than the rate of this inflation, then you are no longer creating an investment, you are creating debt. If a property investment group, a private bank, or state bank has over invested too heavily in developing the real estate market… there’s a pretty good chance that it’s going to have a hard time remaining in solvency.
This is an example of why a lot of people accuse the CCP of giving up on communism after the Deng reforms. Satiating the needs of the market too often conflicts with the needs of the people.
Theoretically in a planned economy you would be correct. There’s no motivation too build too many homes, nor is there is there a scarcity of homes. Both scenario are conditions of a capitalist market reacting to the perceived needs of the consumer or the market.
In a planned economy, it wouldn’t be unexpected to over-build. In fact, it perfectly makes sense, same as we would over produce a small surplus of anything. Housing isn’t ten I to create, and so having reserves ready for use when they’re needed in the future is a good thing. It may be bad from capitalism perspective, because you aren’t getting a great return on the investment yet. But from a planned economy perspective it’s good.
In a planned economy, it wouldn’t be unexpected to over-build. In fact
I wouldn’t call that over building though, and that wouldn’t explain hundreds of millions of extra homes. Building that aren’t being used begin to break down quite rapidly.
Real estate speculators make too many buildings, property values fall, people can buy homes, and everyone wins. Right? Oh, except for real estate speculators, but who cares about them anyway.
The problem with China’s real estate market is that it’s entirely built on false promises and leveraged debt.
The government provides cheap loans to citizens to buy homes they will never live. All in an effort to drive the country’s GDP… but eventually you will either:
- Run out of capital to fuel this construction
- Rebase the value of these paper homes and the economy collapses on a scale 10x that of the 2008 housing crisis
This article has nothing to do with unhoused people, nor an overvalued housing market pushing out middle class buyers. The economics of the Chinese market are completely dissimilar from the western (US particularly) markets.
It’s entirely about how the Chinese government has an unsustainable market segment dedicated to building things that people don’t want or need… other than to have wealth on paper.
The CCP basically “encouraged” those with capital to park it in these massive make-work projects knowing full well that any real demand-based natural economic equilibrium wouldn’t support that housing inventory. They pumped up their economic numbers using tools like this, but like all centrally managed economies they are running out of levers to pull. It’s going to be ugly when this stuff all comes to a head.
How? A 65 million unit surplus is more or less in line with other countries: 65/1400 = 5%. At an average family household size of 3, that gives an aggregate household vacancy rate of (up to) 15% (ignoring, of course, that not everyone who owns a home has a family). This also ignores how things like second homes, vacation homes, and excess rural housing stock is counted (given that, y’know, China has had a massive rural-to-urban migration over the past few decades).
The US census reports a vacancy rate of about 10%, and even New York has a vacancy rate of 3%.
Approximately 89.6 percent of the housing units in the United States in the second quarter 2023 were occupied and 10.4 percent were vacant.
The root cause that all comments here in Lemmy miss is the Chinese approach to tax funding, which is entirely built on cities and provinces being expected to generate tax income through land sales to property developers, and then public officials competency and rise inside the party being measured by the size of that tax income generated trough land sale.
China needs to adopt a western style of income and consumption taxation if they don’t have one but I understand that internal enforcements is very lax (to prevent popular protests) and corruption (that ends up siphoning off any revenue raised through taxes).
In short, that housing stock will remain unused and, without maintenance and continued use, will only deteriorate over time, leaving cities with a terrible burdensome legacy
Didn’t we just come off a decade of record low interest rates? Are we all fucked?
It’s not a matter of if the Second Great Depression will happen, but when
Meanwhile, the rest of the world has a severe housing crisis and there is a global shortage of concrete sand aggregate.
If only they could send some to Canada. Probably the best ones, nobody’s buying a house without insulation or functioning taps here.
This is why Canada has a housing crisis.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
China’s real-estate struggles rose to prominence in 2021, when industry giant Evergrande became the most indebted company in the world and defaulted.
At the time, there were at least 65 million vacant properties in the country, which would have been enough to house the entire population of France, Insider previously reported.
City’s like Shenyang, in the country’s northeast, were envisaged as new hot spots for China’s ultra-rich, with flashy European-style villas.
Today, farmers have taken over the ghost town, plowing the land and letting cattle roam free around the empty mansions.
The government has since enacted efforts to move some of the country’s top schools to the region, which has led to an influx of families and high-achieving students, bringing the population and real-estate prices up, Japanese publication Nikkei Asia reported in 2021.
Despite these efforts, Inner Mongolia, the autonomous region of China where Ordos is located, is still one of the slowest-growing areas of the country, per the report.
The original article contains 420 words, the summary contains 160 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good bot!
And yet China keeps populating these “ghost towns” over and over again. Almost like the term is nothing more than a xenophobic, alarmist misnomer.
If this was five years ago, I’d agree with you. But the Chinese national government has been clamping down on new construction for the past few years. China is also experiencing almost no population growth.
There was always going to be a time for China to stop building housing because the supply would eventually outstrip demand. Now seems to be near that time.
Holy shit everyone I think the MC’s lie from Goodbye, Lenin is about to come true!