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I find it interesting that everyone is calling this bad management when it's indicating one thing above all:
Productivity has well exceeded the requirements of the population.
People simply don't need to work that hard anymore, but all industrialized societies, even would-be socialists, simply can't stand the idea of letting the working class have leisure time.
UBI and robust social safety nets should have started with the industrial revolution. Every time a machine, computer, or now robots, UBI should have increased and been given to more people.
Tax the automation!! Have companies pay employee taxes for self scanners and all automation. Let the workers live, let the machines work.
I look at my own country of Portugal with a massive realestate prices bubble were more than half the youths only leave their parent's home after they're 30, more than 50% of recent graduates emigrating when they get their degrees and schools in certain areas lacking teachers because houses there are too expensive for a teacher salary, and think that maybe what China has there is actually good thing, not a bad thing.
Yeah, sure, "investors" are suffering, but why should the other 99% of people care?!
I do wonder what's going to happen to all that property as China's population hits 700,000,000 or so
A lot of developed countries are going to see a decrease in population starting in the next 20 years and that will probably go on until the end of this century.
Our growth-minded economics needs to shift. Maybe we need to focus on how to gracefully decline. A decrease in revenue does not mean a company is not profitable. So that mindset needs to change.
We really need to focus on geriatric care, there will be a lot more old people than young people, so we need some way to get care to all the old people without over-burdening the young. More robots? Or robot-assisted care so that is it not so taxing on a nurse? I recently had to help a neighbor who was in declining health and mind, and man, I do not want myself to be in that state burdening my children and family. So we need some legislature to allow assisted suicide for those with terminal illness so I can go and die with dignity and grace.
Then we need a new de-construction industry that is focused on removing old buildings and old infrastructure and restoring the land back to its natural state. Otherwise we will have a plague of urban decay if that's not managed well.
Maybe if they actually built these things up to code it would take longer to build them in the first place. These things tend to collapse.
good to know Earth resources are used in rational and sustainable manner.
The half finished apartment complexes and ones that are collapsing already because they build them with bamboo instead of cement would indicate otherwise. Look up tofu-dreg projects/buildings for a good laugh. So much of the rapid construction done in the last 20-30 years in China is going to be in landfills far before it should be....
It looks like you mixed up the fields for your password and username. TL;DR: you’ve got a password-looking username
Also, I agree with your comment.
This is a feature, not a bug :)
Damn... Can't they disassemble them and ship them in the West?
No thanks, China's infrastructure is of notoriously bad quality.
You're thinking of Ikea
We can exchange them for a wobbly CD rack and some of those rancid meatballs.
If you're American, the problem here actually isn't the number of residences, there are plenty of those. The problem is that developers only want to invest in single family units or high value apartments. We need policy makers who will actually tax absentee landlords and developers of high value properties to the point that local developers begin seeing more profit in creating affordable housing. In fact, affordable housing can be some of the most profitable even without increased tax burden but try convincing a group of investors that.
For many mainland Chinese people, real estate is the only place they can invest their money. Traditionally and culturally it's also seen as the only possible way to rise up and do better.
The money export controls make it difficult for the average guy to move his money abroad as well.
So there are many Chinese people putting retirement or family savings into these places because they don't have other options.
They have also just had a very long run of easy government backed mortgage support, making it a bit too easy to borrow money for these properties.
It's crazy and doesn't make long term sense when the number of domiciles exceeds the number of people.
Can... can they move those apartments here?
I'm 99% sure they wouldn't pass a safety inspection.
If you'd like to die from building collapse, or at the best least have your shit apartment literally falling apart in less than a few years
No need, just need to force them to sell their property here along with all the other rich people who are holding on to vacant property as an investment. There are plenty of homes in most places if they'd do something like double the property tax on any property that's vacant more than a few months per year.
This is important, not least because making the cement and steel for these surplus apartments and associated road infrastructure makes an enormous contribution to global CO~2~ emissions. Look at how the emissions took off after 2005. So the sooner the bubble bursts, the better for the climate.
Then they'll expend CO2 removing the abandoned structures, and building other things on top of some of that, and another bubble will be coming down the pipe sooner or later.
We need to fix the systems that let these bubbles occur in the first place
I recall a presentation by a key guy in China's planning system (NDRC-ERI) - it was clear that their plan all along was for the peak construction to coincide with the peak working-age population - which is why they would never concede to reduce emissions earlier. They had a long-term view including demographics (more than most governments consider), but the process got its own momentum and became the bubble - also related to city-government financing incentives as well as risky tycoons. Now the problem with such over-planning is that the next generation may not thank them for the legacy of this type of construction (and CO~2~), and prefer to live in smaller houses or away from the coast (as Shanghai, Tianjin, etc. will be flooded due to same CO~2~), hence as you say even more reconstruction (and more CO~2~). But the peak has passed, what really matters next is whether India will repeat similar mistakes.
It's almost as if the idea of endless growth is a bad one...
but GrOwTh
What will we ever do without gRoWtH
This is the best summary I could come up with:
BEIJING, Sept 23 (Reuters) - Even China's population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments littered across the country, a former official said on Saturday, in a rare public critique of the country's crisis-hit property market.
Big-name developers such as Country Garden Holdings (2007.HK) continue to teeter close to default even to this day, keeping home-buyer sentiment depressed.
As of the end of August, the combined floor area of unsold homes stood at 648 million square metres (7 billion square feet), the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) show.
That does not count the numerous residential projects that have already been sold but not yet completed due to cash-flow problems, or the multiple homes purchased by speculators in the last market upturn in 2016 that remain vacant, which together make up the bulk of unused space, experts estimate.
"That estimate might be a bit much, but 1.4 billion people probably can't fill them," He said at a forum in the southern Chinese city Dongguan, according to a video released by the official media China News Service.
His negative view of the economically significant sector at a public forum stands in sharp contrast to the official narrative that the Chinese economy is "resilient".
The original article contains 346 words, the summary contains 211 words. Saved 39%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
And China's population is projected to fall under 1 billion again over the next decades, making this a shit show circus. So many apartments bought as an investment will never see any occupancy and will likely just be abandoned. They got entire empty ghost towns already
Nah. China's urbanization rate is currently 65%. South Korea for comparison has 82% urbanization rate. So the Chinese have plenty more (say, a hundred million or so more) homes to build. The current difficulties are more to do with (i) loss of consumer confidence caused by the leadership's bad economic management, and (ii) the deliberate restriction of credit to developers because of the government's concerns about debt.
This analysis reminds me of the hoo-hah about China's "ghost cities" circa 2010. Those ghost cities ended up being filled up.
There are still vast ghost cities in that country, so no they don't actually all fill up
Sooo many empty or partially used shopping malls
In China or the US?
Haha both!
I dunno which is worse. The ones in China were never used, just built and left to rot. Many in the US had some decades of glory, then ended up with the same fate.
Enough of them filled up that even the press outlets that pushed the ghost cities narrative most aggressively, like Bloomberg, have run follow-up stories acknowledging it.
Yes, some developments worked out and others didn't, but building out housing in advance of increasing urbanization is a good thing, not a bad thing. It's how you avoid housing unaffordability in urban centers, or worse, the rise of slums.
Building housing 15 or 20 years ahead of time isn't a good thing. When people move in, the places are already old. Apartment buildings deteriorate over time even with no one living in them. It's clearly wasteful to build them that early and there's definitely a huge property bubble in China.