A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)
71–80 of 191 posts
Re: A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)
#72For context, it's been estimated that there are around 18M vacant homes in the US, though it's difficult to find a reliable source for this information. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+vacant+homes+are+th...
Seems high in the context of a total of ~112M homes. That would be more than 1 in 10 homes which I find hard to believe. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183635/number-of-househo...
Try driving around resort towns in the offseason or even midweek. Nearly all empty. ITs really noticeable compared to other countries.
Re: A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)
#73To put things into context. 1. These are Urban Homes. 2. There are roughly 20M people jumping to new cities and Urban areas every year. For years China has keep a roughly two years buffer zone, I think the rate of new housing is the same and rate of people going into Urban has declined, so a slight increase in terms of buffer ( closer to three years now ). 3. Most of the "Ghost Cities" do get fill up quickly, once th…
America is also a developing country. It's not like anywhere is ever finished developing.
Re: A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)
#74For context, it's been estimated that there are around 18M vacant homes in the US, though it's difficult to find a reliable source for this information. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+vacant+homes+are+th...
What, within context of what we are talking about, defines "vacant"
I grew up in Lake Tahoe , and having gone up recently for my Dad's memorial - and talking to some of the wealthiest realtors in the region - coupled with how areas of tahoe are literally banning AirBnB - they have a crap ton of "vacancies"
But its not like these are not owned-homes - they are just not lived in/abandoned.
Basically, the homes were bought in the past decades for fractions and either rebuilt/remodeled such that now there are +++% of the homes which are +Million$ vacation homes.
The problem with this is that it happened so densely so quickly, that the idea of running a small business in Tahoe City is tough due to lack of traffic as well as lack of workers - as you cant have workers who have no place to live...
Is there a global institute for urban planning who is attempting to address some of these issues.
In dealing with the local cannabis regulations across every county in California, and the local city planning department jurisdictions within these... my take-away is that its a ridiculously fragmented understanding of both problems and the solutions.
Re: A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
A car that you bought 20 minutes ago has suffered no measurable degradation of the physical components, but has lost a very large portion of its "new" value. The lost value is purely from the "new" label which the car no longer qualifies for. That is why people will tell you never to buy a car new.
That's deprecation, and it's super fast in things like cars and consumer electronics. However, as far as I know, homes do not deprecate rapidly (ie. a "brand new" house doesn't command a significant premium over a comparable 1 year old house)
Homes depreciate rapidly in Japan. It's a cultural thing. They value newness.
Re: A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)
#76It doesn't make much economic sense that these houses are empty. Why not rent them out or sell them for whatever the market will bear?
First three rules of real estate: location, location, location. Would you be interested in renting a 400 sf dilapidated teardown shack in western Kansas, no utilities, five hours from the nearest big city, no local jobs, and not near anything of consequence? As young Chinese flock to the large cities, they might have grown up in something similar to the above, but just because they're leaving it behind doesn't take i…
What's the Fourth rule?
Re: A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)
#77To put things into context. 1. These are Urban Homes. 2. There are roughly 20M people jumping to new cities and Urban areas every year. For years China has keep a roughly two years buffer zone, I think the rate of new housing is the same and rate of people going into Urban has declined, so a slight increase in terms of buffer ( closer to three years now ). 3. Most of the "Ghost Cities" do get fill up quickly, once th…
America is also a developing country. It's not like anywhere is ever finished developing.
Let's replace "developing" with "in the progress of rapid urbanization".
According to wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization#/media/File:2015_...), US is already highly urbanized but China's not.
As long as we agree that high rate of urbanization is the future, China basically has more room to grow in this aspect.
Re: A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)
#78For context, it's been estimated that there are around 18M vacant homes in the US, though it's difficult to find a reliable source for this information. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+vacant+homes+are+th...
And how many are homeless and living in bad condition?
Re: A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)
#79To put things into context. 1. These are Urban Homes. 2. There are roughly 20M people jumping to new cities and Urban areas every year. For years China has keep a roughly two years buffer zone, I think the rate of new housing is the same and rate of people going into Urban has declined, so a slight increase in terms of buffer ( closer to three years now ). 3. Most of the "Ghost Cities" do get fill up quickly, once th…
The central authorities control the central bank, the banks, and perhaps importantly: the press. And of course policy/taxation. So they can stop a lot of rampant speculation through a variety of measures, meaning hopefully, they can kill any bubble-like blowups. As you say, there's a lot of poor folks and a lot of empty homes, maybe that does mean a haircut for home owners, but it might possibly be done in a way that…
I'd say the danger for China is not being unable to handle a consumer bubble. As you've pointed out, they have a lot of tools.
It's their not recognizing they're creating a government supply bubble.
The real weakness of demand economies historically hasn't been their difficulty producing basic things (that they feel are necessary), but knowing when to stop producing things. Absent free market signals, there's not a lot to tell you when to put the brakes on.
Re: A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)
#80To put things into context. 1. These are Urban Homes. 2. There are roughly 20M people jumping to new cities and Urban areas every year. For years China has keep a roughly two years buffer zone, I think the rate of new housing is the same and rate of people going into Urban has declined, so a slight increase in terms of buffer ( closer to three years now ). 3. Most of the "Ghost Cities" do get fill up quickly, once th…
Articles about ghost cities are a fascinating read - sometimes exploring un-intuitive facts, like having 50m empty homes in China, yields a surprising discovery of the underlying systems.
In this case, I think the system perfectly justifies having 50m homes empty. If you look at it another way, if San Francisco (arguably another booming localized economy) had the same initiative to build a 20% buffer for housing, it would be seen as a progressive, citizen minded effort to create affordable housing and a huge benefit to the community.
As China, I'd much rather face the problem of building empty homes (which is not really a problem?) than face the population revolting from huge spikes in cost of living due to not enough urban housing. SF is full of rich enough people to ignore the struggles of the working class - China probably isn't.
edit: I also don't think the rise in 2nd or 3rd home purchases is an issue, it's more of a symptom of the growing divide between rich and poor, especially in China.