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A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)

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Re: A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)

#181

Post by pascalxus »

BurningFrog wrote: post #104
pascalxus wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF residents are nowhere near rich enough to afford the struggles. Even people in the top 2-5% struggle desperately to afford housing, renting out every bedroom in the house just to afford to stay there.

SF residents are among the richest in the world. SF housing is made extremely expensive by multi decade long anti housing policies, but that's completely artificial. If the Chinese ran housing in SF, there would be housing for 5 million people there.

yes, but they aren't, and that's why we're in this mess. not enough housing driving up the cost to the point where most can't afford it anymore or barely afford it.

Re: A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)

#182

Post by elamje »

setgree wrote: post #123

In 2012, I traveled for about 6 weeks in China. I saw a lot of large cities -- not the megalopolises of Beijing and Shanghai but Guangzhou, Xi'an, Kunming -- with unreal amounts of what looked like high-end real estate going up. if you moved to the countryside, things got a lot poorer, so there was a pretty clear disconnect. But the weirder thing was endlessly empty malls. For whatever reason, high-end luxury malls h…

I have to agree with you on this even in 2018. I have been fortunate enough to travel to many places in the world and China definitely struck me as the most strange in terms of development.

I constantly hear about China being an econ powerhouse, the future of the world, everyone wants access to their huge middle class, etc. But for my one week visiting Beijing and Shanghai I was confused to say the least.

The most impactful thing I have ever seen was on the high speed train between Shanghai and Beijing (about 5 hours at 190 mph) and I have never seen more highrise apartments completely empty in my life. In fact, at some points, I would look out the window and see over 200 of the exact same highrise perfectly spaced and all very clearly empty. I would say a lower bound on the number of 20+ story apartments I saw in 5 hours is somewhere around 10,000. I could be off, but I was pretty attentive to it the entire ride. Most of them were empty(given the lack of any humans, vehicles, or clothes on the balcony around them).

The wildest thing was seeing some of these highrises plopped in the middle of a farm. Nothing around, not even a cement road, and just an unoccupied apartment, 20 floors tall, surrounded by fields of whatever crop it was.

I started to hypothesize that the massive construction SEO's in China were used to subsidize jobs for rural workers and nothing else. It seems like construction would be a good industry to try to bring lesser educated and rural populations to higher wealth due to the high need of labor. This is total speculation so please don't blast me, but it seems possible.

Anyways, I was shocked at seeing this and I wonder if anyone can add other anecdotal evidence of something like this in another Chinese region. The great wall was pretty cool though:)

Re: A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)

#183

Post by bparsons »

setgree wrote: post #123

In 2012, I traveled for about 6 weeks in China. I saw a lot of large cities -- not the megalopolises of Beijing and Shanghai but Guangzhou, Xi'an, Kunming -- with unreal amounts of what looked like high-end real estate going up. if you moved to the countryside, things got a lot poorer, so there was a pretty clear disconnect. But the weirder thing was endlessly empty malls. For whatever reason, high-end luxury malls h…

Saw the same thing in Guangzhou.

New neighborhoods the size of downtown San Francisco, and barely anyone around. A few police, the odd person riding a bike, but otherwise you could throw a bowling ball down most streets and not hit anything.

The more I thought about it, the scarier it became. This is a bubble that makes all before it look insignificant in comparison. The question is whether the government can guide it into a soft crash landing.

Re: A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)

#184

Post by epynonymous »

baybal2 wrote: post #136
epynonymous wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

several corrections, apartments are typically leased for 70 years, 40 is for commercial property which are sometimes inhabitable. some apartments are finished, these days it’s more likely you’ll find a fully finished apartment, ready for move in, but they do have the unfinished apartments, but it’s too much trouble and trending down lately. you’re right about the investment aspect, i believe in early i used to rent a…

>i used to rent an apartment in downtown shanghai, 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom, roughly 100 sq m (1000 square foot) new apartment, fully furnished with 60 inch led tv, furniture, etc, that cost me about 6k rmb a month (1000 usd a month), to buy would have cost me about 4m rmb (670k usd), i had pretty good relationship with the landlord, her father owned about 20 similar apartments in the complex, they were from a small tow…

This was back in 2010, now that same place to buy is around 8m, at its height it was 12m, i think it rents for 10k now.

Re: A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)

#185

Post by NicoJuicy »

annefauvre wrote: post #52
NicoJuicy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so, according to what I read/learned it had to do with defaulted loans. In a "us knows us" world, the big loans are given to people approving the regime. The loan is 10 million for example, the collateral is the property. The loan is 50% used and defaults. 5 million profit. Some articles around shadow banking, if you want to look it up

Yeah that's interesting. What I've also read is that property was one of the only private assets not taxed at the same rate in China so is a good place to store capital (or that was the expectation). Secondly, a huge initiative of the Chinese Government beginning in 2008 was to "go west" and they started providing a significant amount of funding for major infrastructure and development projects with the "if you build…

Yeah, the curious thing is. China still borrows cheaply from the world bank and they use that ( partially) for the one road, one belt initiative.

This has very recently changed, if I'm not mistaken.

It's part of not being an developed countries. And the requirements were accepted by a loan to the world bank of 7,7 billion $ from America ( from memory)

Re: A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)

#186

Post by jonathankoren »

imtringued wrote: post #141
jonathankoren wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s unclear to me why Bangladeshis would migrate to China as opposed to India or Pakistan.

Probably because china has 50 million empty apartments. 3 People per apartment should be enough to let all of Bangladesh escape (they'll need it).

Countries aren't fungible commodities.

The problem isn't if there's a spare bedroom, it's the political, social, and economic forces. And since we're talking about mass migration, we also have to talk about geography.

Think about it. In order to get to China, you have to cross the Himalayas, probably on foot. Then once you're there, you have to enter an economy (perhaps clandestinely) where you can't speak the language, have no large population of people that speak your language, have no common social ties, and if that wasn't enough challenges, the country is famous for clamping down hard on internal economic migration (i.e. the hukou system), and has no history of foreign immigration since... ever?

It's just not plausible. You can walk to India. You can walk to Pakistan. There are cultural ties to Pakistan. If you want to go someplace outside of South Asia, Kuwait and the other Gulf States have extensive Bangladeshi expat communities, due to the number of migrants workers. (Hell, 70% of Kuwait's population isn't Kuwaiti[0].)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Kuwait

Re: A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)

#187

Post by woodandsteel »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #90
ksec wrote: post #66

To 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…

2. There are empty homes in 10 year old complexes in Beijing and Shanghai. 3. Many of the ghost districts never fill up before they are torn down as eye sores. Kangbashi will only fill up if coal makes a big come back, which is highly unlikely. Tianjin financial district is mostly a bust so far, but a derelict building or two for a decade is not abnormal. The problem is really simple: China lacks a property tax, so h…

>The problem is really simple: China lacks a property tax, so housing is seen as a speculative investment rather than just a place to live in.

The government should read Henry George. Well, everyone should read Henry George.

Re: A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)

#188

Post by foldr »

close04 wrote: post #176
foldr wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but it's not really accurate to say that intellectual activity moved because the Church was systematically harassing philosophers.

> a bunch of intellectuals for their "heathen" ideology (greek philosophy, sciences, etc). So they all moved [...] I think the suggestion is that the ones who were persecuted moved, not all. Basically "the bunch".

Well yes, but I wonder who that is supposed to be, specifically.

Re: A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)

#189

Post by Arn_Thor »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #148
Arn_Thor wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This animation by McKinsey shows a number of different paths for urbanization. There are many neuanced models, but they commonly divide into "supercities", "hub and spoke" and "distributed growth". https://www.mckinsey.com/tools/Wrappers/Redesign/Interactive... Quote from a related 2009 report called "Preparing for China's Urban Billion": "China's current urbanization path will show a pronounced expansion in the numb…

No one significant has ever said China has empty mega cities, or even empty cities, they are more like empty districts of existing cities (eg Kangbashi of Ordos, Tianjin Financial district, etc...). The western press latches onto “ghost cities” because Chinese city/town administration units are weird to westerners.

This is the comment I replied to: "When did that change? They were incredibly trying to cultivate and outright force mega cities.

Leaving behind mega cities that are empty. Hell if you want to play out a pretend version of "I am legend" you could get pretty close. (Minus the zombies) "

I am I having a stroke, or did that comment refer to "mega cities that are empty"?

Re: A Fifth of China’s Homes Are Empty (2018)

#190

Post by kartickv »

logfromblammo wrote: post #175
kartickv wrote: post #60

The government should make a law saying that houseowners shouldn't keep a house empty if there's someone offering even a single rupee or yuan a year, plus paying the insurance premium to protect the homeowner from any damage done by the tenant, plus deep cleaning to restore the house to a rentable condition when the tenant leaves. A landlord cannot keep the house empty if there's at least one person offering the abov…

> The government should make a law ... King Canute should just decree that the tide is to go out.~ No matter how you structure the law, the capacity of property speculators to evade its intent will likely exceed the government's ability to enforce it, especially when some of those speculators are government officials. I foresee that a vacancy tax would be avoided by building apartment buildings that are only 80% fini…

Your points would be received better without the sarcasm in your opening sentence.

Regarding your point that this tax will be hard to enforce, why do you think this is harder than to enforce than the cornucopia of taxes and construction rules we have today?

Regarding your point about leaving buildings 80% finished, there can be another tax on land not put to productive use. This would include both land left empty, and unfinished construction. In return for these taxes, eliminate other taxes like property tax, stamp duty, registration, transfer of ownership, etc.

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