Posted on 12/22/2010 1:01:51 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Satellite images pulled from Google Maps showing empty Chinese ‘ghost-cities’ surfaced and went viral yesterday, capping months of allegations that there are allegedly over 64 million brand new vacant apartments in China, enough to house over 200 million people.
The almost post-apocalyptic images of excess property are said to be the result of Chinese government pressure to increase internal economic activity – and hence net GDP – by any possible means, even building entire cities even when it’s unnecessary.
Patrick Chovanec of Tsinghua University explained to English language Al-Jazeera TV: ‘Who wants to be the mayor who reports that he didn’t get 8% GDP growth this year? Nobody wants to come forward with that. So the incentives in the system are to build. And if that’s the easiest way to achieve that growth, then you build.’ What makes this apparently pointless expansion so appealing is that, as Chovanec also states: “Nobody’s ever really lost money on real estate in China.”
So, as Business Insider reported back in September, because “ [the Chinese] need to put their money somewhere, but the stock market is under pressure and bank interest doesn’t cover inflation…they plunk their money into a new property, just as a place to store their wealth, even if they don’t intend to live in the place and can’t find renters.” One interviewee in an Al Jazeera report attests to this as fact, stating that though he wants to move into Ordos, one of the cities in question, the cost would be so high that despite nearly the entire city being vacant he’s unable to afford it.
The result of this unnecessary expansion is that we have perhaps the first outposts of civilization that are impractical to the point of being unusable, as many of them have housing prices so high that even if there were people available to fill them, it would be impossible to do so – the money simply isn’t there, and ideally never will be. Otherwise the investments of an entire country’s wealthy would be utterly devalued (unless China someday controls so much of the world’s wealth the cost of living in these cities becomes affordable only for them).
At least for the time being this makes the issue into a much more abstract one. It begets a situation in which the particular housing market of these cities becomes less about want, need, or exchange value and more about investment banking. That is to say: these aren’t cities we’re looking at, but bank vaults wherein the houses have become abstract capital’s physical manifestation – as has been hinted, an apparition.
Which is, I suggest, a sign that in these images the physical commodities that structure civilization itself have become so imbricated with capital that they have become it outright: More precisely by looking at these cities we witness the absolute limit of both capitalism and civilization. Herein the physical (buildings, cities) and immaterial (capital), the objective and the abstract, reality and representation, have completely united, become indistinguishable – exactly as happens in the case of insanity.
Will someone please tell the Mexicans about this.
Call me conspiratorial, but these “vacant” apartments have a purpose we are not aware of; yet.
The hottest market in the hottest economy in the world is Chinese real estate. The big question is how vulnerable is this market to a crash.
One red flag is the vast number of vacant homes spread through China, by some estimates up to 64 million vacant homes.
We've tracked down satellite photos of these unnerving places, based on a report from Forensic Asia Limited. They call it a clear sign of a bubble: "There’s city after city full of empty streets and vast government buildings, some in the most inhospitable locations. It is the modern equivalent of building pyramids. With 20 new cities being built every year, we hope to be able to expand our list going forward."
Click here to see images of the Ghost cities.
...Nowhere near to this extent, but Spain has a similar problem with empty suburban developments, and the Mexicans wouldn’t have to learn a new language.
Ciudades chinas Espíritu 64 millones de viviendas vacías Nueva!
No kidding. We need to round them up, deport them with a one way ticket to China.
Real estate always crashes. Always. At some point the bubble pops. Whatever’s hot can’t last forever, it gets overvalued and everyone wants their ‘cut’, inflating and inflating well beyond actual worth.
Wow.
I read something similar in Business Week not too long ago. Your average Chinese citizen cannot even begin to afford to live in all of this empty housing, so just how will all of this end? It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
I’ve seen the same thing on a smaller scale here in America.
Outside Frisco Texas in the mid 80s a housing boom had stalled. There were miles of nice streets, sidewalks and even concrete driveways. The only thing missing was the houses.
Satellite images pulled from Google Maps showing empty Chinese ‘ghost-cities’ surfaced and went viral yesterday, capping months of allegations that there are allegedly over 64 million brand new vacant apartments in China, enough to house over 200 million people.The almost post-apocalyptic images of excess property are said to be the result of Chinese government pressure to increase internal economic activity – and hence net GDP – by any possible means, even building entire cities even when it’s unnecessary.
Will someone please tell the Mexicans about this.
Bill Gates will buy it. American employees can then be relocated to work abroad for half the pay, "all bills paid". < 1/2 sarcasm >
“Why would they learn a new language? They haven’t bothered to here in the USA. “
BINGO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“Bill Gates will buy it. American employees can then be relocated to work abroad for half the pay, “all bills paid”. < 1/2 sarcasm > “
Why would Bill Gates do that? He doesn’t own America, the Chinese do.....
There were miles of nice streets, sidewalks and even concrete driveways. The only thing missing was the houses.
The average Chinaman is scared of these places. they think they are haunted.
Maybe they can pay out of work American construction workers to move there and do the needed repairs to keep the empty cities in fine shape.
From the sounds of it they eventually went back to building. I know Frisco is considerably larger than it was when I was there.
I always suspect the GDP numbers were fudged but buildng cities to nowhere is the height of economic idiocy. This is like our government on drugs.
China got problems?? Well boo EFFING hoo.
I was just about to post that when I noticed your post
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