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.
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.
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.
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.
To put into context, China’s population will not grow 200 million. By 2050, it will be shrinking by 12 million per year, the size of New England. This is not prognostication; this is fact: the babies quit being born, and now we’re just biding time for the babies which were born in the 70s start dying.
People really have to read their Orwell. This is easily explained, and not with the mush in the article.
In order for an elite to retain power, one thing they must guard against is too much knowledge and prosperity in the people they rule. Building these cities is simply a way to expend resource without increasing the standard of living for the general populace. These cities serve the purpose of perpetual war in Orwell’s 1984 - to destroy the product of “the machine” which could otherwise destabilize the system and thus the ruling class’s power...
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.
John Maynard Keynes advocated building pyramids as a cure for unemployment.
In fact, "Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one," he wrote in his 1936 treatise.