Construction on the Hotel of Doom stopped in 1992 (rumors maintain that North Korea ran out of money, or that the building was engineered improperly and can never be occupied) and has never started back up, which shouldn’t come as a shock. After all, who the hell travels to beautiful downtown Pyongyang? It would make sense if the hotel were in South Korea, where Americans are allowed to travel and where projects like the Busan Lotte Tower and the Lotte Super Tower now rise thousands of feet above the formerly modest skyline.
With Pyongyang’s official population said to range between 2.5 million and 3.8 million (official numbers are not made available by the North Korean government), the Ryugyong Hotel — the 22nd largest skyscraper in the world — is a failure on an enormous scale. To put it in context, imagine if the John Hancock Center (1,127 feet tall) in Chicago (population 2.9 million) was not only completely vacant, but unfinished with zero hope of ever being completed
If it's all government money, I can't imagine why they care it's ever used. It kept people employed in building something that's useless. That is all they care about.
It's about spending the money not creating an asset to generate wealth. See the US Congress and 'stimulation prograns.' Generally, they don't end up in concrete, but they can be much more expensive to tear down.