Nobody's home
Posted on 02/10/2011 5:06:58 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Until I came across this post on redalert.wnd.com I neber even heard of the phrase "ghost cities". But in China they are all the rage! Remarkable as it seems, photographs of these "ghost cities" – after countless billions of dollars spent on their design and construction – reveal nobody lives there.
We're talking block after block of empty houses and apartment buildings, glamorous public buildings, magnificent public parks and sports complexes, even art museums, remain entirely empty.
The Mail in London estimated that China is building up to 20 new ghost cities a year on the country's "vast swathes of free land."
Business Insider speculated that the Chinese need to put their money somewhere, so developers have decided to build, as a place to store the wealth, even if the Chinese building these cities do not intend to live in them and there is no prospect they can find renters. Still, the phenomenon of China building these elaborate ghost cities is hard to understand.
"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," Anthony D. Poerio wrote in his entry on the website ScallyWagAndVagabond.com.
"The money simply isn't there, and ideally never will be," he said. "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 to them." Obviously, these ghost cities are not being built in China to be inhabited. Instead, they are being built to embody capital in a physical form, as bizarre as that idea sounds.
"It might all seem mere nouveau riche folly, were it not for China's national goal of moving hundreds of millions of rural residents to big cities over the next decade, in the hope of creating a large middle class," the New York Times reported.
Still, Patrick Chovanek, business professor at Tsinghua University, insisted to the Times that the building boom is being driven by frenzied investors, not by the housing needs of millions of migrating workers. People are using real estate as an investment, as a place to store cash – they treat it like gold," Chovanec said. "They're stockpiling empty units. This is going on in cities of virtually every size."
Kind of reminds me of the building boom in the mid to late 1900's when I would see the building of strip mall aftger strip mall, and pffice building after office building being built, but with no tennants. That trend has ground to a halt with the bursting of the housing bubble. Will China reap a similar bitter harvest?
Not really. The article mentions that this could be the precursor to moving the rural Chinese into these cities to create a huge middle class. Once they forclose on the bankrupt US, they’ll have 350 million coolies to grow rice for them.
With a billion people, the Chinese could reproduce and fill up a thousand “ghost cities” very, very quickly. Where they get food for those is another matter.
The reason the idea sounds bizarre is because if there are no buyers for those houses then the builders have not "stored capital". They have merely consumed it.
There are several.
if they allow their currency to appreciate by x3, ppl will be richer to buy
If not, then however well built they are, and I'm guessing they're not that well built, they will start to corrode and collapse before anyone gets a chance to occupy them.
Saaaayyyy, those would be great places to relocate all the world’s unwanted muslims...
These ghost cities ARE inhabited.
By the ghosts of the 300 million Chinese who have been murdered in the womb.
Or maybe China will end abortion and cities like this will be necessary over night.
I read the other day China is merging several small cities into one mega city.
With 42 million residents.
No worries. We currently have a “ghost president” who doesn’t give a hoot about the country.
Ive always wanted to see that building. I watch Ghost Adventures and that is one of the most active haunted buildings in America if not the world.
Dante described a better place for those who hate freedom, hate God, and hate life:
It may be their solution to the hou-kou (city resident) permit. Move all the illegal city immigrants from the city, estimated at 100 million, into legal cities they are building.
More haunted than Borley Rectory? Whoa!
Great show! Their 2nd trip to the Goldfield Hotel was perhaps their best episode.
Keep in mind China’s one-child policy. Under this program, each generation is 50% as large as the previous. They won’t have a billion people for long if they keep it up.
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