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?
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Stay Safe CO !!
Eh ? These are always the same pictures all over the internet and most of them is showing only a few streets with some apartment buildings, the largest of these “ghost cities” is a new district of existing city. There are a lot of new housing developments in inner regions as there's where Chinese industry is moving because the coastal regions are becoming too expensive. The inner regions are moving from peasant economy to industrialization when the coastal regions are turning into western style service based economy. 300 million people moving from villages to cities is not some government plan but estimated long term effects of current trends. I'm not saying Chinese economy is perfect, It's far from It and some of these projects were definitely miscalculated, however overall It makes sense.
I love ‘Ghost Adventures’ and watch it every Friday night! You’re right, it’s one of the most active that I’ve ever seen watching any of the ghost hunting shows.
(BTW, Nick is my favorite on the show, LOL)
I read the headline and thought we were going to be talking about ghost hunting, darnit!
China’s got ‘extreme liberal makework’ - a high-end equivalent of flipping burgers for each other - Conservation Corps Jobs - Detroit “jobs programs”...etc. etc. - anything except allowing the market to work.
China has a big problem with people coming from rural areas into the large cities. So, the strategy is to create “satellite cities” where people can migrate, and thereby take pressure off the larger urban areas.
someone else turned it to the paranormal though.
Im learning all I can because we have what is known as a “shadowman” who comes through occasionally.
Nearly every family member has seen it from time to time and has been reluctant to tell anyone else about it lest we be thought of as nutty. The funny thing is, we all report exactly the same things when we see it.
It’s something I’ve always been interested in. I loved reading ghost stories and about haunted places as a kid. I love to check out cemeteries, both from the ‘haunted’ standpoint, but more importantly from the historical standpoint.
I’ve never had any experiences that I can recall, but I would love to go on a ghost hunt. We’ll be moving to southeast OH in the summer, just minutes away from Point Pleasant, VA, home of the ‘Mothman.’ That’s something I’m looking forward to checking out!
You should be journaling your experiences to see if some sort of pattern can be established. I believe it was on ‘Ghost Hunters’ that I saw some hotel that was supposedly haunted. The management left out a book for people to record anything that happened during their stay and they started getting patterns of activity from all sorts of visitors at different times.
Don’t these ghost cities need maintenance? Do you heat and cool the buildings or just leave them be? Doesn’t an unoccupied building get infested with critters? Something is wrong here. Perhaps they are building a gigantic set for the Chinese version of The Truman Show.
Point Pleasant WV huh? are you going to move down around the Bob Evans Farm area, or wellston?
The TAPS guys from Ghosthunters sent me an email telling me the same thing, that I should start keeping a journal of when and where I saw the shadowman and other circumstances such as weather and what might have been going on in the home at the time of the discovery.
My husband is working in Gallipolis, so close to Bob Evans Farms. We’ve looked up at houses in Wellston (I was there for a few days during Christmas vacation) and Jackson. We have one house in Wellston that we like, but it’s about 30 minutes to dh’s work. We also have one in Gallipolis that we like that is about 10 minutes for him to get to work. Right now he is staying in a house the company rents. I could not get over how hilly that area was, LOL.
I remember watching an episode on the Mothman on ‘Paranormal State’ and when I realized that we would be moving close to that area, I was excited. I’m easily amused. :)
My husband is working in Gallipolis, so close to Bob Evans Farms. We’ve looked up at houses in Wellston (I was there for a few days during Christmas vacation) and Jackson. We have one house in Wellston that we like, but it’s about 30 minutes to dh’s work. We also have one in Gallipolis that we like that is about 10 minutes for him to get to work. Right now he is staying in a house the company rents. I could not get over how hilly that area was, LOL.
I remember watching an episode on the Mothman on ‘Paranormal State’ and when I realized that we would be moving close to that area, I was excited. I’m easily amused. :)
The ‘Ghost Adventures’ guys did an investigation at Fort Chaffee here in Fort Smith not too long ago. I didn’t know a lot of the history of the place until I saw the episode. Some scary stuff. If I had known they were going to be here, I would have been one of their temporary groupies, LOL!
Oops! Sorry about the double post. Too much caffeine this morning ;)
its a nice area and ohio has shall issue concealed carry now.
Does seem to get colder there than here in Winter.
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