Posted on 12/31/2018 4:54:46 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s mantra that homes should be for living in is falling on deaf ears, with tens of millions of apartments and houses standing empty across the country.
Soon-to-be-published research will show roughly 22 per cent of China’s urban housing stock is unoccupied, according to Professor Gan Li, who runs the main nationwide study. That adds up to more than 50 million empty homes, he said.
The nightmare scenario for policymakers is that owners of unoccupied dwellings rush to sell if cracks start appearing in the property market, causing prices to spiral. The latest data, from a survey in 2017, also suggests Beijing’s efforts to curb property speculation - considered by leaders a key threat to financial and social stability - are coming up short.
“There’s no other single country with such a high vacancy rate,” said Gan, of Chengdu’s Southwestern University of Finance and Economics. “Should any crack emerge in the property market, the homes to be offloaded will hit China like a flood.”
One solution that the government could use is property or vacancy taxes to try to counter the issue, but neither appears imminent and some researchers, including Gan, say what actually counts as vacant could be tricky to determine.
Thousands of researchers fanned out across 363 counties last year as part of the China Household Finance Survey, which Gan runs at the university. The vacancy rate, which excludes homes yet to be sold by developers, was little changed from a 2013 reading of 22.4 per cent, he said by phone, adding that he was finalising the data for its release.
The 2013 study showed 49 million vacant homes, and Gan puts that number now at “definitely more than 50 million units.”
Housing speculation has bedevilled China’s leaders for years
(Excerpt) Read more at scmp.com ...
Send our illegals home and our Millennials will simply move out of their parents’ houses into their own places, which will become more affordable.
Bkmk
Personally I’d be reluctant to live in one of those as I’ve seen too many videos of how easily they topple over due to poor foundation.
Also how about the supply of furniture for the homes & offices? How about the phone services, cell phones towers, hospitals & other infrastructure? Are they already in place?
Lol, on China they are not political correct like in Europe or the USA. They speak their mind freely to you and will also do so to those referees waves.
It is certainly a kind of hybrid (but the Party controls the businesses in a top down manner).
A true market economy wouldn't build this much of an over supply because the "market" would be telling investors the buyers weren't there. It is apparent that there is some kind of artificial central planning construct within China's economy that is misdirecting capital toward housing.
Furthermore, it is one thing for a builder and his investors to fail to predict a market decline, but it is another thing entirely for investors to fail to predict the market enthusiasm for entire cities. When one sees entire cities standing empty, you can pretty much place the blame at the feet of the central planners.
Cities and their vast infrastructure aren't built by builders and their investors in a vacuum. They are built according to plans laid out by--guess who--the government.
You are correct, of course.
I thought it was interesting to know what percentage would be rural if they filled what they have built.
Why are there dozens of ‘ghost cities’ in China?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiTDU8MZRYw
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