Even China’s population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments littered across the country, a former official said on Saturday, in a rare public critique of the country’s crisis-hit property market.
China’s property sector, once the pillar of the economy, has slumped since 2021 when real estate giant China Evergrande Group (3333.HK) defaulted on its debt obligations following a clampdown on new borrowing.
Big-name developers such as Country Garden Holdings (2007.HK) continue to teeter close to default even to this day, keeping home-buyer sentiment depressed.
As of the end of August, the combined floor area of unsold homes stood at 648 million square metres (7 billion square feet), the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) show.
That would be equal to 7.2 million homes, according to Reuters calculations, based on the average home size of 90 square metres.
Well, as I said, the point is not that the kind of housing providion they’re doing in China is great, the point is that it has become shit all over the West (and whilst I mentioned my homeland, Portugal, I also lived in England and it suffered from most of the same problems).
Shockingly even the dehumanised mechanism of housing provision in China might beat the “extremelly insuficient affordable housing provision whilst demand explodes due to realestate being used as investment assets” we seen in many places in the West, mainly because homelessness is even worse that living in a cookie-cutter appartment in a cold oversized appartment building in lifeless suburbia.
They’re both problematic, in different ways, but at least the kind of problem they have in China isn’t going to kill the country in the mid- and long-term by pushing half the young adults to leave the country as soon as they get a degree and pushing birth rates even lower in a country which already had low birth rates and has one of the most aged populations in the World.
