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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
BEIJING, Sept 23 (Reuters) - 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.
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 does not count the numerous residential projects that have already been sold but not yet completed due to cash-flow problems, or the multiple homes purchased by speculators in the last market upturn in 2016 that remain vacant, which together make up the bulk of unused space, experts estimate.
“That estimate might be a bit much, but 1.4 billion people probably can’t fill them,” He said at a forum in the southern Chinese city Dongguan, according to a video released by the official media China News Service.
His negative view of the economically significant sector at a public forum stands in sharp contrast to the official narrative that the Chinese economy is “resilient”.
The original article contains 346 words, the summary contains 211 words. Saved 39%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Considering China’s population shrank by nearly 1 million last year and it predicted to drop by ~700 million by 2100.
This is not going to get better.
It’s not for them. It’s so they can buy them and charge exorbitant rents to the next generation looking for a place to call their own, but can’t afford one of their own.
Nah. China’s urbanization rate is currently 65%. South Korea for comparison has 82% urbanization rate. So the Chinese have plenty more (say, a hundred million or so more) homes to build. The current difficulties are more to do with (i) loss of consumer confidence caused by the leadership’s bad economic management, and (ii) the deliberate restriction of credit to developers because of the government’s concerns about debt.
This analysis reminds me of the hoo-hah about China’s “ghost cities” circa 2010. Those ghost cities ended up being filled up.
There are still vast ghost cities in that country, so no they don’t actually all fill up
Enough of them filled up that even the press outlets that pushed the ghost cities narrative most aggressively, like Bloomberg, have run follow-up stories acknowledging it.
Yes, some developments worked out and others didn’t, but building out housing in advance of increasing urbanization is a good thing, not a bad thing. It’s how you avoid housing unaffordability in urban centers, or worse, the rise of slums.
Building housing 15 or 20 years ahead of time isn’t a good thing. When people move in, the places are already old. Apartment buildings deteriorate over time even with no one living in them. It’s clearly wasteful to build them that early and there’s definitely a huge property bubble in China.
Ghost cities are largely American propaganda and most have filled out to well urbanized areas. You can read quite a bit about it on the wiki
if only their regime weren’t so repressive, homeless americans would be flocking there for a place to live.
I’m guessing most of those dwellings are in places that don’t have any employment options.
perhaps not, but hey, if a job around here won’t make it possible for you to afford four walls and a roof, then the difference it purely academic.
People like to create things, to do something productive. it’s why NEETs are notoriously miserable people who hate themselves. humans crave to DO something or it torments us to the brink of suicide - and sometimes past it. If only these folks had a place to live and weren’t brutalized by the authorities for daring to attempt to do so, they’ll create productive activities.
Part of the problem of poverty here, also, is that it’s sometimes literally fucking illegal to carry out productive labor activities unless you’re on land that you own or land that is owned by a designated employer. Try growing produce in a vacant lot and you’ll get arrested for trespassing and “vandalism”, and possibly sued by whatever ghoulish real estate holdings firm is hoarding the land.
With an apartment and nothing else, you’ll have a place to go back to while seeking employment OR a place to stage activities with other people. just because I personally don’t have 100% of the answers or the clairvoyant foreknowledge of what someone might be able to do with the resource of just having a space to call their own doesn’t mean that someone else won’t come up with something i’d have never dreamed of. I think it’s not unreasonable to have a little faith in human creativity.
presumably someone is doing upkeep on these buildings, and presumably those someones have needs for other folks to fill
presumably once more folks move there, they will have even more needs for folks to fill
not to mention remote work and all that
