Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Ghost Cities of China

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Ghost Cities of China

    We may have done something similar on a thread but search function etc I am sure that someone will be interested in this

    #2
    Ghost Cities of China

    Great pics. However, the idea that the new Yunnan Univeristy campus was built to accomodate 2.3 million studentrs is utter nonsense. 23,000 is more lieke it.

    Comment


      #3
      Ghost Cities of China

      I don't know. The 'small' school I worked in had 5-6,000 residents. Everything's designed on a different scale there. I agree that 2.3 million sounds a bit crazy, but the building bubble is insanely overblown and developers get ludicrously optimistic. Designing for 230,000 would be extremely likely and designing for 2.3 million wouldn't be beyond the realms of possibility.

      I had a very surreal holiday once, when a Chinese friend from work let me and some friends stay in her 'holiday cottage' so we could go hiking up the nearby taoist mountain Qingchengshan. The 'holiday cottage' turned out to be an enormous but very flimsily built house in one of these ghost towns. There were thousands and thousands of empty houses, and an empty hotel with a dry ski slope on the roof, but the only other sign of human habitation that we saw was the one forlorn guard who sat in a hut by the entrance to the housing estate and seemed completely baffled by the arrival of four foreigners wielding a key to one of his properties.

      Part of it is explained by the fact that many Chinese people are getting rich enough to own a holiday home, but only get about 10 days holiday a year if they're lucky, so the homes just sit empty for the rest of the time. But there is also rampant speculation and corruption. Almost every Chinese person seems to have a story about someone they know who started building a tower block and then absconded with half the investment money half-way through construction.

      Comment


        #4
        Ghost Cities of China

        And in somewhat related news.

        The anger harboured by Beijingers about sky-high housing prices has been captured in a sardonic e-mail spreading in Chinese cyberspace calculating how long it would take peasants, thieves and prostitutes to buy a home.

        . . .

        As long as there were no natural disasters, a peasant farmer working an average plot of land would just have been able to afford an apartment if he or she somehow had worked since the Tang dynasty, which ended in 907AD, until today.

        If a Chinese blue-collar worker had been on the average monthly salary of Rmb1,500 since the opium wars in the mid-19th century and had given up weekends, then he or she might just have been able to afford a place of his or her own.

        Prostitutes, the e-mail says, would have to entertain 10,000 customers – a marathon feat requiring them to service one customer a night from the age of 18 until the age of 46 without an evening off.

        The thief would need to conduct 2,500 robberies to find the funds to buy a home.

        Of course, the e-mail notes, such calculations do not count interior decoration, furniture or household electronics.

        Comment


          #5
          I'm turning this into the Chinese bubble/crisis thread, as the Greece one is getting two unwieldy. Anyway, Anbang, one of China's largest private sector insurers, has been seized by the government and the owner is being prosecuted for fraud. In recent years it became one of the biggest investors in international real estate, something the government has been cracking down on, somewhat ineffectually until now.

          Comment


            #6
            I honestly thought it was a thread about a David Sylvian bootleg.

            Comment


              #7
              It's probably the angle that the photo is taken from, but those tower blocks in Zhengzhou look as though they might be about to topple forward and over at any moment.

              Comment


                #8
                Jared Kushner was trying to get Anbang to save his vanity project at 666 Fifth Avenue (yes, really).

                He may have dodged a bullet there.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Anbang gets $10bn bailout.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    More terrifying Chinese economic charts.

                    TLDR: 69% of all homes bought in China in 1Q18 were not primary residences, and over half were explicitly for investment.

                    Comment


                      #11
                      And when you add overseas properties to that, the overall exposure of the economy only increases.

                      Comment


                        #12
                        True, though hopefully those overseas property markets are at least slightly less correlated, but of course one of the big trends in real estate over the last decade has been the increasing correlation of large cities' housing markets.

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                          Jared Kushner was trying to get Anbang to save his vanity project at 666 Fifth Avenue (yes, really).

                          He may have dodged a bullet there.
                          The price of which to be borne by the Kushner family surely

                          Comment


                            #14
                            China's P2P lending market is blowing up. NB this is separate from that time it turned out the biggest P2P platform was a literal Ponzi scheme.

                            Comment


                              #15
                              And now the AMCs are being asked/told to step in.

                              Comment


                                #16
                                What could possibly go wrong?

                                https://twitter.com/LimDown/status/1031647684745224193/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Eembeddedtimeline%7Ctwterm%5E335082383692943361&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fftalphaville.ft.com%2F

                                Comment


                                  #17
                                  Lots of nasty economic data out of China over the last week, culminating today in Apple reporting a slump in revenue, pretty much entirely driven by falling sales in China. Hard landing looks increasingly likely.

                                  Comment


                                    #18
                                    Also, not quite ghost cities, but here's some largely vacant apartment buildings.

                                    Comment


                                      #19
                                      But they have landed an unmanned craft on the dark side of the moon, so they have that going for them

                                      Comment


                                        #20
                                        Oh wow. That article looks incredibly familiar, just change a few place names....

                                        This is going to be super mega grim.

                                        Comment


                                          #21
                                          I must say that the people protesting at empty apartments being offered at lower prices than earlier tranches, are an intriguing phenomenon. I get why they're angry. I just don't know what they hope to achieve.

                                          I wonder how crazy a property boom gets in a totalitarian state. I mean it was challenging enough to get an article vaguely critical of the irish Property boom printed in its last decade, but in a country that actively manages the economic news.....

                                          Comment


                                            #22
                                            Slew of profit warnings in China

                                            Comment


                                              #23
                                              Well I suppose bursting China's huge bubble is one way of clipping their geopolitical wings. I wonder if that was the ultimate aim of this trade war stuff, or just a likely happy coincidental effect of domestic posturing.

                                              Comment


                                                #24
                                                The Chinese will be ok, as they seem to be in the throes of a 19th century type colonisation of Africa.

                                                There Should be another one of these threads for Dubai.

                                                Comment


                                                  #25
                                                  It's a bloody big bubble TG. Those are seriously messy situations to deal with.

                                                  Comment

                                                  Working...
                                                  X