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.
I’ve traveled outside city centres, but neither to commuter towns nor beach resorts, so I’ll believe you and get there is systemic imbalance.
I have lived six months in China, and literally cried when I cycled around new developments and saw the width of the concrete they were laying for roads. That was Shandong - quite similar landscape and climate to Portugal. Their planning is not all crazy, they also preserved some city centres, build metros, and maybe those roads allow potential space for trams or bicycles, but now it’s mostly many lanes of cars, lost the human-scale markets, and I doubt most tower blocks are energy-efficient (anybody know?).
Some people like ‘modern’ concrete lifestyle, the problem is the scale of such construction, and no choice of alternative styles of development (in cities like Glasgow where such construction was a fashion decades ago, now they are demolishing towers due to social failures). Also, many graduates in China have poor job or housing security, there has also been mass over-production of degrees.
(p.s. now I’m in northern europe in a 1930s house, it’s very cold in winter as can’t afford good heating, even with PhD, will get out woolly hats and electric jacket to keep coding at computer … but at least every house is different here, scope to adapt).
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.