Very curious how these opportunities for housing were marketed to the masses? These ghost cities you describe, I can see how the new housing can be presented as a life-changing opportunity, with nice images/videos but the reality is...a ghost town, facade of a city.
China is still urbanizing rapidly. Just like GP said, it won't be a ghost city for long. It depends though on how long the investor can hold out, and whether or not the new city is doomed from the start.
CCP planning is just different. TBD if it's doomed to fail like the Soviet Union, or if it will make it through a crisis like this. It's also hard to tell what will ultimately call a crisis; just thinking back to 2008, a lot of the story is only figured out in retrospect (eg how critical Bear Stearns was).
Many things wrong with that statement. There is a reverse migration from cities back to countryside, since the wages in the city have fallen, jobs have disappeared, rent is still expensive, and it's harder to justify living in the city when you can only save a few hundred dollars a year from a job.
Thus, empty retail stores in major tier 1 cities. Empty apartments in Dongguan and Shenzhen. Small crowds at malls.
From what I heard that is a somewhat "recent" trend while most ghost city cases I heard of outdate that trend by month potential over a year.
I think a lot of people living in the west without ties to china haven't realized that there are many huge but sometimes subtle changes in China in the last view years.
Kangbashi is up to 100k now, at least, but they designed for a million, so it is still pretty empty. As soon as coal becomes big again, maybe it will fill up.
Empty retail stores in major tier 1 cities wasn't unusual even in good times. Nor were empty apartments in tier 1/2/3 cities as well as small crowds at malls. Actually, I would be hard pressed to use these signs as good or bad news, since they are so normal.
Anecdotally, there’s a great episode of the journal[1] that does not lend too much credence to the idea that the reverse migration movement is anything but a temporary stay away from home.
I think it’s much too early to really say the trend is sticking.
They are marketed as investments, not housing. The majority of people buying these "Homes" never intended for themselves or anyone else for that matter, to live in them in the first place.
