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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

Quoting from Caixing Global, a PRC-based financial news source:

China Investment Network, a business newspaper in Beijing, released a "ghost town index" to determine which cities were, well, the most ghostly. The newspaper devised its index using a government standard that says cities should have 10,000 people per square kilometer. The editors at China Investment Network determined that if a city's ratio of people to area was 0.5 – that is, it was half full – then it is a ghost town. To take the example a step further, if a city had a ratio of .10, then it had one-tenth the population the government thought it deserved. Based on this approach, at least 50 Chinese cities fit the description of "ghost town." (1)

This report is from 2014, so maybe some of those cities were eventually filled ... but surely not all of them.

1. https://www.caixinglobal.com/2014-10-17/graphics-ghost-towns...

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I think both of these positions (its a fake narrative, and "ghost towns abound") have elements of truth. What it is, is impossible to compare.

Given the structure of western governments, and by that I mean nominally liberal democracies, a policy of funding the development of a city prior to their being any economic reason for the city to exist, is not possible. Western forms of government wait for economic pockets to develop, then tax them, and then with the tax revenue improve them to increase their economic potential. Without a tax base there is no mechanism for funding development.

China on the other hand, has a central government with a fiscal policy of borrowing from the central bank to fund the creation of economic zones prior to there being any economic activity. Once that zone exists, it does not enhance the existing zones nearby thus as they grow there is incentive to move their activity to "nearby" zones which are under utilized. This takes time of course and between the time of construction and mass migration, well the zone is under utilized or a "ghost" town.

When China guesses wrong, and the zone never supports additional economic activity, then its a complete write-off. Something a western government could not survive (they would be booted out of office for it) but one that a central government can (and does) survive.

The bottom line is that it is easy to write stories that amaze people who live in one system by playing on the differences of the other system.

A building sitting empty for 5 years is a massive cost even if it’s later filled. This goes beyond time value of money and into the limited lifespan of infrastructure. Ghost cities are a problem with an easy and obvious solution, slow down the rate of construction to more closely match population movement.

>> A building sitting empty for 5 years is a massive cost even if it’s later filled.

Don't look too closely at NYC, Vancouver, london, or any of the other hot markets. Whether for historical preservation scams or investment trickery, it is not unusual for a building to sit empty for many years. Given the effort that it takes to oust tenants, and the length of time necessary for zoning/planning, many owners would rather a building sit empty for years pending redevelopment rather than the hassle of filling it.

Google "Calgary new horizons mall". From the owner/developer's perspective that mall is technically full and, at least for them, profitable.

US national vacancy rate is ~6.9% and NYC sit's well below that at under 4%. Much like the unemployment rate these things don't hit 0% for various reasons. But, that's very different from building a 11th building when your first 10 are all at 90% vacancy.

"Vacancy" is something above a building being empty. Vacancy is a building that has space available that hasn't been filled. It does not cover buildings deliberately left empty by owners. A building waiting years to be demolished and replaced isn't vacant, nor a condo kept only as an investment and never lived in.

That mall in Calgary isn't vacant either. Each store/stall is technically occupied by its owner. There just aren't any flesh and blood people in the mall.

NYC has ~60,000 buildings. Less than 1% of them are deliberately left empty by their owners. It’s a very different situation in a city which can make use of that space as demonstrated by the low vacancy rate.

That mall does have people shopping in it. In terms of retail square footage it’s underutilized but a long way from empty. Good or bad investment they are not building 3 of them next to each other while the first is far from full.

Really, you have some edge cases with people trying to time the market, deal with zoning or lawsuits etc. But, that’s different from seeing 6 empty apartment buildings and saying let’s build another one.

For dense urban areas land cost could exceed building cost. However for ghost cities land cost (defined as an opportunity cost) is low to begin with. While building material may have alternative use, if the labor used to build buildings don't have a lot of alternative use then the true economic cost of building a building may be below the headline cost as well.

> The bottom line is that it is easy to write stories that amaze people who live in one system by playing on the differences of the other system.

I wonder if they do this in China to things in the USA?

I imagine that if they did, it would be just as skewed and critical as the stories from the west about China are. Even so, it would be interesting to find out what is considered to be "amazing" (for whatever connotations that word has) by the Chinese (or at least their "media") about the United States...

I imagine that there might be one difference - the fact that there are probably more Chinese tourists who visit a wider part of the USA than there are USA tourists visiting the non-touristy areas of China. This might give them a different impression (perhaps closer to reality - whether that reality is objectively/subjectively good or bad to them) than the USA does of China (where we see - or are fed - information about them that still has a smell of "the mysterious" or "the exotic" or "the strangeness").

My gut feels that they likely have a far better, and likely more realistic, impression of the United States than we ourselves do - if only because they can be realistic about it without any threat, where we tell/sell ourselves stories to gloss over the difficult to talk/think about parts.

What pains me most about this, as a citizen of the United States, who has never visited China (but would like to some day) - is that I can see these things; maybe not as clearly as someone not immersed in the culture - but they are still very, very apparent to anyone honest with themselves. Yet, it feels like a large majority of my fellow countrymen either don't, or they do and just ignore it (or take advantage of it); either seems a tragedy to me.

Probably still worse with an authoritarian government manipulating the news. It did not take long after the Huawei arrest scandal for brand new TV channels focused on Canadian news to pop up from nowhere.

The difference being that most Chinese are well aware their news is propaganda.

Fox viewers probably not so much.

They’re aware they’re getting the opinion of the Chinese State, just like Fox News viewers are aware they’re betting the opinion of those who run the Republican Party (and, by proxy, the state)

This build-a-city approach is also probably due to the large rural population in China that have been steadily urbanizing or just moving to the cities for work. So there is some expectance that cities will be filled which does generate false hope and random ghost towns near places of economic activities. Good example in the past is Shenzhen which became big and the other unknown cities built around that time and was grouped with Shenzhen that people have forgotten because they never became big.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_China

Not sure that Milton Keynes "Home of the Roundabout" and the other new towns in the UK don't count.

Well, Milton Keynes was built incrementally as people arrived to fill it, and it and the other new towns definitely had an economic reason to exist - the existing towns couldn't handle increasing urbanisation and the growth of businesses that relied on that. It did end up with rather more light industrial space and slightly more offices than necessary due to the decline of British industry, but nothing like the kind of speculative building described here.

I don't think such mass speculative building would even have been economically possible; if I remember rightly, the housing construction was done by the usual home-building companies who needed to be able to sell off their houses to residents in order to afford the next tranche.

It was very centrally planned in what to day would seem very creepy eg segregated housing for workers, supervisors and executives.

By that definition, Chicago, Miami and Philadelphia are "ghost towns" with less than 5,000 people/sqkm

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

You can find many sources complaining about this in the US, yes. Real estate speculation, etc. People aren't happy about it, so that description is not unreasonable. Some cities are trying to pass laws to address it (not that those laws seem to work).

The density of construction matters a lot here too. Many US cities like the ones you mention were not planned out and are subject to sprawl.

The number naturally has to be adjusted when trying to define 'ghost town' in America or anywhere else because relatively few places are built to be as dense as 10k/km^2.

I just googled ghost city china and clicked on a random image which was a cnn article from 2014:

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/china-ordos-ghost-town/ind... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordos_City

Apparently it is no longer a ghost town.

Oh look, the propaganda team has arrived!

You don't seem to be refuting the central claim, but rather accusing the person of being non-genuine, can you point out any flaws with their assertion?

Created an hour go not ring any bells

There's nothing to refute, they posted an article that contradicts their own assertion.

Ordos is kind of the 'original' ghost city, the one that sparked Western curiosity.

There's a lot of reporting about it subsequently.

It looks like folks are indeed moving in, but maybe not at the rate that would make sense.

Ordos was never a ghost city, one of its newly built far out districts, Kangbashi, was. Chinese cities are more like counties that contain multiple municipalities.

Many westerners don’t really understand china’s district system for cities. Ordos City is very old, maybe a couple of thousand years by various names.

Kangbashi is a new remote district (New Town) of Ordos that was built over the last couple of decades and is still very much empty. It is too far away to commute to Ordos’s older more popular districts, and so people don’t want to live there. Many of the apartments have been bought out by speculators, however.

Wow, 10,000 per km² sounds crazy ambitious. By those standards, Germany is a ghost land, cities here barely reach those numbers in the densely populated parts, certainly not on average.

Keep in mind they are built out for that density, having comparably much less density (much closer to a German small town) before development.

Berlin has 3,944 inhabitants per km2. If not even that city reaches the standard, I think the criteria must be flawed. My city is the third largest in Mexico and it has less than 3500/km2.

Or maybe we need an article about ghost countries.

Berlin has forests within its borders.

So does Mumbai (the Sanjay Gandhi National Park) and it still supports a density of 73,000 people/sq km.

What? Wikipedia has Mumbai at just 21k/sqkm, and even that seems to be megacity (urban) density, not its metro density, which is only 4,700/sqkm. I assume the national park is in the latter and not the former.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai_Metropolitan_Region

I guess the standards necessarily are different for a city of skyscrapers

Pudong was definitely in that range before it was developed. Chinese densities are completely different from the rest of the word. No one calls a 3500/km2 area a ghost city of it is built for 3500/km2, but if it’s built for 10k/km2 with lots of 30 story apartment blocks, there are a lot of empty units and you can play football in the overbuilt 8 lane streets.

> Wow, 10,000 per km² sounds crazy ambitious. By those standards, Germany is a ghost land, cities here barely reach those numbers in the densely populated parts, certainly not on average.

Yeah, but to get those levels, they fill blocks with dozens of identical 25 story apartment buildings. E.g.: https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/styles/node_i...

That isn't inherent to getting the density though. You could design them all differently if you wanted.

You could find an example of a row of identical buildings in any country, it doesn't prove anything.

It isn't inherent, but it sure is attention grabbing. In my experience, cookie-cutter construction is far more common, at a far larger scale, and far more obvious in China than in any other country I've visited.

They are usually 32 stories high since that is how far they can go with concrete.

By Chinese standards, most places are barely populated. They are a fifth of the world.

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