The article should then address this global phenomenon rather than conclude it is a "political problem", suggesting it is some kind of peculiar ideology exported out of Britain.
How does this marry up? Is it the age old problem of building too much in suburbs people don't want to actually live in? Or the old problem of new build apartments being too expensive for most people, so require a bubble?
Yes in a country of 1 billion people there are dodgy apartments, but then again in my country of 26 million people an estimated 60% of new apartments have flaws, big ones in the middle of Sydney have been deemed unlivable only a few years after being built.
China overbuilds entire cities and everyone mocks them for it, but a few years later those cities fill up and people conveniently forget about that.
Even the commentator who coined the term Ghost Cities admits they have become functional economic powerhouses.
> Reporting in 2018, Shepard noted that "Today, China’s so-called ghost cities that were so prevalently showcased in 2013 and 2014 are no longer global intrigues. They have filled up to the point of being functioning, normal cities"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in...
You'll see the same pattern with healthcare, water, waste, media, energy, etc; every common good is being scooped up as much as possible by private interests.
The ultra-wealthy have a sophisticated playbook for doing this which maximises profit at the expense of the vast majority of the population. It's international.
A complicit media owned by the same private interests acts like this is all a big mystery, and any individual or group that gets too effective at making this plain is systematically irrelevanced.