China's Many Ghost Towns of Abandoned Mansions (2024) | Hacker News Reader

China's Many Ghost Towns of Abandoned Mansions (2024)

architecturaldigest.com

16 pointsmooreds6 comments

They built large-masonry structures without laying down roads, or apparently sewers either. Some of the structures are sitting atop raised foundations, higher than the others, yet apparently without stairs or ramps.

Many of the roofs in the background appear to be masonry, compared to the modern tile roofing seen in the foreground, and the masonry roofs are very weathered. All of the masonry looks like it has a 200 year old patina impervious to power washing. Behind it all and only slightly taller than all of the structures, a hill that looks distinctly dug out, and which exposed dirt is the same coloras the patina on the old roofs.

I Think there are two typically causes: 1.Developers often acquire land in remote rural areas to build housing projects, anticipating urban expansion that would drive up property values. However, China's urbanization has largely reached its limit, making further expansion unlikely. 2.Some developers construct properties on leased land without securing proper ownership titles. If full property rights aren't obtained before sales commence, these units become unsellable and are eventually abandoned, as buyers avoid legally precarious investments.

1. PRC urbanization still has long way to go, rate slowed to ~0.8-1% per year, that's still 10-14 million per year. Current urbanization is ~65%, goal is 70% by 2030s, but "urbanized" by east asian standards like SKR, JP is ~90%. So still looking at 200-300m to urbanize (factoring in population decline to 1300m) by 2050s. Depends on hukou reforms and rural policies, a lot of rural old don't want to move, but if they want to age with modern amenities/services, they will probably have to.

Current excess PRC square footage in housing inventory is enough for 100-150m people. About 10 years of urbanization headroom. This is without accounting for replacing deprecated housing stock. Reality of speculation and (mis)allocation of "ghost" developments is messy, but over next 25 years, PRC is still ~100m short on urban housing, they just also have a very wasteful 100-150m decade long housing runway that needs to be unwound in mean time.

2. It's product of PRC land finance system, local govs revenue cash cow is to raise money by developing land / RE. System got gamed/speculated to hell. 3RL finally starved process, shock left a lot of financing drama on existing projects. System slowly figuring out how to restart/finish, remember a lot of these are presales... people are waiting on their units. But the TLDR is PRC / CCP haven't figured out politically palatable way of introducing property taxes which would go a long way to replace inefficient/speculative land finance model.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom made the interesting point on Lex Fridman’s podcast that for political reasons China settled into an equilibrium of building too much while the US settled into one of building too little. In China it’s kickbacks and building with credit and selling homes that don’t exist. In the US it’s NIMBYs and environmentalism and austerity politics and everything bagel liberalism.

My hope is that people who believe government should work make it work better for more of us. In tech we are pretty clearly the beneficiaries of government investment and R&D.

Turkiye has a similar one

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/burj-al-babas

Reply on news.ycombinator.com