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Comment by swframe | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much was used to build their ghost cities: http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-ghost-cities-in-2014-2...

This always reminds me of people snickering about how much snow is in their backyard whenever the topic of climate change comes up.

If you subtract the 15% unoccupied rate from your link from the 6.6 gigatons of concrete, it's still a lot more than the U.S. used in 100 years.

They are being filled up.

https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/koos-jansen/guest-post-5-c...

people ridicule it because it's so different than the american way, which is to severely restrict housing construction to cause enormous increases in price so that nobody can afford to live anywhere without taking out massive loans, while poor people get kicked out of their homes.

That is not the "American way". That is the way certain areas behave as they try to fight urbanization, but is not the way most areas behave.

Can you give some examples of cities that don't do this? Every single city I'm familiar with does this, though Houston does it less than most places.

It's hard to point to examples of cities that don't do it because it doesn't make the news when a new building is put up in Nashville. It doesn't make the news when a law to limit building height is never even proposed in Kalamazoo. It doesn't make the news when Akron's population increases 3% year over year.

It does make the news when San Francisco's residents start getting driven out of the city. It does make the news when Madison limits the height of buildings downtown. Can you give me an example of people who didn't get a flat tire today? Of course not, because that's just called normal functioning.

so what you're saying is, the media distorts and amplifies the exceptions in order to create a perception of widespread dysfunction, thereby generating revenues through public outrage?

but this only happens in the US, right? not anywhere else, like... china?

Poor people get kicked out of their homes in China too - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jun/06/sport.china

There has been massive displacement of Chinese peasants too. By a decree. But indeed - if you look at rates of home ownership in Eastern Europe pre changes - socialist systems indeed seem to prefer affordable housing.

All of which is happening in China plus the wiping out of massive amounts of historically significant buildings with so much as a thought

Beijing real estate makes San Francisco look like a bargain.

Also, china doesn't have a property tax, so you can just buy an apartment and sit on it forever, there is no economic pressure (as a property tax is) to put it to productive use.

You can't buy land forever in China the way you buy land in the US. You can only get a 70 years 'land use grant'.

No one expects that to hold, but even if it does, the US has property taxes most everywhere, and you'd eventually pay for your land again and again just by owning it.

It is speculated that China will drop the land use grant when they institute a real property tax.

I wonder if sooner rather than later, those ghost cities might actually fill up once they bottom out and become affordable like how bad parts of SF or Oakland or NYC used to be cheap?

Ordos is in the middle of the Gobi. Build a ghost city in the middle of say Arizona, why would they come?

When you need a permit to move to a city and you can't get one for Beijing, the middle of Gobi doesn't seem like a bad option.

Moving to a city doesn't majically get you a job and livelihood. There is already plenty of depopulated country side with plenty of livable space, people go where the actual jobs are.

Edit: looks like things have gotten worse for Ordos: http://gizmodo.com/4-instant-cities-that-are-still-completel...

True, but my point was that in China the government exerts a lot more control on where people can go. Wouldn't surprise me that the Chinese gov't could fill an empty city if they wanted to.

I don't think that is true. Sure, there is the hukou system, but migrant workers have been free to move around since the 90s, and they do.

If you handed out hukous in 3rd tier economically depressed new cities, I'm not sure if there would be many takers. And the properties in Kangbashi are all fairly high end anyways, the city hukou-deprived migrant workers probably wouldn't even be welcomed.

China builds a lot of subsidized public housing on the city outskirts of major cities, but no one wants to live there because transportation is bad to where the jobs are.

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