Even China's 1.4 billion population can't fill all its vacant homes, former official says

I find it interesting that everyone is calling this bad management when it's indicating one thing above all:

Productivity has well exceeded the requirements of the population.

People simply don't need to work that hard anymore, but all industrialized societies, even would-be socialists, simply can't stand the idea of letting the working class have leisure time.

The world is really lucky that China's not doing that great at the moment. Not so long ago, China was winning the propaganda war internationally.

You don't want authoritarianism to win the argument by out-performing democracies.

good to know Earth resources are used in rational and sustainable manner.

Considering China's population shrank by nearly 1 million last year and it predicted to drop by ~700 million by 2100.

This is not going to get better.

When you make the only safe place for money real estate, then your corrupt Politicians make that only safe for the wealthy and connected, you end up with a lot of empty useless real estate.

Damn... Can't they disassemble them and ship them in the West?

For many mainland Chinese people, real estate is the only place they can invest their money. Traditionally and culturally it's also seen as the only possible way to rise up and do better.

The money export controls make it difficult for the average guy to move his money abroad as well.

So there are many Chinese people putting retirement or family savings into these places because they don't have other options.

They have also just had a very long run of easy government backed mortgage support, making it a bit too easy to borrow money for these properties.

It's crazy and doesn't make long term sense when the number of domiciles exceeds the number of people.

Can... can they move those apartments here?

It's almost as if the idea of endless growth is a bad one...

This is important, not least because making the cement and steel for these surplus apartments and associated road infrastructure makes an enormous contribution to global CO₂ emissions. Look at how the emissions took off after 2005. So the sooner the bubble bursts, the better for the climate.

And China's population is projected to fall under 1 billion again over the next decades, making this a shit show circus. So many apartments bought as an investment will never see any occupancy and will likely just be abandoned. They got entire empty ghost towns already

This is the best summary I could come up with:

BEIJING, Sept 23 (Reuters) - Even China's population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments littered across the country, a former official said on Saturday, in a rare public critique of the country's crisis-hit property market.

Big-name developers such as Country Garden Holdings (2007.HK) continue to teeter close to default even to this day, keeping home-buyer sentiment depressed.

As of the end of August, the combined floor area of unsold homes stood at 648 million square metres (7 billion square feet), the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) show.

That does not count the numerous residential projects that have already been sold but not yet completed due to cash-flow problems, or the multiple homes purchased by speculators in the last market upturn in 2016 that remain vacant, which together make up the bulk of unused space, experts estimate.

"That estimate might be a bit much, but 1.4 billion people probably can't fill them," He said at a forum in the southern Chinese city Dongguan, according to a video released by the official media China News Service.

His negative view of the economically significant sector at a public forum stands in sharp contrast to the official narrative that the Chinese economy is "resilient".

The original article contains 346 words, the summary contains 211 words. Saved 39%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Nah. China's urbanization rate is currently 65%. South Korea for comparison has 82% urbanization rate. So the Chinese have plenty more (say, a hundred million or so more) homes to build. The current difficulties are more to do with (i) loss of consumer confidence caused by the leadership's bad economic management, and (ii) the deliberate restriction of credit to developers because of the government's concerns about debt.

This analysis reminds me of the hoo-hah about China's "ghost cities" circa 2010. Those ghost cities ended up being filled up.

It's not for them. It's so they can buy them and charge exorbitant rents to the next generation looking for a place to call their own, but can't afford one of their own.

if only their regime weren't so repressive, homeless americans would be flocking there for a place to live.