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

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.

China’s property sector, once the pillar of the economy, has slumped since 2021 when real estate giant China Evergrande Group (3333.HK) defaulted on its debt obligations following a clampdown on new borrowing.

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 would be equal to 7.2 million homes, according to Reuters calculations, based on the average home size of 90 square metres.

DragonTypeWyvern,

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.

somethingsnappy,

UBI and robust social safety nets should have started with the industrial revolution. Every time a machine, computer, or now robots, UBI should have increased and been given to more people.

Squizzy,

Tax the automation!! Have companies pay employee taxes for self scanners and all automation. Let the workers live, let the machines work.

Aceticon,

I look at my own country of Portugal with a massive realestate prices bubble were more than half the youths only leave their parent’s home after they’re 30, more than 50% of recent graduates emigrating when they get their degrees and schools in certain areas lacking teachers because houses there are too expensive for a teacher salary, and think that maybe what China has there is actually good thing, not a bad thing.

Yeah, sure, “investors” are suffering, but why should the other 99% of people care?!

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • world@lemmy.world
  • fightinggames
  • All magazines
    •