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.
Portugal has preserved beautiful human-scale cities and villages, while most apartments in China are in concrete jungles of tower blocks - you really want to swap one for the other? Sure, solutions are needed, but not like that. Also the chinese housing bubble conned many ordinary people to invest multi-family life-savings, it’s not a 1% thing.
You clearly have never been outside the touristic city centers if you think “Portugal has preserved beautiful human-scale cities and villages” or actually seen the massive destruction caused in any place that had even the most token amount of potential for Tourism were masses of skryscrapers were built (like in Albufeira) or just enormous beach or golf-resorts, or even the city centers were the locals were kicked out and the local businesses died because when every dwelling was turned into an AirBnB, those little neighbourhood shops selling everyday things lost most of their clients.
I’m sure living in the typical “beautiful” 8-story building from the 80s (with such horrible energy efficiency that its significantly colder indoors in Winter than in the equivalent place in Northern Europe) 1h away from the city center were the typical 30 year old lives with his or her parents because they can’t afford their own place with the shit salaries they get from the only kind of work they can find - invariably a short-term contract - even with a bloody degree, makes them feel happy and all nice and warm inside (and people definitelly need that inside warmth when the house reaches 11 C indoors in Winter).
In one of those “horrible” cheap chinese appartments you really can’t enjoy the beauty of the 80s-style fly-by-night-builder appartment built at a time when there were pretty much no building rules, in a residential neighbourhood with insuficient public transportation and having all the freedom and privacy you have when living in your parent’s home in your 30s.
That chinese nightmare is horrible by itself, yet it’s great by comparison with the even bigger nightmare created in lots of countries in the West as governments and central banks turned the housing markets into a money making machine for rentseeking investors, screwing everybody and anybody who wasn’t already a realestate owner when they started doing it, so mostly the young but now things have reached such a bad point that small shops not in prime touristic places can’t even afford to stay open because their rents have become crazy.
Sure, it’s a fucking “paradise” out there for retired owner-occupiers who have cashed in on their overvalued house in the city and moved to the countryside. For the rest, not really - even young adult owner-occupier couples wanting to upsize because they would like to have children (and a 1-bedroom appartment won’t do) can’t because they can’t afford the money to do so: their 1-bedroom is worth a stupid amount but the 2-bedroom is worth a stupid amount too and now they can’t afford the difference.
(Unsurprisingly birth rates in Portugal are low and falling and it’s now one of the 10 most aged countries in the World)
The pure fantasy of affording the absurd mortgage anywhere decent and also having children and actually having a life (a car, a holiday once a year or less, healthy food) were a significant factor in my partner and mine’s recent decision to not have any children. Just not affordable in Spain. We don’t have family to palm kids off on so, what are you going to do? Have kids and starve, give them a subsistence upbringing, or survive and keep our own heads above water?
The exact same thing is happenning in Portugal.
At least 2 decades of measures to pump up house prices (both by boosting the demand side and by limiting the supply side) leading the young adults to either leave the country of refraining from having children, leading to well below replacement birth rates, an aging population and all problems that come from it (I very much doubt that I’ll ever have a state pension from Portugal).
And then on top of that the Global Warming Climate Models predict that almost all of Spain and Portugal (except near the coast) will become a literal desert.
Meanwhile the policians who passed lost of “pro realestate investor” measures to make themselves and their friends wealthier, all the while killing the life opportunities for the younger generations (and “younger” by now means “in your late 30s”), causing the massive age pyramid problems we’re having, put on their most innocent *surprised Piachu* face when talking about the population ageing problem.
In between the countries becoming unaffordable to live and grow a family in for anybody not already well in their 40s and the desertification due to Global Warming we’re completelly totally screwed here in the Iberian Peninsula.
I’ve traveled outside city centres, but neither to commuter towns nor beach resorts, so I’ll believe you and get there is systemic imbalance.
I have lived six months in China, and literally cried when I cycled around new developments and saw the width of the concrete they were laying for roads. That was Shandong - quite similar landscape and climate to Portugal. Their planning is not all crazy, they also preserved some city centres, build metros, and maybe those roads allow potential space for trams or bicycles, but now it’s mostly many lanes of cars, lost the human-scale markets, and I doubt most tower blocks are energy-efficient (anybody know?).
Some people like ‘modern’ concrete lifestyle, the problem is the scale of such construction, and no choice of alternative styles of development (in cities like Glasgow where such construction was a fashion decades ago, now they are demolishing towers due to social failures). Also, many graduates in China have poor job or housing security, there has also been mass over-production of degrees.
(p.s. now I’m in northern europe in a 1930s house, it’s very cold in winter as can’t afford good heating, even with PhD, will get out woolly hats and electric jacket to keep coding at computer … but at least every house is different here, scope to adapt).
Well, as I said, the point is not that the kind of housing providion they’re doing in China is great, the point is that it has become shit all over the West (and whilst I mentioned my homeland, Portugal, I also lived in England and it suffered from most of the same problems).
Shockingly even the dehumanised mechanism of housing provision in China might beat the “extremelly insuficient affordable housing provision whilst demand explodes due to realestate being used as investment assets” we seen in many places in the West, mainly because homelessness is even worse that living in a cookie-cutter appartment in a cold oversized appartment building in lifeless suburbia.
They’re both problematic, in different ways, but at least the kind of problem they have in China isn’t going to kill the country in the mid- and long-term by pushing half the young adults to leave the country as soon as they get a degree and pushing birth rates even lower in a country which already had low birth rates and has one of the most aged populations in the World.