Dateline-China's Ghost Cities

[DaShi]

That's racist!

[DaShi]

But a little funny.

[N35t0r]

reminds me of dwarf fortress

JM

[Dinner]

Yes they need to liberalize their terms of sales, but if the average urban family is making $6000 / year they're still not going to be able to afford $ 500,000 apartments. A 10% down payment would be 9 years of wages and the average balance paid off each year would be 2 1/2 times their annual earnings. That's not counting the interest paid. To bring housing into the range of their workers they'll need to bring the prices down to around $20,000.
I wonder what the actual unit cost of these apartments is?

I'm purely guessing but assuming actual cost of land & construction is 40% of sale price (which is likely way too low) then we're still talking $200,000 on the high end half million places and half that on the typical quarter million dollar place. Assuming two incomes both at $6k we have $12k per year per household on average so five times earnings (the old level of how much someone should pay max for a house) we have $60k. Even if Chinese save more for a larger down payment and even if the interest rate was low they're still priced out by a large margin.

[The Mad Monk]

reminds me of dwarf fortress

JM

Please explain.

[DanS]

64 million vacant apartments is a lot, but should be put in context of a population of 1.33 billion people.

By comparison, the US has some 15 million vacant homes, with a population of 310 million.

[Dr Strangelove]

I'm purely guessing but assuming actual cost of land & construction is 40% of sale price (which is likely way too low) then we're still talking $200,000 on the high end half million places and half that on the typical quarter million dollar place. Assuming two incomes both at $6k we have $12k per year per household on average so five times earnings (the old level of how much someone should pay max for a house) we have $60k. Even if Chinese save more for a larger down payment and even if the interest rate was low they're still priced out by a large margin.

For the couple interviewed in the linked videoi it was $ 6000 together. That's about right considering China's current per capita GNP.

[Ben Kenobi]

Even taking into account the population, the rate of vacancy is higher in China than in the US. Wow. That's not a good thing.

[Addled Platypus]

this is why the panda has been voted into the top 5 most dangerous animals