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I’ve been browsing around satellite view of Chinese cities for a while now. There are hundreds of thousands of high rise apartment complexes without visible ac
by gzu 8y ago
I’ve been browsing around satellite view of Chinese cities for a while now. There are hundreds of thousands of high rise apartment complexes without visible activity around them. Literally copy paste buildings surrounded by empty fields. How does this bode for China’s economy? They are all over the place.
- yorwba 8y agoI'm curious about your reasons for browsing satellite images of Chinese cities. Are you looking for something in particular?
- glvn 8y agoCuriosity?
- gzu 8y agoI’m interested in the China/global economy and this is one of the many data points.
- yorwba 8y agoThanks for the reply and I hope it's okay if I ask some follow-up questions. Are you doing some kind of manual sampling or have you automated parts of it? Also, what kinds of objects can be distinguished with the images you use? I assume it might require a bit of practice to reliably recognize certain kinds of structures.
- duxup 8y agoI wonder how much it has to do with ambitious real-estate / encouraging growth ... and maybe a little communist legacy of building massive blocks of apartments for housing. Granted when I think of block after block of cookie cutter buildings I think of my travels in eastern Europe, maybe China had that tradition too?
- dsadsasdasda 8y agofirst, china has a population of 1.5b, compared to the US 20. So to get an idea of what the US equivalent of a building project would be, divide it by 5. Now observe as the rents in big US cities have grown unaffordable for a majority of people due to insufficient building, what China is doing is much better. Having too many apartments available for 20 years is good compared to having none.
- gthtjtkt 8y agoToo bad those vacant buildings will all be uninhabitable within a couple years thanks to the lack of maintenance.
- vkou 8y agoChina has moved 300 million people out of rural poverty, into nearly-first world lifestyles in the past 30 years. At that rate of development, it would be a failure of planning to not have millions of empty units.
- low_common 8y agoCan you elaborate on your second sentence? Are you referring to the empty rural homes that these people left behind?
- sgillen 8y agoI think they are saying that china needs to plan for more and more people moving into its cities. The buildings are empty now but maybe that's better than having a housing shortage in 15 years.
- adventured 8y agoChina has a rather unique ability compared to other major economies: they can do whatever they want to, anytime they want to. If they need to move a million people from a location, they can just make it happen. This isn't San Francisco we're talking about, Chinese authorities can snap their fingers and dictate policy. They can point at an area and that's where the new expansion will go for the city. Zoning problems? Nope, it's all flexible depending on who wants something done. There's no need to build so far in advance if you're China. They're front-loading economic activity, attempting to pull future returns forward. You can tell because the returns they generate on their debt has plunged drastically over the last decade. If they were still generating the old tremendous growth returns on their borrowing, it'd be a different story, then they'd be feeding growth. Instead, they're stealing from the future (which will have to pay for all of this low value forced expansion).
- ng12 8y agoIt's a failure of planning if those new units fall into disrepair before being rented.
- toephu2 8y agoThis is how you pump up GDP numbers.
- sct202 8y agoWhy bother even putting up the buildings.